Etsy shop suspended
Etsy shop suspended
Author
Discussion

Shrimper

Original Poster:

432 posts

210 months

Friday 8th August
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Hi all, some of you may remember a sideline business I started a few years ago selling used wooden wine boxes - The Wine Box Merchant

I sell on my website, ebay and etsy, all doing relatively well this year with sales steadily increasing on all of these platforms.

My etsy shop was permanently suspended a week ago - supposedly for seller policy violations. These were addressed by me after the second warning, despite it being a minor technicality and after several attempts by me to find clarification of the changes I should make (and receiving no reply to those attempts).

The shop had just tipped over 5k transactions after 5 years, with a rating of 4.8 out of 5. It was a decent way of advertising the business, and would then prompt returning customers to buy direct. It had generated approx £38k and I had spent around £15k in marketing and fees with them in the last 12 months. I appreciate these are still relatively small numbers for their platform but they are quite large numbers for essentially a 1.5-man-band sideline alongside my full time job.

I've appealed to the suspension only for it to be upheld. All of the correspondence is clearly automated by a bot, and its impossible to find a human at the end to reason with.

Faceache groups and reddit threads are all doom and gloom with no solution, so I wonder if anyone with some PH wisdom has come across this and managed to speak to a physical person?

Or shall I write it off, start again, and focus more on other platforms? Amazon is one to get stuck into, and I've never invested any money/effort into SEO for the website

Any advise welcome! thanks

NickZ24

296 posts

83 months

Tuesday 19th August
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Well that is the risk with all 3rd party SaaS.
Afew complaints and they close your shop. Due to technical issues you cannot pull a backup and set you shop elsewhere.

It is best to have at least one independent shop set up.

GregK2

1,715 posts

162 months

Tuesday 19th August
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Etsy are absolutely militant and their decision always seems to be final with no reasonable appeal process. Once you are on the blacklist anyone even sharing a relation to you or living under the same roof will get banned if they try to open a store. It happened to my Mrs and she's not even able to purchase on the platform anymore.

She has been able to use other forms of gaining business such as through Instagram and Facebook, also has a Shopify website but almost no traffic and not sure heavy investment in that side is worth it. Etsy was by far the easiest way to gain volume of sales but forget about getting back on there, sorry.

otherman

2,246 posts

181 months

Tuesday 19th August
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Shrimper said:
Any advise welcome! thanks
I've been down this road. I ended up refining my own shop site and using adsense to feed users from google. Then you aren't beholden to anyone elses rules. Well, apart from any government ones that may apply.

Redarress

717 posts

223 months

Wednesday 20th August
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We get someone across our doors monthly who has fallen foul of Ebay,Etsy etc. Simple solution is putting effort into your own website. It takes a while to get worthwhile traffic which then leads to purchases. The sooner you invest in your site the sooner you get orders.
We have a number of strategies we employ in these situations depending on the niche you are in

seabod91

866 posts

78 months

Thursday
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Not possible to ask a family member to create an account and go through them ? Or would that mean re-branding and losses of repeat customers?