#microbusiness

A $100 Startup review and summary: Chris Guillebeau's case studies are the antidote to thinking you need funding and permission to begin. ★★★★½4.5/5 The verdict: Proof you do not need investors, staff or an office to start. 🎧 Listen free on Audible Try Kindle Unlimited Buy the paperback ⚡ Quick answerThe $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau gets 4.5/5 from me. Proof you do not need investors, staff…

I am slowly moving most of my posts to my Patreon, including links to everything I write elsewhere. Join for free today to make sure you don't miss anything in the future!

You can also choose to be a paying supporter and receive additional publications from me, such as my twice-weekly news summary, resource collections, and live chat threads.  Without the Patreon income, I would have to stop all blogging, education and seller advocacy, due to the huge amount of time it takes away from my jewellery business. Thank you to everyone who is already a paying Patron. ❤

Now, on to my recent posts and articles; please share them around so more folks are up to date:

Etsy's fourth quarter results showed a tiny increase in sales year over year, and Depop has been sold to eBay: https://www.cindylouwho2.com/blog/2026/2/21/etsy-fourth-quarter-2025-financial-results-trending-in-the-right-direction

Due to laws in the United Kingdom, shoppers in the UK will now see item prices with the shipping included, although the format Etsy is using in search and shop home pages is not the only option possible: https://www.patreon.com/posts/etsy-displaying-151033251

Earlier in the month, Etsy was testing quality/"craftsmanship" labels in search; is this another step in "elevating" more unique and artisan items on the site? https://www.patreon.com/posts/etsy-testing-in-149887930

Handmade marketplace goimagine is shutting down in late March: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cindy-baldassi-381b64235_goimagine-will-be-shutting-down-on-march-activity-7431890546203250688-I4rc

Etsy is expanding access to its buyer loyalty program, Etsy Insider: https://www.patreon.com/posts/etsy-insider-151566606 Did you get an offer? Some people were shown higher prices than I received.

The European Union will be getting rid of de minimis and charging tariffs as well as per package and per item fees for each parcel entering from elsewhere; some have already started the per-item fees: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cindy-baldassi-381b64235_eu-import-fees-in-2026-what-changes-for-activity-7422694286363664385-l3JX

Etsy is not getting around to fixing the numerous errors in the monthly Star Seller and Customer Service Standards emails:  https://www.patreon.com/posts/etsy-continues-147518360 https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7424274578308403201/

Do you believe in overnight success? Think again. True wealth isn’t found in boardrooms or viral fame—it’s built in overlooked niches, side hustles, and unconventional opportunities. Learn how ordinary people create extraordinary success.

Welcome to Finance Facts, your go-to destination for mastering the art of money management and building a secure financial future. Whether you're just beginning your financial journey or looking to refine your investment strategies, our channel delivers clear, reliable, and actionable financial knowledge. From simplifying complex topics like stocks, inflation, and crypto to offering practical budgeting and saving tips, we make finance accessible for everyone.

I've moved my coverage of Etsy's quarterly reports to my website blog; please join us there to discuss it:

is booming during the remote work era 💼✨ Learn how to start your small business online, top tools & tips for 2025 👉

If you are a small business outside of the United States trying to figure out how to continue selling to the US in light of tariffs and the end of de minimis shipping, I've put together some resources to help.

Topics include:

🔷which postal services are suspended 🔷available shipping options 🔷how to figure out tariffs owed 🔷marketplace & website builder options 🔷exceptions to US tariffs

I’m now in Week 9 of running my small business, Refined Finds, and things are starting to feel very real. This has been the most hands-on part of the project so far, and I’ve had a mix of wins and learning moments along the way.

✅ What’s Going Well: I’ve started getting more consistent with my listings on Facebook Marketplace and even had a few returning inquiries. Product presentation really makes a difference—better photos and honest, clear descriptions have led to faster responses and more trust from buyers. I’ve also finalized some packaging and added a little thank-you tag to help build a memorable customer experience.

❌ What I’m Still Working On: Managing inventory is becoming a challenge. It’s easy to get excited about sourcing products, but I’ve realized I need to be more selective. Some items take longer to sell than others, and space is tight, so I’m rethinking my strategy. I also haven’t fully launched my Instagram page yet—so that’s on my priority list this week.

💡 Big Lessons: Marketing takes more energy and planning than I thought. I’m learning that selling isn’t just about having a great product—it’s about how you present it, when you post, and how you follow up. I’ve also become more comfortable adjusting my pricing and experimenting with bundle offers.

Above ©️ Etsy.

On May 28, 2025, Etsy released its Transparency Report for 2024, along with a short post promising changes, a new Ultimate Guide to Etsy Policy, and also hosted a live presentation [now available on YouTube] about how Trust and Safety decide on and implement Etsy policy.

So on top of my usual coverage of this annual report, I will also look at Etsy's promises on Trust and Safety policy, with historical context and an eye to future developments, as well as what happened within a few weeks of its release.

But first, the most recent Transparency Report.

2024 Transparency Report:

Policy Violations

A common theme in the past few Reports is that Etsy's automation is becoming much more accurate, and is removing fewer items in error. However, each year Etsy gives us fewer raw numbers in relation to that goal, so that readers can't figure out how poor the false positive rate actually is. Fortunately, I have been carrying the old numbers forward each year, so I can still do the real math.

For 2023, I calculated that only around 1 out of 8 items Etsy removed from the site was actually violating policies, per their own data. The exact percentage of true violations was 11.7% of all items flagged.

For 2024, they state:

"we removed 25% fewer listings for violating our policies compared to 2023..."[we improved] detection precision by 70%, reducing false positives and enabling us to be more accurate and targeted with our enforcement efforts."

Improving "detection precision by 70%" means 11.7% increased to 19.9%. Sure, improvement is great, but this still means that over 4 out of 5 listings that Etsy's bots thought were not allowed on the site actually were fine. So, pat yourselves on the back for only being 80% inaccurate last year, Etsy!

[If anyone at Etsy thinks my calculations are wrong, they are very welcome to provide us with the actual numbers so we can better understand what is going on. You have my email address.]

Furthermore, removing "25% fewer listings for violating our policies" year over year does not mean much when the total number of sellers on the site dropped 26% over the same time. Etsy will claim that the seller numbers dropped because they have been cleaning house to get rid of bad actors, but we know at least some of the drop is due to the new shop sign up fee and other issues.

And finally, how many of those items that stayed deactivated were truly violations of Etsy policy? Etsy now admits there is currently no official way to appeal listing removals - they say they are working on that - so many sellers try to appeal and fail, or simply give up because they can't figure out how to get Etsy's attention. I am pretty sure Etsy's accuracy rate is well under 20% for this reason.

The Report also states that "we removed 22% more listings and suspended 1.5x more sellers for violating our Creativity Standards and Handmade Policy compared to removals in the previous year under our Handmade Policy." That increase makes sense, since the newer Creativity Standards encompass everything on the site, including Craft Supplies and Vintage (and they weren't covered under the old Handmade policy).

"Of the accounts we took action against in 2024, 56% were sellers based in North America and 33% were sellers based in Europe."

Since we don't know how many sellers are in every country - Etsy does not release shop numbers for the United States and only provides totals for their other 5 core countries - this doesn't tell us much, but based on the numbers we do have, and the fact Americans are the largest group, it is odd that so many violations come from Europe. That seems disproportionate. North America - including the US, Canada and Mexico - seems a bit low in comparison. Is there a language issue here preventing some shop owners from getting Etsy to understand them when Etsy makes an error? Or perhaps the better access to Support in North America - both Live Chat and callbacks - means more NA shops can get issues resolved in their favour.

Etsy credits the July 2024 release of a new Adult Nudity and Sexual Content policy with reducing member flags for mature content by 32%, but again, since the number of shops went down 26% last year anyway, that isn't particularly impressive. Fewer products on the site should mean fewer flags.

Intellectual Property (IP)

"In 2024, Etsy processed 85,591 alleged infringement reports, a 30% decrease from the year prior, and we removed a total of ~832,000 listings, representing a 31% decrease from 2023." That drop in claims is again close to the drop in total shops, but it is larger.

In total, over 26,500 shops were removed from the site for either intellectual property or counterfeit claims, 15% fewer than 2023. Over 400,000 listings were taken down for counterfeit concerns, down 73% from the previous year. Etsy states the large reduction is due to so many problematic shops already being removed.

This year, Etsy only rejected 15% of IP claims, far less than the 1 in 4 that were refused in 2023. "We attribute this decline to the implementation of enhanced requirements for authorized reporters in the Etsy Reporting Portal. This improvement also coincides with an increase in voluntarily withdrawn reports—from 2% to 5%—indicating more effective resolution of concerns between reporting parties and members."

Product Safety

Etsy claims they provide "educational tools and resources that ... help sellers understand requirements to sell on Etsy, which includes compliance with relevant regulations, local laws, and Etsy’s policies." However, notifications of removed listings under product safety recalls and laws often lack this element, with shop owners not provided with any details on the recall or ban. See this seller, for example. Of course, this is typical of Etsy; they don't tell sellers why their items were removed in most situations, unless the law requires it, such as with intellectual property takedowns. This is yet another example of Trust and Safety talking a big game but not following through where it is most needed.

Removals were down 65%, but they had been up 63% the year before. Given the big drop in shops, these numbers probably do not balance each other out; they are likely still removing more listings under these grounds than a few years ago, especially given that they claim to have received "60% fewer recalled item alerts compared to the previous year." They didn't tell us how many articles were removed for product safety reasons in 2022; in 2024, it was over 50,000.

Oddly, Etsy does not mention the European Union's General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR) that took effect in December 2024. I look forward to reading about takedowns and complaints under this law next year.

Buyer Complaints and Seller Support

Apparently, only 1 out of 8 Help requests from a buyer end up going to a case. Cases are resolved on average in 1 1/2 hours, which is down from 2 hours in 2023. Of course, most cases seem to close automatically, so for an average of 1 1/2 hours, they'd need some to go on for days, which I have seen. The actual range of times would be interesting to know, but Etsy did not provide that.

The report claims that another 1.8 million sellers in the United States and Canada now have access to live Support Chat, and that more countries will be added this year. Given how often Chat is broken, I doubt that is going to be true. If you search "chat" in the Etsy seller forums, it is just pages and pages of people whose Chat is either frozen or has vanished.

If Etsy wanted sellers to have actual access to live Chat, they need to make it easy to reboot Chat when it fails. Last time I checked, there isn't even an obvious email ticket in the Help portal that sellers can use to get their Chat reopened. Since it is such a common issue, you would think they would fix it, but again, I doubt they really want to give that many sellers automatic Chat access. They'd have to pay more human beings to answer Chat if most of us had it and it actually worked.

Remember 2 years ago when the Transparency Report claimed "we expanded our popular Help Center live chat support to be available to all sellers, 24 hours a day, every day. Now, most sellers wait less than one minute to be connected with an agent." [my emphasis] Back then, I was one of the many sellers who did not have access to live Chat, and I called them out for putting complete falsehoods in the "Transparency" Report. I knew they were not telling the truth then, and the fact they now state they are expanding Chat to more countries just proves I was correct.

Trust and Safety Plans and Changes in 2025

They plan to continue to use automation to find problem listings on the site. "The Report also states Etsy will be "empowering [shop owners] with tools, resources and transparency" in this area - wow, wouldn't actual transparency be nice? They could start with having a factual Transparency Report instead of skewed numbers and statements that don't reflect reality.

Removing problematic content will extend to reviews and shop home pages (if the machine learning can figure it out, of course, which hasn't worked accurately on any other part of the site so far...)

"We’re developing refreshed, clarified language and guidance to help sellers better understand and learn from enforcement actions on their shops." - this plan is similar to another thing they promised in the past that did not materialize. In 2023, Alice Wu stated that "we’ll also be working to add more transparency to let sellers know if their listings have been temporarily removed from search for review", but that never happened. I don't believe any changes in this area will truly improve clarity, because Etsy is not good at real clarity. However, after this report came out, I did see a takedown notice that had far more detail than they usually do, so maybe they will actually deliver on this promise. This quote could also refer to the changes in various Etsy policies after the Transparency Report came out; see discussion of how poorly that went below.

"Building upon our account-level appeals system, we plan to introduce a new listing-level appeals process so sellers can request that we review our decision to remove individual listings" - 1) they previously said we had that already; both Wu and Josh Silverman have publicly stated this. Now they admit it doesn't exist. 2) if the new process is based on the shop appeal system, then don't expect much, as it frequently glitches out. Many shops have reported that they never received a reply to their first appeal, but then after 2 weeks they are surprised to find that they can start a new appeal. Many account appeals get only automated responses anyway, rejecting the appeal. This is one of the many reasons suspended members have to take to social media to beg for someone to look at their case; much of the account-level process is (poorly) automated. So, is the listing-level appeal going to work any better? Better yet, will it actually materialize this time?

There's also a promise to improve account security info with a "self-service account recovery option." That would be fantastic if it happens and it works, because currently some sellers end up locked out of their accounts for weeks or even months, and cannot get a real human at Etsy to help. Even when they get their shops back, they may still have products from the hackers in their sold items, and money from the hackers' sales in their payment accounts. I've struggled to find good ways to help shops like this; Etsy's response is really hit and miss.

So to sum up: lots of promises that sound decent, and no accountability for all of the things they failed to deliver in the past.

The Live Event: Nothing New, No Ability To Ask Questions

Let me save you time: only watch the video if you have nothing better to do, or you learn best from video and don't want to read the posts that Trust & Safety publishes. The 3 participants didn't reveal anything that isn't found elsewhere, and they didn't take any questions. The live comments from sellers did get a little pointed, though.

If (like me) you prefer reading, you can save some time by reading the transcript generated automatically by YouTube.

The Ultimate Guide to Etsy Policy: A Good Start For Making Etsy Policy Easier To Follow

Surprise! I honestly like this, at least as a start. They've covered some of the key issues that trip up new shop owners in particular on the "4 Policy Best Practices When Listing Items on Etsy" page. Collecting all of the major intellectual property post on the landing page is also smart.

At one point it was almost impossible to make sure that you had read all of Etsy's policies, since they were not well organized. There is now one home page for the different types of Etsy legal policy, and each of the links leads to a more detailed page with all of the major policy headings. For example, here is the current Buyer Policy page:

While these new layouts help a lot, as does the "Ultimate Guide", more improvements would be welcome. I still find it easier to Google a specific Etsy policy than start clicking through the legal pages trying to locate it. And unlike the average seller, I have read some of these pages more times than I can remember. So I know they exist, but I still can't find what I want easily. The internal search doesn't pick up everything, and tends to return some irrelevant or out of date results as well. Google works better, as it will sometimes find Help pages that lead me to the correct policy page.

Etsy needs one long page - almost like a site map - that lists every single current Etsy policy page all in one place. For sellers who complain it is too hard to find all of Etsy policies since they are linked from one another, we could just link them that page and tell them to read everything.

But even if Etsy never does that, let's hope they do continue to update the Ultimate Guide regularly to make is as easy as possible to get through.

So How Is Etsy Doing With Giving Us More Tools and More Transparency And Clarity?

I am so glad you asked!

Nearly 2 weeks after publishing these plans and promises, Etsy made significant changes to both the Creativity Standards policy and the Services policy. I covered the first set of edits here, and the latter ones here. Several types of listings that were previously allowed suddenly became forbidden, and Etsy moved an entire category of services from prohibited to allowed without changing a word of their descriptions.

Etsy did not notify sellers that these changes had taken place, but instead just hit publish and then set up their bots to start takedowns of the now-banned items. Needless to say, shop owners got upset, and Etsy did notice. How did the corporation respond? By getting a forum moderator to make a locked post in an area of the seller forum that can't be accessed by many sellers, which claimed that the revisions were just clarifications:

If they had only added some more detailed language, that would be a "clarification." But there is no way that removing items from allowed categories and expressly banning them is a "clarification". That's an outright change of policy, even if the intent of the broader categories should have prohibited said items in the past.

Therefore, Etsy is so far getting a big fat F for failure on better clarity and transparency. How is removing something from a list of allowed goods for sale, not announcing anything, and then issuing takedowns for said goods immediately, helping any seller with clarity on Etsy policy? As I said on LinkedIn last week,

"Dear Etsy: All of this is the exact opposite of the "transparency" you promised everyone. Please stop treating sellers like we cannot read."

That said, I will admit that most of the erroneous listing removals resulting from the edited policies seem to be getting restored more quickly than Creativity Standards takedowns were before June 10. In the past, when sellers wrote to me asking for help getting a listing reinstated, it could sometimes take 2+ months before they got back to me saying everything had been fixed. Most of the recent ones have taken less than a week. Posting about the issue in the Etsy forum actually seems to be working right now. So, fingers crossed that they will start allowing official appeals soon; this could be part of a trial run.

Two years ago, I warned that the 95% error rate on Etsy bot takedowns was unlikely to improve much, as Etsy could not be profitable if they hired more humans to provide actual seller Support as well as oversight of the takedown bots. Plus, Etsy was hoping to make the site less cluttered anyway, and bad bots were a great way to do it (from Etsy's point of view).

Since that time, Etsy has only improved automated removals to be 20% accurate, which is likely overstating the success rate since sellers cannot easily appeal when the bots get it wrong. Meanwhile, the number of Etsy sellers rose dramatically then dropped back, and is now once again 5.4 million, as it was at the end of 2022.

Will the newest version of the Creativity Standards drop the seller count even further, at which time Etsy will have enough staff to review listing removal appeals in a more timely fashion? I would not be surprised if we don't see true listing removal appeals that are heard in much less time than they are now until Etsy gets the seller count down a lot more. Either the appeals will still take up to 2 months, or Etsy needs a lot fewer shops appealing.

That of course assumes they really will allow appeals of listing removals; Etsy doesn't have a track record that makes any of these plans look likely to work out as described. So my advice is, don't hold your breath.