Guided by our values

Our policy decisions are guided by our company values. Etsy’s Policy Team creates the rules that strive to preserve our commitment to independent businesses selling handmade and vintage items and craft supplies; protect our marketplace and community from harmful content; establish trust, prevent legal risks for our members; and help members navigate the legal and policy challenges of running an independent business.

Simply put, the job of Etsy’s Policy Team is to write the rules for what members may or may not sell and what they may or may not do on the site. In practice, this means that the Policy Team writes policy to help support new features of the website; determines the rules for resolving disputes that arise between members; creates the definitions for handmade, vintage, and supplies; and manages which items are prohibited from Etsy.

Members of our community rely on us to be a trusted marketplace. Our policies are designed to encourage transparency and clearly outline the rights and responsibilities of participants on our platform.

Making our policies easy to understand

In 2015, we launched our new “House Rules,” where all of our policies and terms live on Etsy. We made a concerted effort to avoid legalese and instead use language that is clear, simple, and most of all, human. We also translated our policies into five additional languages so that more of our global community can find the information they need. We want everyone who agrees to our terms and policies to clearly understand their rights and responsibilities.

Working hard to strike the right balance

In addition to putting Etsy’s mission at the center of our policy decisions, we strive to strike the right balance between a variety of complex factors. We look outside of Etsy at relevant laws, cultural expectations, and industry standards. We consult with experts on the issues at hand. We often speak with Etsy sellers directly to fully understand how a given issue is impacting them. Inside of Etsy, we carefully consider whether a policy change adheres to Etsy’s mission and values. We think very hard about the potential impact on members, understanding that on the other side of any policy decision is a real person working hard to run a real business.

Protecting endangered species

Among Etsy’s core values are our commitments to acting as a mindful, transparent, and humane business, and planning and building for the long term. For these reasons, we decided to ban ivory and certain animal products, including products made from endangered animals, back in 2013. Since then, we’ve continued to iterate that policy to be sensitive to the effects these products have on our natural resources. This work has led to global recognition from agencies tasked with minimizing the illegal animal product trade, including the United Nations Crime Congress, at which Etsy spoke in April of 2015. We are also partnering with experts such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare on this issue to further refine our policies, and we look forward to reporting updates on this topic.

Keeping our community safe

Part of the Policy Team’s mission is to create policies that promote safe transactions and positive member experiences. In an effort to further this mission, we created this guide for members to follow to protect their personal safety. Buyers can learn more about how to find reputable sellers, how to communicate directly with sellers to find the products they want, and how to protect themselves against fraud. Sellers can learn how to develop and protect their good reputations on Etsy, how to amicably resolve disputes should anything go wrong, and how to handle fraudulent buyers. Both buyers and sellers can learn how to take the appropriate security measures to protect their online information.

We have also instituted policies that work to protect members from exploitative behaviors. For example, we prohibited magic spells which promise to effect a change in the world such as cure a disease or transform a body part to the buyer’s liking. We took great pains to craft a policy that still allows qualifying items that involve metaphysical, religious, or spiritual elements, but that removes items that prey on people’s insecurities and fears.

Helping members learn

It’s a complex world out there, governed by widely differing laws and regulations. For many types of items, like food and children’s products, there are important rules and regulations that vary from place to place. While we don’t provide legal advice, we do our best to point members toward resources that may help them. This year, we launched educational resources for members listing in certain categories. For example, if a seller is creating a new listing in the Food and Drink category, a resource with content about food regulation will be suggested as part of the product listing process. We’ve also held training sessions with the community to help clarify our policies.

Learning from members

Etsy’s Policy team makes sure to stay in touch with our community in many ways. We relish opportunities to meet members face to face. Members of the Policy Team have attended events to meet and learn from sellers and buyers in seven countries and numerous US states. These experiences have helped us to understand both the needs and the wishes that members have for Etsy as a business platform and marketplace. We’ve also made strong connections with important community members, such as Team Captains, who directly communicate to us questions, concerns, and ideas they see arising within their teams. Most crucially, meeting the creative and supportive members of Etsy reaffirms our belief in Etsy’s mission and values. This inspires us to do our best work every day, with the knowledge that there are amazing, hard-working, creative human beings on the other side of every decision we make.

Allowing for expression

We live in a hyperconnected world where the internet is readily available to a large and increasing portion of the global population. When tragic events happen, that global population often feels a need to respond in a way that would have been inconceivable to previous generations. When tragic events transpire, we try our best to give Etsy’s community the space to share grief, concern, alarm, and expressions of solidarity with anyone impacted by the events. At the same time, we monitor the marketplace for those wishing to exploit, glorify, or mock real-world tragedies, and we take action as needed. By and large we’ve seen incredible, creative, heartfelt expressions of support for victims (often the items are being sold with the intention to give all profits to victims or charities) manifest in truly beautiful expressions of Etsy’s core values.