Etsy Techies Go Slush Mode for the Holidays

Sellers often worry about policy changes on some e-commerce platforms because once there are changes , sellers not only need to adjust their business models in a timely manner to adapt , but also need to bear the consequences of failures and unexpected consequences caused by the changes .

It is for these reasons that some platforms will freeze changes to platform rules during holidays.

That’s the case at Etsy , though in seller terms, Etsy’s handling is more like a “mess” because it’s not a complete freeze on rule changes , according to a new post on the Etsy Code as Craft blog. Techie Mike Adler said Etsy discourages deploying changes in the weeks leading up to the holiday shopping season because it could disrupt seller operations and affect some infrastructure changes .

He added: "We can still drive necessary changes, but the standards in terms of preparation and communication are higher." He explained that this is called a "freeze period" because it is not a complete freeze.

But he said the recent holiday shopping season was trickier to handle than usual because the pandemic led to a historic increase in holiday traffic in 2020 .

The company is uncertain about its plans for the current quarter. Etsy's traffic grew significantly in the second quarter, something that usually takes years to achieve. "Even if our traffic maintains normal month-over-month growth rates from August to December, given the peak we've already reached , this will take us into uncharted territory. "

He described plans to prepare for the holiday season heading into a period of uncertainty — but then Etsy faced an overwhelming problem in 2020 : a disruption in the postal service, which meant sellers faced widespread package delivery delays.

Techie Mike Adler opined: “It only required a small code change to better inform our buyers of the issue, but we deployed it during our busiest time. Since it was the first deployment of the day, the entire code base needed to be compiled from scratch on over 1,000 hosts.”

Adler said the rollout went “very smoothly,” thanks to a decade of preparation and a technology approach that served the company well.

Etsy

Holidays

North America