Etsy promised shopping with a soul. Then the scammers came.

When the package arrived two weeks later, the necklace wasn’t only broken, it was made of cheap plastic, coated to look like metal. I threw it away. When I went back to investigate, I found the shop had vanished. I fished the packaging out of my trash. The return address was not for the home of some artisanal jewelry-maker. It was for JFK Airport. That’s when I knew: I had been dropshipped.

For the uninitiated, “dropshipping” refers to a sales practice wherein someone offers products for sale online that they don’t actually have or make themselves. If a customer bites, the seller turns around and orders the item from a source such as Chinese wholesaler Alibaba, then ships it directly to the buyer. Dropshipping entities are often opaque. When writer Jenny Odell investigated the phenomenon in 2018 for the New York Times, she uncovered within the long, looping supply chains everything from false return addresses to shady Bible college profiteers. It is often impossible to track down exactly where a dropshipped item originated. When I attempted to retrace the path of my necklace, every lead came up short.

Scammers have been a problem on megaplatforms such as Amazon and newer e-commerce enterprises such as Shopify for a while. But Etsy — a marketplace intended explicitly for vintage and handmade products — was supposed to be different. Its whole allure is that it’s a place where consumers can “connect directly with makers to find something extraordinary,” as its website states. While you can still find plenty of mid-century bar carts and hand-knit scarves there, the necklace debacle showed me the soul of Etsy had changed. Maybe I was naive to ever think it wouldn’t.

Creator Abby Misbin should be the picture of success on the platform. The sequin and mirror-coated cowboy hats that she sells went viral after Beyoncé wore one on a poster for her Renaissance tour last year. Misbin’s life changed seemingly overnight — there’s currently a waiting list for her hats 6,000 orders long. The 24-year-old works full time running her Etsy store out of her Pennsylvania basement. Each hat Misbin crafts takes painstaking work: “Five to six hours, including packaging and shipping,” she says. Misbin gets so much glue on her hands that she says she doesn’t “even have a fingerprint anymore.” Still, the work is a passion: “I love it.”

After the Beyoncé moment (which yielded positive publicity for Etsy, too), Misbin says a representative from the company contacted her to ask if she needed help navigating the attention. In fact, she did: Misbin’s cowboy hat photos had started appearing in dozens of other Etsy shops, and she’d also tracked them down on the Chinese sites Alibaba and AliExpress. It was apparent to her that dropshippers were attempting to sell counterfeits of her work. The company rep encouraged her to submit those Etsy shops to the “reporting portal,” the tool Etsy uses to address suspected intellectual property violations. At first, it seemed to help — with some of the scammers disappearing — but as her work continued to explode and the counterfeiters multiplied, Misbin says stopping them seemed impossible.

Etsy recommended that Misbin copyright the photos in her store. “Intellectual property is a complex space, but if you choose to register a copyright, there are certain protections afforded to you, which may then have benefits when enforcing your copyright,” a company representative wrote in an email that Misbin shared with me. Misbin says she looked into that option, but found it daunting. Registering copyrights with the U.S. Copyright Office is time consuming, particularly for an artist with no legal experience, and costly.

Instead, she followed some of Etsy’s other advice and tried confronting a few of the counterfeit sellers on her own, but she had little success. In the meantime, she says she can feel it affecting her business. “Most people that are buying from me message me really nicely, like, ‘I want the one you made for Beyoncé,’ Misbin says. “… [But now] there are a lot of people who … are like, ‘Um, girl, AliExpress already has it for $45. Don’t try and scam us.’ I was like, ‘Buy it from them, I guess. See what you get.’” (Misbin, whose Beyoncé hats cost $350 apiece, is genuinely curious; she says she has no idea what will show up if you order a hat from a dropshipper using her images.)

An Etsy spokesperson declined to make anyone from the company available for an interview. She wrote in an email that Etsy invested $50 million last year in efforts to boost trust and safety within the marketplace, including adding tools to automatically detect problematic listings. She also directed me to Etsy’s handmade policy, which requires that everything listed for sale on the platform be handmade, vintage or a craft supply; sellers must also use their own images and disclose any “production partners” used to make their items.

Nonetheless, it’s obvious that people are routinely breaking these rules. I went back to Etsy to search for another cherry necklace. The first page of results had 60 items, of which I found eight on AliExpress and six on Alibaba. One particular necklace showed up in a number of different Etsy shops as well as on AliExpress. (Aside from products appearing on Chinese wholesale sites, other clues I’ve gathered that a product may be counterfeit include too-good-to-be-true price tags, unusually long shipping times, and strange seller names that are a mishmash of different words or letters.)

As someone who’s worked as a design critic for seven years, this whole saga has started to sound familiar. In the late 19th century, craftspeople such as William Morris in England (famous for his nature-inspired wallpapers) and Gustav Stickley in America (known for his craftsman-style furniture) rejected mass production and urged artisans to return to a culture of making goods by hand. You’ve probably heard of their effort: the Arts and Crafts movement. The point was to underscore the dignity of labor, at a time when factory conditions were miserable. But the political winds eventually shifted, technology progressed, and new design schools, such as the Bauhaus, embraced mass production.

Etsy may have started in 2005 with a utopian vision similar to Morris’s and Stickley’s. But the internet has changed profoundly since then. The early aughts were a time before Amazon Prime, before dropshipping was so widespread, before the “junkification” of e-commerce as described by John Herman a few months ago in New York Magazine. Just like the art movements of the late 19th century, Etsy probably never stood a chance of fending off those changes. Many of its frustrated creators wonder if it ever really wanted to.

Etsy went public in 2015. Last year, the company reported annual revenue of nearly $2.6 billion — a more than 10 percent spike over the year prior. Among other issues, these creators see the increase in counterfeiters on the platform as a result of Etsy prioritizing growth over being able to enforce its standards. The dropshipping problem is one reason that 35,000 Etsy vendors held a week-long “strike” last year and wound up forming an advocacy group called the Indie Sellers Guild.

I admire their effort, though I suspect it’s in vain. Just as the Arts and Crafts movement couldn’t last, a large-scale online marketplace of handmade goods in the age of Amazon Prime seems increasingly like a hopeless endeavor. Which is a shame for consumers (I’m still on the hunt for a necklace) but mostly for makers like Abby Misbin.

“I just like handmaking [my hats],” she says. “It’s annoying that people can so easily take away the fun of Etsy and so completely do away with what I think Etsy’s all about.”

Kate Wagner is an architecture critic and journalist based in Chicago and Ljubljana, Slovenia. She is the creator of the satire blog McMansion Hell.