This was going to be a nice link to my etsy store, now its a warning to other sellers.
I created enough of a fuss that they actualy refunded me and reinstated my shop (without making a ticktock!). Also with no notification or email with an explination. But they did fix it. I’m still leaving this up as a warning to other potential sellers.
To make sure this doesn’t happen again, none of my listings are on auto renewal and I check my metrics every other day to make sure that my shop is getting some traffic.
Here is my story (now with photos) that I have (tried) to out on a couple of sites, including etsy community.
I can’t post it on most reddit forums because it deals with a suspended shop and Etsy Community banned me when I posted it.
I thought that I had had my shop posted and running for two years. I went through the whole verification process, followed all of the rules ect.
I thought that I had an unsuccessful etsy store, and that my ideas weren’t good, turns out my shop was suspended.
I never received an email notifying me that my shop was suspended, and they had been charging me for listings the whole time! Every 3 months for over 2 years, I was paying for my listings to be posted, they never were.
It took me doing a major overhaul of my shop to realize that no one had been seeing my listings. I wanted to get some traffic to boost numbers so I asked friends and family to look for my shop and listings. There was nothing, my shop didn’t exist.
So I reach out to etsy support:
And this was their reply:
Thats right, they thought I was a minor….. I was stunned to say the least. I was expecting a ban for something stupid but more along the lines of copyright infringement on my own copyright (which etsy is prone to doing), not a basic math error.
Any decent code wouldn’t have had this issue and they had a copy of my drivers license as proof of my identity.
I went back through my emails to find any reference to a suspention. I’m bad about deleting emails so this was essentially all of the emails I had received since 2019, before I opened my shop. Nothing.
I wrote back a polite email with another photo of my drivers license (full birthday redacted for privacy purposes):
Rather than fixing a problem they caused, Etsy sent me back to the beginning. And my shop is still not officially marked as suspended, therefore I can’t submit an official appeal.
This issue isn’t covered anywhere on any of etsy’s many posts, resources or articles.
This is what I got back after reiterating the previous email:
That’s right my account was suspended in 2027, two years from now.
This is ridiculous, I don’t think an actual person was reading my emails and AI was definitely the one responding seeing as it can’t do basic math. A decent program would be able to do the math, but AI is prone to making very stupid mistakes.
Etsy now has a fee to open a new shop on top of listing fees and I would have to redo all of my listings. It would take weeks and I don’t have the money to pay the new shop fee. All of my savings has gone into making products to sell.
I’m hoping that an actual person will get back to me and fix my store without me having to blast this all over social media as a warning to any other potential sellers.
Well turns out that they didn’t like this being posted on their seller conversation page, after my post being up for two days it was deleted before I could read any responses. I reposted it becuse all that came up when I clicked on the link was an error message,
no notification that I had somehow broken community rules. then they deleted my follow up post and banned me.
Again no email notification, I followed the community guidelines as originaly I was actually looking for help to get things back up and running.
Now this is on principle… you don’t take advantage of other people, especially small buisnesses. Seriously I’m pissed enough to get a tick-tock account, an app that I personaly hate and have purposefuly avoided for years, just to get this message out.
I had an Etsy shop from about 2015-2018 (when I actually was a minor, connected to one of my parents) and they were just fine. Support worked, listings got posted. Etsy used to have a good reputation, but now they have trashed it.
Etsy is also are being pretty vindictive about people who say anything negative about the site, so I’m fully prepared to be banned from using the site all together for posting this.