I am the owner of a suit shop on Etsy that was selling handmade custom men’s and women’s suits. We are 2nd generation of tailors who have been making suits since 20 years.

We went online in October 2023 and scaled to three office team members and a 4th guy was supposed to join us on Saturday. On Etsy we had around 450 sales with revenue of $54.8K

So here’s the thing:-

Till late 2a.m, I was packaging orders. I got a call from my sister on Saturday morning (at 6 a.m.) and she told me about the countless emails she was receiving. They were emails from case open requests on Etsy. Etsy did suspended our shop and also notified all of our buyers who panicked and started opening cases with them. As soon as a buyer opens a case with them, they are immediately issuing them a full refund. We have around 55 active orders. Our probably only one mistake is around 20-25 were overdue orders. Our standard mode of operation is a buyer makes an order and we share them our detailed custom sizing guide where we include and ask for around 9 body part measurements or we also offer free video consultation. Most of the overdue orders were from people who ordered “Custom” but did not proceeded to provide the info or clearly in their Etsy chat stated that they will reach back to us with measurements in XYZ number of days. We were also offering free video consultation for sizes since our item is custom and customers were aware about the delay/reasons behind delay. We have not received any policy violation email or warning before this suspension email. We had our own set of good and bad feedbacks (overall rating was 4.1) but overall there were a lot of happy buyers with them wearing the suits we sold testimonials. So it was not like we were not sending the items and just keeping the money A customer of Japan bought from us in July. He had to pay a custom of $70 and he started asking us to pay for it. We ended up in an argument with him. He wrote a false review. He in his previous chat messages mentioned to us that the fitting is good but later in review wrote the suit is ill fitting. We told him to change that feedback and told we will split the customs (probably a mistake!). He and us ended in a series of argument and we opened a case with Etsy to remove the review because he updated it with a series of more big lies. Etsy told us that we have violated their review specific policy and we should avoid it in future and we told them we will do so. This happened 2 weeks ago but our shop was not suspended at that time.

Now Etsy has suspended our shop. There were a lot of active orders most of which are being made or are already ready. Whoever opens a case, Etsy just refunds them their money

We were making all items custom, never dropshipped a single item, all items were handmade (Which we believe Etsy is / or was all about). There are some active stores on Etsy which have stolen our product images and surprisingly they are still active. And they have removed our account because they found a risk factor which they cannot disclose.

We have thousands of dollars of fabric in stock with us. There are four to five team members directly dependent on this and then we have tailored who also get impacted by this.

A lot of our customers are expecting suits for their wedding from us but if we are not getting paid, we are not sure how we should fulfill those orders because some of the orders are worth 1000-1200$ too). We had remade an appeal too but they seems to be sending automated template emails. This is very disheartening and honestly I am getting panic and anxiety attacks since last 3-4 days.

We are even ready to give our business email access to Etsy for them to verify that all the attempts made to customers were just for asking sizes . If a customer orders custom without any other necessary information, we could n’t do anything apart from just making contact attempts to them. Never in any of our chats, we mentioned our phone numbers or asked customers to order directly from us. We did n’t even had a website up till end of July 2024.

To anyone reading this, please don’t put all your eggs in one basked. And fuck Etsy!!