# Businesses dependent on a marketplace they do not control | Dead Internet Theory Dead Internet Theory: A marketplace can provide sellers with traffic, payments, trust, and discovery while also retaining the power to change fees and rules after a merchant has built a business around that access. 2026-05-07 :: Switchboard Tech Services ![Businesses dependent on a marketplace they do not control | Dead Internet Theory](https://switchboardtechservices.com/static/images/defaults/articles.webp) Part of the [Dead Internet Theory Series](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/dead-internet-theory-series/). 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](https://www.etsy.com/news/delivering-value-to-etsy-sellers) and its [2022 annual report](https://investors.etsy.com/sec-filings/all-sec-filings/content/0001370637-23-000017/etsy-20221231.htm). 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](https://www.etsy.com/news/growing-alongside-our-sellers/). 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. Part of the [Dead Internet Theory Series](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/dead-internet-theory-series/). - Categories: [Dead Internet Theory](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/categories/dead-internet-theory/) - Tags: [#Marketplace Dependence](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/marketplace-dependence/), [#Small Businesses](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/small-businesses/), [#Platform Rules](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/platform-rules/), [#Dead Internet Theory](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/dead-internet-theory/), [#The Enshittification Machine](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/the-enshittification-machine/) [Articles RSS](https://switchboardtechservices.com/feeds/articles.xml "Subscribe using an RSS reader") --- Canonical URL: https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/dit-businesses-dependent-on-a-marketplace-they-do-not-control/ Language: en-us Content type: article Author: Switchboard Tech Services Published: 2026-05-07T23:54:50+00:00