Latest posts
-
Week in Review — December 7, 2025
A news-heavy week, with Etsy’s Color of the Year announcement generating real seller interest alongside the usual shipping-crunch urgency. Color of the Year: early seller reaction Following Thursday’s coverage of Patina Blue and Washed Linen, several sellers in home decor and jewelry categories mentioned already planning small catalog additions to reflect the palette, mostly as…
-
Small Business Saturday Broke Records — What Actually Sold
Data compiled over the weekend tells a more mixed story than some early seller chatter suggested. American Express’s annual Small Business Saturday survey put nationwide spending at an estimated $18 billion this year, down roughly 18% from $22 billion in 2024, even as some individual sellers reported a strong Thanksgiving Day’s calm before Small Business…
-
Week in Review — November 30, 2025
Closing out the biggest weekend of the year, and November as a whole, with a genuinely eventful stretch behind us. The Cyber Five, overall: a strong weekend for most sellers Despite the search visibility concerns we tracked through the week, most sellers who reported in described Black Friday through Cyber Monday as a strong, sometimes…
-
Small Business Saturday Is Today: Making the Most of a Different Kind of Shopping Day
Small Business Saturday was created by American Express in 2010, specifically to draw shoppers toward independent businesses in the week after Thanksgiving. That founding purpose still shapes who shows up today, and it’s a different buyer than the one who cleared your cart yesterday. Table of Contents Introduction If you’re still running the exact same…
-
Thanksgiving Day and the Calm Before Small Business Saturday
The National Retail Federation forecast that 2025 holiday retail sales would top $1 trillion for the first time, growing 3.7% to 4.2% over 2024. That’s the volume sitting on the other side of today’s quiet, which is exactly why today is worth spending on purpose instead of just getting through. Table of Contents Introduction Thanksgiving…
-
Black Friday and Cyber Monday Keyword Prep: Starting Now, Not in November
In 2024, Black Friday drew an estimated 87.3 million online shoppers and Cyber Monday drew 64.4 million, part of a five-day Thanksgiving weekend stretch that reached roughly 197 million shoppers total, according to the National Retail Federation. That volume is exactly why waiting until November to configure a sale or tag a listing for “black…
-
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…
-
‘My Etsy Shop Is Dead’: Sellers on Surviving the Tariff Shock
National coverage from NPR caught up this week with a story we’ve been tracking on this site since early summer: the real, and in some cases severe, financial impact the end of the de minimis exemption is having on Etsy sellers who depend on imported materials. The scale of the impact, in sellers’ own words…
-
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…
-
How to Handle Buyer Messages When the Platform Itself Is the Controversy
Etsy’s own customer service standard asks sellers to respond to buyer messages within 48 hours. During a platform controversy, that clock doesn’t pause, even when half the messages arriving have nothing to do with your actual product. Table of Contents Introduction We flagged a growing boycott conversation in Sunday’s roundup, and by the middle of…