Tell HN: Makers beware, Etsy will ruin your small business
A friend of mine asked me to create a rather niche 3D printed part for him. That worked very well for him, so I thought about providing this part to others, too.
As I'm good with technical things, but not so good with marketing, I turned to Etsy to sell these parts. They handle SEO, payments etc. pp. for you, so you can focus on creating.
Now, for everyone who doesn't know it, Etsy is also FULL of people who just print articulated dragons and other "entertainment stuff", where copyright/proper CC-licensing is, I would say, seems to be handled rather lax.
Anyway, I created all my models myself, so I'm safe on that.
I set my store up, put up my parts and waited. Etsys SEO magic (and paid advertisements) did its work and after about two weeks, orders started coming in.
And it was just not a single order, but one every two days or so, with a basket value of about 25 Euro (after Etsy commissions). Of course, that's not "big money", but it's nice money nevertheless for something that runs basically overnight.
I also did everything "very nice" to try to be a good seller. Took care of proper packaging, clean labels, got some white shipment packages from Amazon to leave an overall good and professional impression.
After the first six or seven orders, bank confirmation was still standing out on Etsys side, they just froze my account and all the funds within.
No warning, nothing at all. No reason given, too.
Just an ominous mail that I would have broken the TOS or rules of the house or whatnot. As with any service, these rules are so broad that they cover anything from praising satan to selling body parts.
As I did nothing like that, I filed an appeal to this decision through their Zendesk.
After _exactly_ 10 minutes I received an automated mail that my case was dismissed but I could reply to have it reviewed again.
I obviously did that and I also added that I did the bank authorization, because I thought that would most likely be the reason for the account lock.
Two weeks have passed now, no reply from Etsy at all but the ticket was closed yesterday, probably by another automated process.
My 150 Euro revenue, which has some real value in printed parts and shipping costs etc. against it, has of course not been paid to me.
Etsy has probably also not refunded the buyers, so they have kept the money of both parties, which looks like a good deal to me, at least from their perspective.
Anybody out here with some connections who can help? Anybody out here who has made the same experiences and can advise on what to do next?
Thanks!
edit: What I wanted to say when making that comment about the dragons: I'm baffled that downloading a file from Thingiverse and printing and selling that hundred times is no problem at all, but creative and new designs get the ban hammer. If you want to sell articulated dragons, you're probably fine, but beware of anything else.
edit2: The part in question is a little addition to the normal window locks. You can slide the part over the window lock handle and it will anchor itself between handle and window frame due to its geometry. My friend asked for this, so his children would not be able to open the windows and fall out.