What Etsy maketh, Etsy taketh away. That's the moral of this story, and if you don't have your own domain pointed to either your own website or another venue this could be your story too. It doesn't matter how much or how little you sell. Etsy will get you, if they want to. Or just one admin feels like it.
LildecalShoppe will attest to that. Etsy is shutting them down.
We've been sitting on this for a week, hoping not to have to publish this. We were honestly hoping Etsy would do the right thing, but it appear Tim has started playing the God card so we've been give the pass finally to announce what top seller (who just broke into the top 100 with almost 5000 sales) has been shut down (see last post).
This seller has been featured a number of times in the new defunct gift guides, front pages and Dorque articles, they got tons of exposure online for themselves as well as Etsy, they are also slated to appear in InStyle Magazine, but now will not be providing their Etsy address.
They sent us this brief summation of the whole incident:
So basically after 6 months of great customer service, Etsy banned us. Our customers loved us for not only our fast service but also that we would customize anything and fix ANY issue quickly.
Etsy declared us to be in cahoots with another decal seller. How we have anything to do with this Etsy store, we don’t know. They had a few sales and only 73 percent feedback and being allowed to stay open, we had over 5000 sales with 99% feedback and are being shut down. The guy lives nearby us, but other than that, we have nothing to do with him. It appears Etsy may have just used this as their excuse for getting rid of our account.
My business partner and I have many theories as to why they really shut us down but I assume its because I made another account called “craftyguydecals” to combat yet another decal seller (whose name we were playing off of) who basically just copies ours and others work. It also may be that the hipsters don’t like us. Regardless of that, Etsy’s user agreement states nothing about having a second account and we did no wrong.
So Etsy now loses an active supporter (you have no idea how many people we turned onto Etsy) and the cash flow we provided them. We paid them well - over $3000 in fees during our brief 6 month tenure.
So if you want to support somebody that Etsy screwed over, you can find us on our new website, and also soon find us on Artfire; a website I am going to support fully. If I have any hand in it, will overtake the poorly run Etsy as the top handmade website.
After answering all of Etsy's questions, agreeing to what they said and having near perfect customer satisfaction, we were banned without any warning or chance to comply with whatever it was they wanted us to comply with...we still have no idea what that was"
We got to see some pieces of correspondence between this seller (but we will not share them here) and Etsy Admin Tim, who seemed to be on a bender with his godlike power all but stating he can do as he likes with arbitrary rules and no actual procedure, or answers. All this seller kept asking was "what can we do" and was repeatedly met with accusations of unproved wrongdoing which he provided answers and clarification for.
First this seller was accused of not being handmade, for which they provided video of the two of them working in their shop basement actually making the items. Then they were inundated with accusation of running or being involved with a number of stores (ironically ones that copy them) that have no relation whatsoever. They even helped other sellers in their field and Etsy accused them of collusion. Every time they'd answer an accusation, they'd get hit with another one. It's clear Etsy was pulling shit out of thin air trying to find a reason. Then they were accused of having an undeclared shop, which they did but had fixed. (How many admins have had or do have undeclared stores now? More than we can count.) I can truly say there was nothing this seller did worth the treatment they've received.
The store is inactive, we hope by publishing this that Etsy will be reexamine shutting down a seller that gave more than it got and will flip the switch back.
Shame on you Etsy. You have resellers with months worth of flags and you pick a upstanding handmade store who has made you tons of money to go biblical on?
Source: http://etsybitch.blogspot.com/2008/09/from-bitches-auxiliary-dont-quit-your.html