A marketplace can be the reason a small business exists.
That is both its value and its leverage.
A seller does not join only for shopping-cart software. The platform supplies buyers, search traffic, payments, reputation systems, fraud handling, reviews, advertising tools, and a familiar checkout process customers already trust.
Rebuilding all of that independently can be much harder than opening a new website.
Etsy shows how a fee change lands after scale exists
Etsy announced in February 2022 that its transaction fee would rise from 5% to 6.5%, effective April 11, 2022. The company said it expected to reinvest most of the incremental revenue in marketing, seller tools, support, and marketplace quality. See Etsy’s fee-change announcement and its 2022 annual report.
That was not Etsy’s first fee increase. In 2018, Etsy raised its transaction fee to 5%, describing it as its first-ever fee change and tying the increase to larger marketing and product investments. See Etsy’s 2018 announcement.
By 2022, Etsy said its marketplace connected sellers with a built-in audience of more than 90 million shoppers.
That audience is the important part.
The seller cannot move the marketplace with the shop
A merchant can copy product photos to Shopify, WooCommerce, or another marketplace.
What does not automatically follow is:
- the buyer traffic,
- accumulated reviews,
- marketplace search ranking,
- customer trust in the checkout system,
- saved favorites,
- platform advertising data,
- or the habit of shoppers starting their search on Etsy.
The seller may dislike a fee increase and still decide that leaving costs more than paying it.
That does not prove the fee is unfair.
It proves dependence changes the negotiation.
Marketplace power is partly optional and partly structural
Etsy’s position was that higher fees funded services intended to help sellers sell more. A seller could reasonably conclude that the exchange remained worthwhile.
Another seller could conclude the extra percentage materially reduced already-thin margins.
Both can be true.
The Enshittification question is not simply did the platform charge more?
It is:
How much practical bargaining power does a merchant retain after the platform becomes the source of customers?
A marketplace is most attractive when it can deliver demand a small business cannot cheaply create alone.
That same advantage is what makes walking away difficult when the platform later changes the price of access.