Etsy Sellers of Reddit

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We strongly prefer posts that contain more information about the milestones. Tell us your story. Talk about the struggles you went through to reach 1000 orders. Explain what you learned about producing your products that let you scale from 10 orders to 100 orders.

Please use this stickied post (and only this post!) to discuss how your views and sales are going.

This includes discussion of trends in sales and views, as well being the place to share general suggestions on improving traffic during slow times.

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I have read the FAQ and I'm just curious as this has happened to me twice now:

I see an item.

It's an item I need.

It delivers by the date I need it.

I order the item.

Seller marks order shipped.

Item stays in "pre-shipment".

It stays in "pre-shipment" longer than I can even blame USPS for.

Finally I ask.

"Oh yeah I didn't like the first one so I redid it six times it's drying now should be able to ship it next Thursday." or "Oh yeah it's a holiday weekend so I know you ordered that last Friday Imma work on it this Friday and ship it Monday."

What am I missing? How is this cool? Is this just a side effect of something Etsy does? After reading the FAQ it seems to me like it's just people who should not be in the business of selling things.

Hiya,, sale rates pretty slow please critique my shop and lmk how I can improve it:)

https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1685980485/cute-creepy-doll-face-clown-succulent?click_key=497de3a15ac03998f80f2a16c54ef2a2ae3fe692%3A1685980485&click_sum=b47201e7&ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=doll+face+clown+pot&ref=sr_gallery-1-2&organic_search_click=1&frs=1&cns=1&local_signal_search=1&content_source=f459cb966f8b1c994cd00867fdb886d7a7f837b4%253A1685980485

I just tested this out with one of my items because I was curious. I told my sister to add my item to her cart and then she waited about 5 mins and she got the 10% offer. I’d assumed Etsy waited atleast a couple hours to send out the offers. I only noticed because I sold an item a couple minutes after posting on my social media about it and the buyer used the discount and I was so confused.

My question is, do you guys think it’s worth sending out this offer? I only do 10% but I think most people know that if you leave an item on your cart you can get a discount so I think buyers wait a couple minutes before checking out to get a discount.

I sell supplies, and I wanted to ask about something I've noticed recently. This has happened twice in the last couple weeks: I've gotten an email from Etsy, saying "Etsy has issued a refund", and when I have clicked through to the order, I've seen that Etsy refunded the exact amount of sales tax that the buyer paid.

If Etsy is refunding sales tax, does that mean that these buyers have somehow registered as licensed resellers with Etsy, meaning that they don't have to pay sales tax on materials they buy?

And, if this is real, how do I sign up for it??? Despite selling jewelry supplies, I also buy a great deal of jewelry supplies on Etsy, and would love to get in on this. :)

Hey everyone!

I'm at a loss for how to be professional and not upset my buyer. This is my forst time in this situation and I could use some help please.

My issue is that this morning I got an order from an address that appears to be an overseas military address. While technically this is a US address, I would still need to fill out a customs form (I think?) and that's not something I'm willing to do right now.

I only ship to the US because I do not want to deal with customs and international shipping. I don't need advice on that, I'm just not willing to do it right now.

The item purchased was only $2.50 so after fees and everything, I'm just not willing to spend my holiday weekend figuring out customs stuff.

How do I politely inform my customer that I'm not willing to fulfill this order and how do I cancel? I'm a really small shop and I have no idea what the right next step is

My cricut screwed up today so I was late getting orders done to ship before close and since the post office is closed tomorrow, I just put them in the mail slot there (I always go inside to get scanned)

My question is, do they normally scan bubble mailers or do you have to pray to the mail gods they will in transit...

I have a small 7x5 bubble mailers

I sell on both Etsy and Shopify. I use the Shopify app called ShopUpz to sync my inventory. When I list a new item in Shopify, I can export it to my Etsy drafts, make a few changes and publish.

But, since the last Shopify updates, I have not been able to publish any listings that I exported from Shopify. It gives me a very non-descriptive error message. "Hm, we’re having trouble saving your changes. Try again, and if this keeps happening contact Etsy Support." I did contact Etsy Support, but we were not able to work it out. I think it's more on Shopify's end.

Is anyone here also experiencing this? If so, were you able to find a solution?

Thanks!

I have a costumer reaching out ot me via Facebook with an issue regarding a package that is being returned to me (missed delivery, was warned and did not collect for 15 days).

My first thought was to redirect him to Etsy Messages to keep everything inside the platform (even more if he expects that I resend the items), and he states that he's having "issues and errors" logging in.

What would you do?

Hi guys,I have one Etsy store I opened about a year ago which I've hardly used. Now to my question, should I delete this account and start a new one because the product I'm planing to start selling now isn't the same i was selling before. I would like to start fresh and open an entirely new shop but,than again I have some 10 sold items with rewievs on this old store which I thought might be helpful when I start selling my new products.

Anyone with some ideas? Any answers would be much appreciated, I'm a bit confused at this point.

Hi guys.

I'm based in the UK but I only want to sell to the US market with Printify and Printful. Why does Etsy add "VAT on seller fees"? The products are sourced from the US and FOR the US market via Monster Digital. My shop hasn't made any sales at all and already I'm being charged £4.61 in VAT on seller fees.

I am getting ready to list a bunch of plants on my Etsy account. There are multiples of the same type of plant.

How do I indicate that the plant in the photo may not be the plant that you received?

Continually having items returned from customs in Ireland via Royal Mail. I send all over the world and this is the only country I have problems with. The Republic to be precise. Tried Evri but they charge additional tax. I send all my worldwide post the same way so it’s nothing I am doing wrong? Anybody else having issues? How did you overcome them?

I came across a shop that sells PNG files such as t-shirt designs, tumbler wraps, and mug wraps. This shop has been selling since 2022 and has almost 7,000 listings which means they would have to post around 9.5 listings every single day for almost two years straight. Surely this isn't possible even working on it full time? Would it be fair to assume they're outsourcing their designs? The shop is very successful too, making almost 15k sales every month so they dominate almost every search listing page you could imagine. I am a much smaller seller and want to get my listing numbers up but I can only dedicate a few hours every day. Am I able to outsource my designs or would this break TOS?

So I just had my first bad review. The buyer didn't like how small the writing was even though it shows it in the photo. I am new to this so I made a public response saying I'd increase the writing size and send them a new one. I didn't pay attention to the note that it could not be updated once I made a public response. That's on me.

I also messaged them as well, but I should have done that first, I was just too freaked out over the one star review since I don't have a ton.

My questions are...

-Since the review can't be edited, will they be able to delete it?

-Right now it seems to be on the third page of my reviews, will responding to it move it up to the first when people look at my shop?

-How will a one star review effect my rankings in search, and other listings. I'm assuming it will effect this one negatively.

-How many five star reviews will it take to recoup that loss of a 1 star, I only have a few dozen.

Thanks for your help. Really bummed.

I recently sold a larger ticket item on my shop but shipped it with a third party shipper that wasn’t listed on Etsy’s available options. At the time, I had to manually go back in to choose “other” to edit and add the shipping and tracking details.

The item has been shipped and received by the customer however the status is still showing pre-transit. Manually if you search it, it does show as delivered. My guess is because I went in a couple days later to add the shipping, it didn’t populate to show as completed.

Will they still get prompted eventually to leave a review? Normally I wouldn’t care much about these one-offs but it’s my first large ticket item sold on this shop as the other items are more mid-low priced. I was hoping they would leave a review so others would be more inclined to purchase.

What do you think?

I sell style bundles on Etsy, and got an inquiry from someone asking to buy a coquette themed style bundle for their “18 year old grandson”. I asked them for inspiration pictures to make sure I knew what they wanted in the outfits. They replied with pics of them wearing ABDL clothing asking for a similar style for their grandson. I’m pretty disturbed tbh. Is there any way to block them? I want to make sure they cannot purchase from my shop 😬

I have done a couple of trials and it seems like I get more traffic if I “create” a new sale twice or three times a day. Does customers receive an alert even if they have received it before? Or am I just tripping and it was a coincidence that while setting the same sales a couple times during the day I got more visitors? Thanks :)

This has happened to me for the past year, but only with the new listing layout. Etsy has removed the old listing layout, forcing you to use the latest version. Etsy support says that using the Etsy app will automatically enable ads when you publish a new product. I do not use the Etsy app; I only list new products through the Etsy website, which allows you to disable marketing ads before you publish an item.

After listing each item, I go to the marketing tab to disable the ads. However, I sometimes forget because I am listing multiple items at once, resulting in ad fees being charged.

I contacted Etsy a year ago about this issue, and they said they would inform their engineers. As of today, a year later, the problem persists. I even took screenshots and screen recordings of the process, but they would only say they would inform their engineers.

I contacted Etsy support today, and they literally danced around the question and cut and pasted templates to frustrate us and make us give up. If we tried to get more information about the problem, customer support said this was not an issue other customers had reported and ended the chat with the following message:

Since I have provided all the information about Etsy Ads and how it was enrolled automatically, I will be disconnecting this chat now. 
Feel free to check our help article on How to Turn Off Your Etsy Ads Campaign.
https://help.etsy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360044099373-How-to-Turn-Off-Your-Etsy-Ads-Campaign?segment=selling
 
Thank you for contacting Etsy’s support team

It seems the new CEO has purposely integrated this issue into their UI/UX, hoping their users will forget to disable ads. This will generate a lot of revenue for their shareholders, as not everyone will remember to disable ads each time they list products, especially if you list multiple items daily. Additionally, the fact that you cannot set a daily budget of $0.00 is very questionable. The minimum ad rate you can set is $1.00.

After conversing with multiple customer service representatives, it appears that they are attempting to conceal this issue until some form of class action is initiated regarding this practice.

Additionally, after raising this concern multiple times to find a workaround to stop auto-enabling ads, my store was penalized by having the Star Seller badge removed for a final policy violation, even though I have had no issues or warnings and still qualify for the Star Seller badge.

These are my thoughts after keeping track of and logging my interactions with Etsy.