Why selling on Etsy is bad for your business, finances and mental health! As someone who's been selling on Etsy for many years, I'm going to outline the many issues I've found, whilst lots of sellers probably have had no issues with Etsy I have and I will outline my experience with them. Shutting down new shops. This is so disheartening, especially if you've never had an Etsy shop before and don't know the process, to a new seller who's excited about spending their new shop and hopefully getting sales, to see your shop more than likely instantly suspended can cause alarm and make you not even want to bother with Etsy, but as this has happened to me I've learned it's the bots that do this, it could be cause you listed too many listings at once etc, but why doesn't Etsy tell you how many listings you can list from a new shop, also why go to the extreme measures of suspending someone why not put the shop of vacation with a message that they are verifying your account etc, this has happened to me before and the only way I knew my shop had reopened was cause I was randomly searching listings on Etsy and saw my listing back up, most new sellers might just forget about Etsy and not even check unknowingly that their shop has been reinstated, such a bad initial look I think to new sellers. Lengthy, generic bot responses. Half the time I don't know if I'm speaking to an actual human or a bot, which is pretty bad considering Etsy is a handmade company who used the tagline keep e-commerce human, I've had responses from "support" that has one name at the top of the message and a completely different name at the end of the message, with a generic response, if you want a human response on most occasions expect to have to respond to the bot at least 3 times to get a human and this is a lengthy process as it's not a chat bot it's an email bot so they take days to respond Political alignments As a moderate liberal myself who watches all news channels, I find it strange that a company like Etsy which is a marketplace, would pick and choose which networks to advertise on, if you're going to advertise on a new network advertise on them all especially the one that gets high ratings inturn attracting a bigger audience, I personally don't care what your political views are a customer is a customer, why is Etsy only advertising to a more liberal base, I'm sure most sellers are more interested in sales than who you vote for but obviously Etsy management isn't. They have banned store owners from minority countries from opening an Etsy shop. So much for equality etc, a few years ago Etsy stopped accepting sellers from pretty much all the minority countries in the world, only first world countries with the exception of India can sell on Etsy now, sounds pretty biassed to me, even Amazon which is a much larger company accepts sellers from pretty much any country as long as you meet their requirements. DON'T put your future in Etsy. As I've stated they will shut your shop down at the drop of a hat, don't put your future in Etsy, look to having your own website and getting organic customers that way, there are horror stories of sellers having shops for 10+ years on Etsy and waking up to it being suspended with no reason why, imagine you've got a mortgage,.made future plans on the basis your Etsy shop will continue on the trajectory it's on just to have Etsy shut your shop down. No protection for sellers. Sometimes Etsy sellers get abusive messages from buyers, there is absolutely no way to block them, or to block them from buying from you, marking the message as spam doesn't actually report the message, and if you report a buyer for being abusive that will more than likely cause Etsy trust and safety to review your shop and look for a way to suspend it, which is what an Etsy employee told me via LinkedIn. Knock offs from AliExpress. I've seen so many shops selling generic products on Etsy that are definitely not handmade the images are on Amazon and AliExpress, I report it and nothing happens, so much for handmade and vintage which is what Etsy was meant to be about, how can handmade sellers compete with this, sometimes looking through Etsy listings is like looking on dhgate or AliExpress. High fees, forced onto you. I feel Etsy purposely complicates fees, why not just charge a set fee like Amazon a percentage and be done, when I make a sale there is at least 4 separate fees connected to that sale, which is so confusing I think purposely confusing. When Etsy started it was a handmade COMMUNITY while companies grow and become more corporate they can still have some sense of what they started on, but how I see it is Etsy has nothing to do with what it started on, you'll be lucky to get a human to talk too, the site is full of mass produced knock offs and they treat sellers really bad, I think Amazon is more human that ETSY.