Two weeks before Christmas, Etsy shut my shop down with no notice. I logged on to fill the 16 orders I had in queue, but to my surprise there was a message saying that my shop privileges had been suspended. In a terrified panic I started drafting a message to Etsy support hoping they could fix the error (because this had to be an error). Before I could finish the message I got an email from a member of the Etsy Marketplace Integrity Team. For the purposes of this article we will call him “Bob”. The email read: “…We have carefully reviewed the information you submitted in your outside manufacturing application and concluded that your business does not meet our selling guidelines. As a result of this, we have closed your application and suspended your shop privileges.”

BACKSTORY

Almost a year ago, Etsy made an announcement to all sellers that if a seller was working with an outside manufacturer, they had to prove two things:

• Sole authorship over the item
• A role in the design process from start to finish

When I saw the announcement I thought – Great! My socks and handmade labels will definitely qualify. I designed the socks from start to finish – I designed the dimensions, dictated the colors, fabric and sizing to the manufacturer. Surely if Etsy sellers can justify selling t-shirts with slogans printed on them, my socks that are unique to my shop will pass the test!

Months after I submitted my information to Etsy Marketplace Integrity and I got an email from Bob asking if I could send more information, photos, and screenshots to help them further understand my role in the design process. I sent the information he requested and hadn’t heard anything back – until now…after my shop had already been shut down.

I was baffled. I could not believe that Etsy would shut my shop down with no warning at all! No grace period. Nothing. I had 16 orders in queue that needed to be filled and with my shop privileges suspended, I couldn’t even fill those orders. I practically had to beg Bob to reinstate my shop privileges so that I could at least fill the 16 orders. In exchange for my shop being reinstated, I had to submit more information, and take all of my sock listings down until they reviewed the information further.

ISH GETS REAL

After reviewing my additional documents, Bob told me my socks still did not qualify…but he never gave me a specific reason why. I had SO many questions. Below are my questions and Bob’s paraphrased responses.

1. What specifically am I missing to convey authorship?
   Bob replied that I needed to provide more images to convey authorship of the sock design process. 
2. How are my socks different from other Etsy shops that sell printed t-shirts, or day planners? These sellers do not make the fabric for the shirts by hand nor do they make the day planners by hand. They design the items, buy shirts in bulk and print their designs on them. For the day planners, the sellers design a planner and get a manufacturer to print them. If my manufacturer is the issue, why doesn’t it qualify? Bob told me that using supplies such as t-shirts and printing on them is okay, so if I were to buy socks in bulk and dye them it would be fine. 
3. Why was my shop closed down so suddenly? I would have appreciated it if you would have just asked me to remove all of the listings in question until I could at least ship out the orders I had pending. I would have also appreciated more time to gather the information you needed and a detailed explanation of why my submission was insufficient. All I received from you was what sounded like a canned response you send to all shops that get suspended.
   Bob stated that Etsy reserves the right to suspend my shop privileges within 24 hours of receiving the outside manufacturing application.

I replied to Bob and sent more documents along with a written verification from the manufacturer. At this point there are 2-3 day gaps between responses from Bob. I finally got a response from Bob’s boss saying that they decided that my items do not meet Etsy’s qualifications and they were sorry they couldn’t provide a more favorable outcome.

Still no specific reason why my involvement in the design process didn’t fit the bill.

ISH GETS WEIRD AND HARD TO BELIEVE

After several emails to every Etsy support email I could find, I got an email from Bob’s supervisor. I will call her Beth for the purposes of this article. Beth told me that since the argyle pattern is already an existing pattern that I did not create, my items are not suitable for Etsy.

So now the issue is that the argyle pattern is an existing design. But Bob said that if I was buying socks and dying them myself, they would be appropriate for Etsy. What if I dyed the socks in an argyle pattern? Do they still qualify? Since the argyle pattern being an existing pattern is the issue? That’s like saying an Etsy seller can’t sell a polka dot print skirt that they sew by hand because polka dots are an existing pattern. Weird.

The Epiphany

Needless to say this entire ordeal was super stressful. I lost sleep, lost money and I’m pretty sure I lost some hair…but most importantly I lost my focus. I was so focused on getting answers from Etsy, I lost track of the most important part of being entrepreneur – perseverance. Success means rising above obstacles.

After two weeks of emailing back and forth with Etsy, it hit me – why continue trying to fight this battle when I could just branch out and build a standalone site? From that day on, I put all of my effort into creating a new site, which led to the idea of creating a new brand, which led to the idea of creating new products. This experience it gave me the push I needed to get out of my comfort zone and take my business to the next step. For two years I had much success on Etsy – over 3,000 sales, 5 star reviews, and little competition…but I was just coasting along. I wasn’t moving toward anything.

I am a firm believer that what is meant to be will be. If a door closes, it’s closed for a reason. I am SO happy with my new brand and the new direction that my business is headed. THANK YOU Etsy for shutting my shop down!

Sincerely,
Kendra Barnes

Source: ladypreneurleague.com/why-getting-kicked-off-of-etsy-was-the-best-thing-that-ever-happened-to-my-business/

I made a transaction yesterday for a OnePlus2 phone using an invite (which is obv very hard to get). OnePlus2 only allows PayPal as the payment gateway. I made the payment of 402.99$ of which 167$ were deducted from my paypal account and rest around 235$ from my bank account. PayPal showed transaction as successful and i received a confirmation email with the transaction ID.
However the seller (OnePlus2) still showed payment as pending and there was no record of it on PayPal account page.
I called a customer care representative and shared the transaction ID with her and she said that there is some issue and she think the transaction is successful. I told her that the seller cannot see a payment received and my invite would be void in 2 hours. Before we could complete the phone got disconnected.
To my horror when i called again somehow mysteriously this transaction ID stopped showing any details for PayPal customer service as well as for me. I went through a pain of 2-3 hours from one agent to another repeating it, till my call was forwarded to a senior agent who refused to accept any transaction as he cant see it.
I asked him to justify the 167$ deducted from my paypal account and asked where it went and how is my balance zero. At this he realized the miss and put me on hold multiple times before giving me the best statement of the year – “Sir for now what i can say is we don’t know where your balance went. I will have to go through my engineering team”.
Since it was clear I was not getting a resolution soon and my invite would be voided I made the purchase again and this time the seller accepted the payment and an order was made with an order number. However next day i see 402.99$ deducted from my Bank account which is current but also a 235$ charge which is for the missed transaction and somehow two transactions show up on paypal page.
Calling the customer care again was painful as now they were arguing they can see two transactions (Obviously as they did something overnight) and asked me to call OnePlus. Now i called OnePlus and they were right at their end as they only have data for one because only one order was done and only one order number generated. And they suggested me to call PayPal.
Again i called Paypal and they finally said they could do nothing but dispute one payment. It was a two day nightmare. It does sound scary for your financial account holder to say your balance just vanished and we cannot see it. It is still resolved and not sure how much hassle i will have to go through in the coming days.

Source: http://www.paypalwarning.com/paypal-admitted-lost-money-return/

"One guy casually told me that women need to be escorted to the grocery store so that they 'keep their eye on the prize' and 'don't spend like $200 on random things' (his actual words). Then he proceeded to explain why he was right about this and why it's not offensive when I told him that I did not appreciate his statement.

Then he told me about his years of psychological and physical abuse by his father, eventually culminating in him being stabbed by his father.

He also suggested I listen to a couple of his favorite podcasts by a Trump-supporting, feminist-hating misogynist.

On the way home (I gave him a ride because it was cold out and I'm apparently a bleeding heart) he asked me if I would go on a 14-hour road trip that weekend with him (which would have been our second date by the way). Hard no. Like...were you on the date we just had?" - Reddit user fuckmywagon

I lost my left eye when I was only seven years old. It was a stupid way to lose an eye, but luckily most people tend not to ask how I lost it, I think the majority worry it might be insensitive. It’s not a story I like to tell. Not because it’s upsetting or brings back bad memories. I just feel embarrassed by it.

Growing up my brother and I were obsessed with Robin Hood, the outlaw of Sherwood Forest, who would take from the rich and give to the poor. I’m not going to pretend this heroic saviour of the poor was our hero because of his good deeds, we simply liked him because of his legendary skill with a bow and arrow. Our father, a keen gardener, had lots of bamboo sticks all piled up beside the shed which he would tie plants to, in order to stop them from drooping when they grew. It was my brother’s idea to take one and attach a length of string to both ends to create a bow. I thought he was an absolute genius.

When we had finished making the bow we made an arrow, simply by using a handsaw to carve a small groove into one end of an arrow sized piece of bamboo, which would act as a nest for the string to sit.

‘I’m first!’ My brother said.

‘Nooooo!’ I cried.

‘It was my idea, so I get to shoot first.’ And that was that.

At one end of the garden there was a little wall which surrounded one of my father’s flower patches. Upon the wall we placed an empty plastic bottle to be used as our target. My brother, of course, then took the first turn, missing wildly and falling far short of the bottle on the wall. Next it was my go and I also missed.

It took about an hour before we had both knocked the bottle off the wall once.

‘Right, now you stand in the middle and I’ll shoot over your head at the target!’ Another genius idea by my brother.

I didn’t argue. I thought it was a cool thing to do and if I did it then my brother would have to let me have a go shooting over him.

I don’t believe he meant to do it, it was just a careless accident, but the arrow never made it past my body. It struck me hard and deep in my left eye, straight away blood poured down my cheek and I screamed in agony.

I spent a couple of days in hospital before the doctors decided they would have to remove what was left of my eye. Until I was twelve I wore an eye patch, but when I moved into secondary school I decided to get my first glass eye to try and put an end to the pirate jokes. It might sound weird, but I loved my glass eye and by the time I was sixteen and leaving school I had collected dozens, all different colours and designs. My missing eye stopped being something I tried to hide and in a strange way became my kind of signature. Kids would say, ’have you seen the boy with a spiral in his eye?’ or ‘have you seen the lad with an eye like a cat?’ I enjoyed this, it allowed me to embrace my injury and make it part of my identity.

I carried on collecting glass eyes for many years, always on the lookout for new designs or something different to what I already had. When I was twenty-five I discovered the Dark Web. A friend from my Dungeons and Dragons club told me about how he had used it to buy some sort of hallucinogenic. I didn’t plan on using the Dark Web for anything like that, I was just intrigued by the idea of it. Once I was on I started looking for stores. It was amazing and disgusting, people selling guns, drugs, services and even other people. It made me feel a little bit ill knowing I was now a part of this strange illicit world.

I went on to one store page which called itself ‘Mr Bubble’s Objects of Trouble’ which was the first store I had come across which had a search bar. So I thought, fuck it, let’s see if they have any?

I typed in the words ‘glass eye’. I didn’t expect anything to come up and I was rather surprised when a match popped up on my screen.

The item was called ‘The Sight of Sin’ which was simply a black eye with a small red number seven on it. It pulled at my fancy so I decided to buy it. I didn’t truly expect it to show up, but one week later a package arrived and there it was. As customary with all my new eyes I washed the eye in a solution to make sure it was clean. When washed I put it in a case with the rest of my eyes and went back to watching television.

The next morning when I woke up I thought I’d test out the new eye, to see if it was a good fit, to check how comfortable it was. It went in with ease and felt absolutely perfect, so I decided to leave it in for the rest of the day. Nothing strange happened at first, it was just my usual daily routine of having breakfast and doing some work on my laptop, but then the doorbell rang.

As I opened the door I immediately knew something wasn’t right. I had double vision all of a sudden, there was only one man standing on my front doorstep trying to sell me solar panels, but I could see him twice. One image of him was completely ordinary, just the bloke dressed in a suit holding a brochure and telling me about how he can save me money on my electricity bill. But, the other image… well, it was him, but dressed up in a gimp suit cracking a whip against the floor lustfully.

I don’t think I said a word to him, I just stared transfixed by what I was seeing. Eventually I closed the door and stood there for a moment trying to understand what had just happened. I passed it off at the time as just my mind playing tricks on me and that I must be over tired. I decided to have a nap. I was woken by a telephone call from my father asking if I was still coming to his house for dinner, I looked at the time and realised I was running late, so I grabbed my coat and flew out the door.

On my way to my father’s house, which is just a ten minute walk down the road from mine, I walked past just one person, a lady, walking her dog, but again, I was seeing double. In one image she was completely ordinary, apart from being overweight, she was wearing a pink coat and beside her a dog trotted along minding its own business. But, in another part of my vision I could see her again, completely naked, eating tinned dog food with a fork. Jellied meat dripped down onto breasts which she licked ravenously. I was almost sick.

I thought about just going home and going back to bed, still trying to convince myself I was simply tired from working, but my father missed not having me at home and I didn’t want to let him down. Though now I wish I did. Now, what happened next won’t make much sense unless I explain something… When I was two years old my mother died. I say died, she was killed whilst walking home from work one night on this very estate. Nobody has ever been caught in relation to her murder, but now I know exactly who took my mother from me.

My father opened the door with a large grin on his face.

‘Come in, son!’ he said cheerily, but I did not move.

Besides the image of my father standing in the doorway was another vision of him holding a knife and laying beneath him on the floor was my mother, soaked in blood, eyes vacant and still.

I took a step back from my father and did not stop running until I had reached the front door of my house. Straight away I went on to the Dark Web and searched for Mr Bubble’s store, but it had gone, vanished, like it had never been there.

I didn’t leave the house for a few days. I didn’t answer the door, I didn’t even pick up the phone. What I did was sit by the window looking out onto the street, watching the people walking past…

I think I know what I am seeing now, it makes little sense, but it’s the only thing I can think of which almost explains what I am seeing. Firstly, when I remove the glass eye I no longer see two images of everyone, I only see one just like I always have, but when the eye is in I see two visions of every person I look at in the flesh. Secondly I think I know what I am seeing… I am seeing their sins. I know that sounds utterly mad, but it’s the only thing all this seems to point to. The name of the glass eye, the red number seven and the grotesque and disturbing images I see. I believe it’s their sins I am seeing with my new eye. I see the true hideous nature of people, the part of themselves they hide from everyone else.

I know I could just take the eye out and forget about it, but I just can’t bring myself to do this. I can’t trust anybody without it… I can’t see the real them. But seeing people’s darkest secrets also leaves me alone, for once you see the hidden nature of someone you never want to be close to them again.

Many questions remain…. Why does this eye allow me to see these things? Who made it? How did it end up on the Dark Web? I need to know the answer to these questions!

Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/et3fuo/i_bought_a_glass_eye_off_of_the_dark_web_i_can/