“It’s not your shop, it’s Etsy’s, you’re just the grunt making the pieces in it.” is the most important statement in this article. Read it all. There’s more.

Etsy has changed their policies. They said they would and after a week of review, (you did know about this, right?) they changed them.

They can decide that your prices or your policies or your shipping is not “reasonable”. This means that they can change your prices if they think they are not reasonable.

Who decides if they are reasonable or not? That’s right. Etsy does.

If you had your own web site, you could do whatever you wanted to do.

You want to charge unreasonable prices? It’s your web site.

If you want to charge $50 to ship a $5 trinket, charge it. It’s your web site.

You want to have no refunds or some other policy, do it. It’s your web site.

But if you are on Etsy, you have to do what they tell you. That’s OK with some people, but the ones who want control over their own business, you need your own web site.

Etsy was quick, they said a week and it was only a week, to allow review of the new dos and don’ts. But they could do that because they didn’t really listen. By the way, why wasn’t a mass email sent out to all members about this? Even if it was just to point out that there have been changes? Communication is still on Etsy’s to-do list it seems.

Some of the bitchable points of the dos and don’ts?

From Shops&Listings, formerly known as ’selling’:

“Etsy reserves the right to request that a seller provide policy information or require a seller to modify unreasonable policies at Etsy’s discretion.”

Hmmm what would be considered ‘unreasonable’?

“Listing prices must be reasonable”

This appears to be an argument against the market and letting shoppers decide what’s reasonable, but it’s just a bad way of leading to their old policies on the issue:

“You may price an item how you choose; however, a listing should not be created with an inaccurate price in order to keep it from selling”

and Etsy’s way of preventing circumvention of their fees:

“The shipping cost must be reasonable for the item”

Why they couldn’t just avoid the potentially troublesome header about reasonable prices is beyond me. How corporate of Etsy, reserving their rights to modify both your policies and your prices. It’s not your shop, it’s Etsy’s, you’re just the grunt making the pieces in it.

Read the entire article at:
http://etsybitch.blogspot.com/2009/10/bitchables-new-dos-and-donts-of-etsy.html