It's Finally OVER for Etsy (Class Action Lawsuit??)

I'm done with Etsy after making tens of thousands of dollars of sales I never thought I'd say this but I'm completely done with Etsy I'm not selling I'm not buying and I'm not even recommending them anymore I honestly think they could be out of business in a few years and are probably going to face a class action lawsuit soon the lack of support random account suspensions and complete disregard for the people who built their platform is really going to cause some major problems very very soon but before I break down the reasons for that let me My Story just give you some backstory I was a star seller on Etsy from 2020 to 2021 I was averaging about $100 a day selling digital products specifically my ebooks without warning I logged in one day to find my store had been completely suspended I didn't even get an email saying what happened and when I tried to appeal this with Etsy I was met with crickets literally like I had zero support I tried for years to get my shot back where Etsy was treating me like an annoying X they were ignoring my messages I tried to get in contact with them through calling through emails through forms they didn't even give me a reason on why they suspended my shop in the first place from that interaction I found out like Etsy really does not care at all about its sellers but like stupid little me I went crawling back to them okay two years ago I created a new account I was selling new things and last month I decided you know what I'm going to start making more listings on Etsy and really push this and really build this but it's like your friends told you don't go back to him right I did it and look what happened I'm the fool okay I will take that out they suspended my shop once again there was no violations that they told me about or that I could point out myself the thing that made this so devastating is that I spent hundreds of dollars pouring in and investing into my shop I was up so late creating completely custom designs for my shop only to have all of that hard work completely go to waste again I went through the process to contact them for an appeal again but nothing there's no response there's zero customer support and Etsy truly once they suspend you they do not care about you from now on I'm suggesting everybody sell on their own website it is a lot more work but What I'm moving to the thing is with Etsy is like if you're a new seller a lot of times Etsy won't really push you so you have to bring in your own customers anyways so if I want to bring in my own customers I'm going to do it on a platform that like I can trust like my own website after ETS been in my account twice I knew I couldn't rely on their platform and needed to get my own I decided to switch completely to Shopify but if you guys want to switch you guys can use anything like Shopify Squarespace or hostinger and while yes the website itself is important so is the domain that you choose that's why I choose to go with a DOT store domain these domains are specifically designed for online stores and can actually help you sell more for example in a recent study it was shown that do store domains get two times more visibility on Google and 87% more people choose to click on a do store domain compared to a domain big names like Rihanna Shakira and even Mr Beast have store domains because they're better at telling customers exactly what they're getting which is an online store like if I see dogs.com and dog dogs. store like come on now 2 plus 2 is four plus if you get a store domain then you get access to some really cool discounts for example for do store users Elevate store offers $2500 in discounts on tools like MailChimp and QuickBooks compared to just 1,600 for other domains and to make this even easier for you I partnered with thought store domains to get you guys a really special deal so you can get your do store domain for just 99 Cents for the first year all you need to do is use my link in the description and use the code energy at checkout thank you so much to do store domains for sponsoring this part of the This is happening to SO MANY PEOPLE video so this whole Etsy issue some might say conspiracy isn't only happening to me it's happening to thousands of Sellers and that's why there's been so many complaints people are really losing their incomes overnight for example one seller lost 90% of her income with absolutely no warning another seller allegedly was making $100,000 a month and logged in one day and it was all just gone I've seen countless other stories like this and you might be like oh energy is this just the new shops like no there's a seller who's been on there for 15 years on the platform and no longer has the store that she worked for years to build and you might be like well energy well I'm making handmade stuff I'm not using print on demand man I'm not doing anything else well it's happening to handmade Sellers as well one seller actually made completely custom things and Teemu a big company decided to rip their store off but then her store was the one who got shut down because they're like oh you're copyrighting it's like what they stole my designs why am I getting affected I've even seen stores who make engraved physical products get shut down and they all say like there is no warning and when they try to reach out to support to rectify the issues support does does help them this is really so bad because most sellers on Etsy are just normal people trying to make a decent wage not rely on a 95 and they did that for a while and then Etsy just shut down their shop and now they're wondering like how are they going to feed their families anymore to me that's not right and this platform is really failing its Sellers and I feel like it's going to hell on hand basket to be honest but like how did this Why is this happening? (Allegedly) happen why is this happening what is going on here I suspect okay allegedly that this is happening because Essie just said that they are using a bot to shut down millions and millions of stores as we've taken down as we said in the call millions of listings and tens of thousands of sellers there's new technologies out there that make it easier and easier to spot for example does this same item exist also on AliExpress and we assume right now if that item exists on AliExpress we assume it's mass produced and we take it down now this makes sense for stores who are like having copyright infringement or something that's breaking the policies but this bot has gotten so out of control it truly has a mind of its own at this point and is taking out people who are not doing anything wrong now why is the bot even going so crazy well I suspect allegedly it's because Etsy just laid off 11% of their staff so they don't even have people to manually review these things which is why you could be reaching out for years and not get an actual response or at least one that's not just an automated message you know also allegedly their stock is completely plummeting which is why I suspect that they're not really going to be around um for very much longer because their stock has dropped like over 20% in just the last year the sellers are getting angry so many people are not wanting to be on their platform and also the customers are getting annoyed like I just recently tried to buy something on Etsy and it was super annoying and even like as a seller there's so many spam people reaching out to you it's a platform that is just like really decreasing in its usability and its user satisfaction I've been active in different Etsy communities and all of this drama around shop suspensions for no reason is really making people want Class Action Lawsuit? to file a class action lawsuit because at this point Etsy is putting a lot of people's lives and livelihoods at risk for no reason I can understand if there is a violation but a lot of people are not given specific reasons for why they're shop is being suspended so they can't even Rectify or verify any of that information and I think Etsy does not give any reasons for liability concerns because then people could actually look into it and be like all right what's the truth and what's not here but although hundreds of sellers are talking about filing a class action lawsuit this most likely won't happen because Etsy has an arbitration agreement which says that you agree not to form any type of class action lawsuit not to get together with other people to file a lawsuit against Etsy so Etsy is really making it impossible to have them held accountable for anything we'll have to see how this plays out but in the meantime you can actually opt out of that arbitration clause on Etsy and I'll put the link to etsy's website and how you can do that Alternatives so what are the Alternatives Shopify number one Shopify is the top site for e-commerce they're going to have all the tools that you need is it a little bit pricey yes it can be I think it's like $3 or $4 a month or something after the free trial but the thing is I'd rather pay $30 to keep my $20,000 a month business than to not really pay anything per month but have it shut down overnight if you guys are looking for a more economical solution I would suggest something like hostinger hostinger you can have e-commerce you can sell physical products digital products all of that but hostinger has a really really affordable price and it is a lot more affordable than Shopify but it is a little bit more limited in terms of the design options that Shopify offers if you're like energy I don't want to even set up my own website at all then I'm going to suggest you to use one of these two either stand store now stand store is like a lincol bio like I've seen a lot of Tik tokers use it and stuff but you can host coaching you can host prodct prodcts you can like add a lot of different things that people could click on from social media and just order directly I do believe they have a monthly fee as well I think it's $20 or $30 or something I have to look more in depth because I'm doing a full complete video comparing to pros and cons of each of these but I believe it's like $20 or something like that and if you don't want to pay any fee then you can use Gum Road now I've bought a lot of things from Gum Road so I can say on a customer side I really like it but it is like you're hosting your products on somebody else's website but you can just put a link to your gumroad um store I personally would say go through that initial work of building your own website just because you're going to look a lot more professional but if you don't want to do that then yes stand store gumroad something other than just having an Etsy store let me know your own stories down below and and I will see you guys in my next video