My Etsy Shop is on a Forced Vacation

It's been a hard week for me emotionally. As most of you know, I opened my shop on Etsy at the end of January 2016. I had been a wreather for 6 years prior & I had accumulated a ton of ribbon in that amount of time. From the start, I wanted to be taken seriously & wanted customers to know they weren't dealing with a flakey lady that just wanted to sell her personal ribbon stash. I opened my shop with over 200 listings & after spending close to $15,000 I had about 850 listings by the end of that 1st year, I did everything I could to make my shop a success.

I have always had a love / hate relationship with Etsy because I wouldn't be where I am today without them. In the beginning of 2018, I noticed that there were a lot of changes being made on the site & the sellers fees were increased to almost double what they had been. I knew Etsy had gone public in 2015 & that there were shareholders that expected to see a gain in Etsy's profit, this just seemed really extreme to me, I still can't figure out why Etsy wouldn't want to make it easier for the shops to sell more & increase revenue for everyone.

Here we are today in May of 2020 & Etsy has outdone themselves with the latest cash grab. Any seller that has sold over $10,000 in a 12-month period, is now automatically registered with Etsy to participate in their new MANDATORY OFFSITE AD SERVICE. They say this ad service is a no risk guarantee to increase our sales on Etsy. They are "ONLY" going to charge us 12% MORE than the 8% we currently pay for any order that comes from one of their offsite ads (20% of the total of the order placed including the cost of shipping & sales tax). If that same buyer places another order in our shop within 30 days of that sale, we are again charged 20%.

In other words, they want me to sell more, work twice as hard & make less money (a lot less money). If I was to stay open on Etsy, I can guarantee you that there would be many days that I’d be in tears because it would actually cost me money to sell there.

This is the reason I set all my listings to renew manually, deactivated every listing & put my shop on vacation. I thought about closing my shop, but I didn’t have the heart to do it. I’m hoping that someone at Etsy will see the error of their ways & realize that none of us can afford those kinds of fees.

If it weren’t for those of you that have put your trust into believing in me & placed your orders here, I’d be really scared right now (who am I kidding, I’m shaking in my boots right now). But really, I want you all to know that I appreciate each & every customer that places an order on this site. Stick with me & I’ll always do right by you. Customer service has always been most important because if you don’t have repeat business, you won’t have a business for very long.

I’d love to hear what you think of the predicament Etsy has put us in. If this happened to you, what changes would you make?