Latest posts
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Scam Alert: What’s Targeting Etsy Sellers This Week
This week’s pattern: fake wholesale and reseller inquiries, timed to Q4 planning season, targeting sellers looking to grow ahead of the holidays. The setup With sellers actively thinking about Q4 growth and inventory planning, several reported unsolicited messages this week claiming to represent a retail store or wholesale buyer interested in placing a large recurring…
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Cash Flow Planning for Q4: Buying Inventory Ahead of the Rush
Last year’s holiday season set a new sales record: $994.1 billion in core retail sales between November 1 and December 31, up 4% over 2023. Every dollar of that demand has to be funded with inventory cash weeks or months before it turns into a sale. Table of Contents Introduction Q4 doesn’t just demand more…
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Thanksgiving and Early Holiday Keyword Guide: Getting Ahead of the November Rush
49% of consumers say they began Halloween shopping in September or earlier this year, up from 47% a year earlier, according to a National Retail Federation consumer survey released this month. That same early-shopping instinct extends into Thanksgiving and holiday-gift searches, and if your listings in those categories aren’t live and indexed yet, that traffic…
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This Week on Etsy: Shop Manager Dashboard Tweaks
A round of small interface adjustments to the Shop Manager dashboard this cycle, mostly organizational rather than functional, but worth a quick orientation pass so you’re not hunting for things that moved. What changed Etsy reorganized several dashboard sections this cycle, adding a new Top Tasks section and policy-violation history to Shop Manager, apparently to…
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Week in Review — September 21, 2025
Halloween is now clearly the dominant seasonal story, alongside continued Q4 planning conversation. Halloween momentum building fast Following Wednesday’s keyword guide, several sellers reported Halloween listings published earlier this month are already converting well, consistent with how sharp this category’s demand curve tends to be. If you haven’t published Halloween-adjacent inventory yet, the window is…
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Building Your Q4 Promotion Calendar Before October Arrives
Q4 packs six overlapping promotional moments, Halloween, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday, plus the shipping season running through Christmas and Hanukkah, into roughly nine weeks. Sellers who map that sequence in September, rather than deciding week to week, are the ones who aren’t scrambling on production and shipping cutoffs…
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Pricing Strategy Heading Into Q4, Given This Year’s Cost Pressures
As of August 29, 2025, the U.S. suspended duty-free de minimis treatment for low-value shipments from every country, not just China. That single change is why this year’s “should I raise prices before the holidays” question has a sharper edge than it usually does. Table of Contents Introduction Every seller runs into a version of…
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Week in Review — September 7, 2025
First full week of September, and the shift toward fall and Q4 planning is now the dominant theme in seller conversations. Fall transition in full swing Following our pieces this week on homepage refreshes and fall keyword patterns, several sellers reported already seeing early traction on newly published fall and Halloween-adjacent listings, consistent with the…
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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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Week in Review — August 31, 2025
Closing out August with the tariff story now fully confirmed rather than developing, plus a clean wrap on back-to-school. The tariff exemption ending: reactions this week Following our deeper look Saturday at the end of the de minimis exemption, seller reaction this week has been resigned more than shocked, given how much runway sellers have…