Latest posts
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Scam Alert: What’s Targeting Etsy Sellers This Week
This week’s pattern: fake wedding planner “featured vendor” pitches, a variant of the wedding-industry scam we covered back in February, now adapted with a more specific and convincing structure as wedding season’s real volume has picked up. The setup This week’s version of the pattern: messages from accounts claiming to be wedding planners or venue…
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Wedding Season Production Planning: The Real Work Starts Now
The Knot’s Real Weddings Study puts the average US engagement at 15 months, which means a chunk of the wedding orders landing in your inbox this week are for events that are still six, eight, even ten months out. Table of Contents Introduction We’ve watched wedding season go from the quieter, listing-prep phase we covered…
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The Week Before Thanksgiving: Final Operational Checklist
Sellers who respond to buyer messages within 24 hours are more likely to earn a 5-star review, and Etsy requires a 95% initial-response rate within 24 hours just to qualify for Star Seller status. That single metric is often the first thing to slip during a holiday order surge. Table of Contents Introduction With Thanksgiving…
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Week in Review — November 16, 2025
Eleven days out from Thanksgiving, and order volume is now clearly at holiday-season intensity for most sellers. Queue prioritization advice paying off, per seller reports Following Monday’s piece on sorting production by need-date rather than order-date, a few sellers specifically mentioned adopting a simple written tracking system this week and finding it genuinely reduced the…
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Packaging and Unboxing: The Small Details That Matter More During Gift Season
A large share of Q4 Etsy orders ship straight to a gift recipient who never sees the buyer place the order, which means your packaging is often the only impression of your shop that recipient ever gets. Table of Contents Introduction Here’s the deal: most of the year, a buyer opens their own package, judges…
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Q4 Production Planning: Deciding Now Whether You Need Help
Retailers nationally expected to hire between 400,000 and 500,000 seasonal workers for the 2024 holiday season alone, according to the National Retail Federation. Etsy shops feel the same volume spike, just at a smaller scale and without a corporate HR department to handle it. Table of Contents Introduction September is the last real planning window…
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The Tariff Exemption Is Gone — Here’s What It Costs Your Shop
We’ve tracked rising sourcing anxiety all summer. As of this week, the underlying policy shift driving it is fully in effect, and it’s worth laying out plainly what actually changed and what it means going forward. What happened The “de minimis” exemption, which allowed shipments valued at $800 or less to enter the United States…
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The Pricing Conversation to Have With Yourself Before the Back-to-School Rush Ends
A season can be your highest-revenue month and one of your lowest-margin months at the same time. The only way to know which one you just had is to actually run the numbers, not just remember how busy it felt. Table of Contents Introduction As back-to-school volume starts to taper, most shops move straight into…
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Quality Control Without Slowing Down When Personalized Orders Spike
A single wrong name caught before production costs a few minutes. The same mistake caught after a personalized item has shipped costs a full remake, a delayed replacement, and often a review you can’t fully undo. Table of Contents Introduction Mid-August is typically the peak volume week for personalized back-to-school orders on Etsy, and it’s…
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Back-to-School Photography: What Actually Converts in the Final Stretch
Mid-August is the peak week for back-to-school order volume on Etsy, and by this point in the season most shops have already fixed their obvious keyword gaps. What separates the listings still converting from the ones that have gone flat is almost entirely photography. Table of Contents Introduction With back-to-school search volume near its peak,…