You can almost hear the collective sigh from Etsy sellers this week. The platform – once a cozy home for handmade trinkets and late-night creative experiments – has announced its latest shiny toy: a partnership with OpenAI. They’re calling it an “instant checkout” feature. Supposedly, it connects shoppers directly to products through AI conversations. Sounds clever, right? But underneath all the buzzwords, something feels… off.
For years, Etsy was where you went to find the weird, the wonderful, and the unmistakably human. A necklace crafted in a kitchen workshop. A knitted hat that still smelled faintly of the maker’s home. But lately? Scroll through the listings and it’s hard not to notice the déjà vu, thousands of identical products shipped straight from giant factories overseas. The small creators, the ones who gave Etsy its soul, have been quietly fading into the background. Not because they lost their spark, but because the platform they helped build started favouring algorithms and ad budgets over artisans.
Now with this AI partnership, Etsy’s steering the ship in a direction that feels even further away from its roots. Convenience sells, sure – but at what cost? It’s tricky not to wonder whether this “end-to-end buying experience” is really about helping customers, or just tightening the screws on sellers who are already gasping under rising fees and shifting goalposts.
We actually saw this frustration coming years ago. Back in 2020, we worked with Silver Pickle Jewellery, a brilliant small business run by a wonderful lady who’d had enough of Etsy’s moving target of rules and charges. We built her a website she could actually control: silverpicklejewellery.co.uk. No middlemen. No commission fees. Just her, her craft, and her customers. That’s the kind of freedom that can’t be automated.
And maybe, just maybe, this new wave of AI-driven marketplaces will push more makers to take back their independence. To own their platforms instead of renting space on someone else’s terms. Imagine a resurgence of small business websites! Unique, personal, untethered from the algorithms that decide who “deserves” to be seen.
Will that happen overnight? Probably not. But if enough people decide they’d rather build something real than feed another tech monopoly, we might see a quiet rebellion take shape. And honestly, wouldn’t that be something? A return to creativity over clicks. To stories over sales funnels.
Because at the end of the day, there’s still something magic about a small business that runs its own show. It’s a reminder that not everything has to be filtered through a faceless platform chasing the next quarterly growth report.
