  hide cookie message 70,552 News Articles  Etsy gets crafty
with big data  At Etsy, the online marketplace for handmade
crafts and vintage items, the benefits of big data analytics
come in small packages - for example, something as simple as
tweaking a "favorite" button, which lets visitors bookmark
products they like.  "Someone was digging through data and
noticed that relatively few people click on that button, but of
those who do click on it, a pretty high percentage wind up
signing up for the site," recalls Dan McKinley, principal
engineer and five-year Etsy veteran. "So we tried making it more
prominent for people who hadn't signed up yet. That was worth a
few percentage points of people signing up, which in our world
is a pretty huge increase."   Sifting through data, adjusting
page elements, and improving site engagement is standard
operating procedure at Etsy, which uses an approach known as
continuous deployment. Any of Etsy's 150+ engineers can deploy
code to the live site at any time -- and that h