a r.

Ask me a month ago, and I was a prophet for ETSY. They made it easy for me to list my products, arranged my payments, brought in customers, and I could print my shipping labels from the site itself. I was okay paying their fees, because it was less work for me. I was a sucker.

I had a shop for nearly 2 years selling hand made crocheted items. I had 100% positive feedback, used all my own images for my listings, shipped every item and worked with my buyers to handle my own refunds so they would not bother etsy. Like all other shops, I paid my bills on time and really caused no trouble. I got a notice that one of the items in my shop was deactivated for copyright infringement (a white cat hat with big, colored eyeballs, but I put a red bow on it) from Sanrio. It's aggrivating, because I never used the search criteria for hello kitty, and my hat looked nothing like the cartoon character (it was modeled after my nieces cat, a hat I had made for her birthday!). Other searches for Hello Kitty brought up 1000's of listings. It was the red bow, I was told, was what was copyrighted. Shortly afterwards, my entire shop was deactivated and I was to provide proof, receipts and photos of my work in a certain amount of time. I provided all that they asked, and still never got access back to my shop.

I got tired of waiting, and created a sub account for myself to relist all my items on again, and within 24 hours, the new shop was suspended. I used a completely new email, new shop name, new credit cards linked to a new address, new paypal, everything. I even changed my name, to my married name rather than maiden like my previous shop. I was set up to being a whole new shop and lose my customer base and standing with ETSY just to be able to sell again. I got an email from legal that I had broken their terms of service and am now seemingly banned from both buying and selling on ETSY. There's an upcoming lawsuit against ETSY for using tracking cookies, and now I fully believe it. I left no trace that the two accounts were similar, even new IP addresses, because I did not want this to happen.

I will be taking my shop elsewhere. I could have set up my own shop on my own domain if I knew it was going to be this much trouble.