Etsy sellers protest transaction fee increase

Yahoo Finance Live's Julie Hyman reports that Etsy sellers are calling to boycott the platform as it will be increasing its transaction fees.

Video Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING] JULIE HYMAN: Well, some Etsy Sellers say they are going to be going on strike. The marketplace is raising its transaction fees from 5% to 6.5% and some sellers definitely don't like it. They say they are planning to set their site-- their portions of the site to vacation mode starting on April 11th for more than a week. And they're also calling on customers to boycott the platform. It's unclear how many people are going to be doing this, how many of the sellers are going to be doing this. And it looks like it could still be a minority of the sellers that are on the platform. But nonetheless, just reflects a little bit of the dissatisfaction, not only transaction fees have gone up but Etsy has imposed some other fees on customers. We've reached out to Etsy for comment on this story, Sozz? BRIAN SOZZI: Yeah. A little bit of a delayed reaction here by the seller community. Let's keep in mind, Etsy came out in late February and announced this transaction fee increase. And we actually asked Etsy CEO Josh Silverman about this and here's what he said at the time, this was late in February said, quote, "We always think about our fees in terms of a fair exchange of value and making sure that we are the best value for our sellers. And we think that 6.5% commission" he views it as fair. Now, Etsy pitched us at the time, is they're going-- like going to take this money and reinvest in their platform but still a situation to watch nonetheless because Etsy has just been on fire under the past two years. JULIE HYMAN: Yeah. It has been in terms of its growth. I mean, the stock has been waning along with a lot of the other sort of pandemic era tech high flyers, right? So it has come down from those highs along with them. So we'll see if this ends up having any kind of effect. It would be difficult to see a rollback of that transaction fee increase but you know, again we've reached out to the company to see if there is going to be any movement on that front.