“oh no I’ve run out of soap and forgot to make more. See you in 5 months, shower” - my autistic ass

Yep. Etsy stopped caring completely when they realised how much revenue drop shippers were bringing in. There was no way I could compete with silver plated copper from China with personalised engraving for $15 when the chains took 8+ hours to make and were made with pure silver. This was back when silver was $30/ounce. Now it’s $91. And the chains were 2-3 ounces by the time I was done.

I used to make fine silver chains by hand and sell them on Etsy, and did quite well with it. Then it got flooded with drop shippers despite that being against terms of service. But you could see the biggest and most successful jewellery sellers all had identical products and if you search their product titles on Ali express or Temu it was the first result. I went from 5-10 sales which was a couple grand a month to zero the instant they stopped policing it.

I can only imagine how bad it is now with ai. I tried to browse Etsy for something recently and there was literally pages of ai slop. I don’t think I saw a single real product.