Etsy Tops $1 Billion in 2013 Product Sales on Mobile Lift

November 13, 2013 Leave a comment

Etsy Tops $1 Billion in 2013 Product Sales on Mobile Lift

Etsy Inc., a website for handmade and vintage goods, has already sold more than $1 billion in merchandise this year as customers increasingly view products on mobile devices. The New York startup, which had $895 million in gross merchandise sales for all of last year, passed the $1 billion milestone in October, setting the company up for another year of growth, Chief Executive Officer Chad Dickerson said in an interview.The company’s biggest quarter tends to be the holiday season, during which Dickerson expects customers to start coming to the site mostly via mobile phones. Etsy has updated its applications for Apple Inc.’s iPhone and Google Inc.’s Android in anticipation of the trend, with a design emphasizing product images.

“This will be the holiday of mobile,” Dickerson said. “Customers will start visiting the site mostly via mobile sometime during the holiday season, or definitely by early 2014.”

Etsy, which is profitable though has not disclosed its revenue, takes a 3.5 percent cut of all merchandise sold on its site, plus 20 cents for listing products. It also makes money via advertising.

The company expects a new revenue line to come out of its business putting Etsy sellers’ products in brick and mortar stores, like Nordstrom Inc., but hasn’t yet figured out that business model, Dickerson said.

Last month, the company loosened rules for sellers on its platform to allow them to use outside manufacturers and hire employees. The change allowed vendors that had cultivated their businesses on Etsy to keep expanding on the site while still qualifying as “handmade.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Sarah Frier in New York at sfrier1@bloomberg.net

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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