How Etsy Doubled Sellers & GMV in 2020

Since July I’ve been writing about unsuspecting marketplaces like Wayfair finding success in spite of Amazon’s dominance.

The trend has been, a company does one thing really well and leverages the influx of customers that attracts to get more sellers on the platform and accelerate growth.

For example, Walmart is the best in the business at curbside grocery pickup. They leveraged their unfair advantage of 4700+ physical stores to give shoppers a familiar and yet safe experience and were handsomely rewarded. 

In the 9 months trailing Oct 31rst 2020, their net income was $15.6 Billion, up 45.3% from the same period the previous year.

But that story we’re familiar with, what’s maybe more surprising is Etsy. 
On April 3rd, their CEO put out a call to ALL merchants to start making facemasks. 
It worked. From April to September their sellers sold more than $600M worth of facemasks. 

That represents more than their entire GMV in 2011. What’s more interesting is that even if you don’t count facemask sales their GMV is still up 93% over the same period.  

The point is, sure they sold a lot of masks but what they really did was attract a lot of new customers.

With a seller base growing from 900k to 1.9M this year alone, people are taking notice… depending on your product line, maybe you should too!

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