We like Etsy here at Silicon Allee – unsurprisingly, considering it’s a successful US startup which chose Berlin as a European base. And the online marketplace for vintage and handmade crafts is still striving to please, most recently with the release of its new app.
Arpan Podduturi is Etsy’s mobile product manager heading up the team responsible for the app and the mobile site and he spoke to Silicon Allee about Version 2.0.
SILICON ALLEE: How will the new app help buyers and sellers?
ARPAN PODDUTURI: For buyers, we built a new browsing experience we’re calling Explore. Explore is an always updating collection of items sourced by our community, our on-site editorial team, and the folks you follow on Etsy – what we call your Activity Feed. We think it’s a really nice way to get a glimpse of what’s relevant to you in our marketplace.
For sellers, we made it easier to manage their businesses on the go. We built out a really straightforward dashboard that lets sellers access their Shop Stats. Sellers can check out how many views their Shop has received and which of their items have been favourited by the Etsy community. They can also manage and fulfill new orders and view the revenue they’ve earned over the past day, week, or month.
SA: Were the changes developed out of feedback from users?
AP: We’re really lucky to have a vocal and active community at Etsy. Their feedback on our on-site forums and at in-house events drove many of the seller-focused features in the app. But most of the buyer-focused work was dreamed up by our team and by working with other teams at Etsy who are creating new buyer experiences across Etsy.com. We wanted to build something beautiful and more representative of our handmade aesthetic, and we also wanted to build a framework that could support a long feature roadmap. We think we’ve given ourselves a lot of runway to iterate on our new features over the long-term.
SA: How does this new app help differentiate Etsy from the competition?
AP: The app has many advantages, including access to our marketplace’s 875,000 sellers, millions of items, and thousands of buyers and curators. We’ve got a really unique set of people generating loads of data that we’re using to create new features across all of our products.
SA: What else would you like to add to the app?
SP: We’re just getting started with Explore and the Activity Feed. We can get a lot better at recommending items and making the overall experience more rewarding for buyers and curators. For sellers, we have a long roadmap ahead. We think we can build a lot of new functionality into Shop Stats to give sellers better visibility into where their traffic is coming from, who they’re reaching, and how they can grow their business. We’re also working on giving sellers the ability to list new items directly from their phone, which is now our most requested feature.
