etsy, and successful card-table shopping!

I like etsy because there's a sense of community there, and I've made some friends there. However, in many ways, the site is the product of a couple of people who sat around and said "hey, let's create a site where people can sell hand-crafted stuff". They have now become victims of their own success; they have tens of thousands of sellers and buyers, but many of the site features are non-functional.

For example, the search doesn't work properly. I won't go into details, but suffice it to say that it is extremely difficult to find anything there. Alchemy, which is a place for people to post custom item requirements and for sellers to bid on those projects, doesn't work at all and has been taken down. The treasuries are very, very unstable. The shipping information setup is clunky and difficult to work with. All of these have been issues since they introduced new versions of their software back in November.

The thing is, etsy wants all of their ideas to come from within and they want to make the site completely home-grown. The problem is that while their people are very talented, they're not quite up to the task of, say, writing a better search engine. They want to hire someone to do that for them - which means that it's going to be months before it's fixed. I guess I don't understand why they would offer their customers an extremely flawed search because they want to write it themselves - but they don't have the knowledge to do it.

I should stop caring about what goes on behind the scenes there. The fact that I do care tells me that I will want to return to work at some point. Yes, I'm like that at work, too, as anyone who's worked with me knows. When I get myself worked up enough, I have been known to try to change things. It's part of what I do and who I am at work.

On a lighter note, we went to a different Linens 'n Things that's actually closer to us and found the card table and chairs! It was more expensive than on the website, but I bought it anyways. I'm quite happy with it. It's easy to create things on it, it's pretty portable, and we now have a LOT of folding chairs :) Yay! We'll return the one I bought yesterday as this one is WAY better.