Here's what you do in all of these situations with big companies where you get mysteriously banned and can't get any recourse from customer service: find a mailing address for their legal department and send them a letter return receipt requested (or whatever the equivalent is for where you are in which you get a receipt from the postal service confirming that the letter was delivered).

In this letter, you politely but directly lay out the facts, indicate that you are not in violation of their terms of service or any other legal document, and tell them that you would like the money you are owed, as well as to have your account reinstated. Inform them (again, politely but clearly) that if you they do not at a minimum send you the money you are owed, that you will pursue appropriate legal action. You don't need to specify what legal action - just appropriate legal action.

Since it's 150 Euros, unless you've really done something wrong that would lead them to get in trouble if they pay it out, they'll almost certainly just pay it out.

There have been a few examples of this on HN (none of which I can currently find, unfortunately) - person sends appropriately written letter to legal, legal understands that this is not worth the time and the best resolution for the company is to comply, company complies.

Good luck!

Thanks, solid advice to minimize "losses" at least.

> There have been a few examples of this on HN (none of which I can currently find, unfortunately) - person sends appropriately written letter to legal, legal understands that this is not worth the time and the best resolution for the company is to comply, company complies.

This is a fairly good post on that; the topic is a bit different, but the advice is the same (from "Presenting like a professional" header on): https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-r...

Yep, this is one of the ones I've seen on HN - thank you!

As usual in these "big company did something bad" stories on HN, OP carefully avoids saying what they were actually selling.

Downvoters: this is legitimately a huge problem on HN. If you come back to most of these threads a few hours after they've made it big, someone will have done the research and figured out that the OP was in clear violation of the TOS and knew it.

Whether that's the case here is irrelevant, it's important for people coming on HN with complaints like this to be specific, and it's worth calling it out early when they're not.

> edit2: The part in question is a little addition to the normal window locks. You can slide the part over the window lock handle and it will anchor itself between handle and window frame due to its geometry. My friend asked for this, so his children would not be able to open the windows and fall out.

Posters do need to be specific but we also don't need to Boogeyman our own community. Nowhere in that post did OP ask for HN to be their personal army. They asked for advice at the end.

Yes, they did, but only after my parent comment was resurrected from being grayed out at the bottom of the page.

I wasn't trying to turn anyone into a boogeyman, but I have watched more than enough outrage parades on HN that turned out to be in support of a scoundrel. If we can establish the expectation that you're fully upfront about the details, then we as a community can avoid repeats of those events while still helping people like OP who are genuinely confused.

> most of these threads a few hours after they've made it big

More than enough or "most"?

The latter doesn't seem true from the threads I've followed and would qualify as "boogeymanning" to me. The former seems reasonable and a sensible request for more information. The difference is that the latter automatically lumps OPs request in with "most" supposedly fraudulent requests for help/words of warning.

You're right that I could have been more specific about what type of thread I was referring to, but at that time OP had multiple comments in which they were dodging the question, so I meant "these threads" to mean very specifically the combination of factors that I was observing at that time—a business banned from a platform and the business owner being sketchy about what they were trying to sell.

The thread has evolved since then to seem less sketchy, and I believe that is largely because my parent comment was resurrected and spent a while at the top. It's easy to judge my methods when you're looking at a completely different thread than the one I came to.

Hmm, this line seem like asking for action on their behalf: > Anybody out here with some connections who can help?

Obviously that would be the jackpot: Somebody working at Etsy, helping me understand WHY exactly the account was banned and not only the product (which would probably have been an option?!?).

Give me back the account, I will come up with something else to design and sell, that's okay.

But nuking the whole account and keeping the money while warning/prohibiting me to create another account is just shitty.

I've added it in the original post:

> The part in question is a little addition to the normal window locks. You can slide the part over the window lock handle and it will anchor itself between handle and window frame due to its geometry. My friend asked for this, so his children would not be able to open the windows and fall out.

I thought Etsy was an e-commerce platform targeted to arts and crafts? It makes sense to me that they would kick off a window safety system which doesn't seem to match their use case.

To be fair to OP, I don't see anything in Etsy's policies that would clearly prohibit this. It's not what they're known for, but it seem to me to fall under "handmade":

> Everything listed as handmade must be made and/or designed by you, the seller. ... Regardless, makers must be creating their items with their own hands (or tools).

My best guess is either their bots suspect that OP is outsourcing the work and didn't properly disclose it OR there's some unwritten policy that a 3D printed part that requires no additional assembly doesn't count as handmade.

I can definitely sympathize with them wanting Etsy to at least spell out what policy they supposedly violated.

https://www.etsy.com/legal/sellers/?ref=list#selling

https://www.etsy.com/legal/handmade

https://www.etsy.com/legal/prohibited

> that OP is outsourcing the work and didn't properly disclose it

Well, I could send them a photo of the 3D printer right behind me and me waving hands and displaying the OpenSCAD model code in the background... ;-)

I can't know for sure without seeing your page of course but there are other window lock covers for pets so it should be a thing that is allowed. My guess is that your email provider was too overzealous and you didn't respond to them quickly enough. or you didn't use your name or any other myriad reasons they might penalize you for it

> 3. Being Transparent About Your Business

> At Etsy, we value transparency. Transparency means that you honestly and accurately represent yourself, your items, and your business. As a handmade seller, you agree to:

> Disclose in your About section the names and roles of people who help make your items or run your business; > Use your own words and photographs (not stock photos) to describe your items; and > Respond to any inquiries from us in a timely manner. We may ask you how your items are made, what workspace, tools, and equipment you use; and how you communicate and collaborate with the people who help you run your shop.

> Remember: Our marketplace is built on trust. Providing false, inaccurate, or misleading information is prohibited by our Terms of Use. If we find that you’re not being open and honest with us, we may suspend or terminate your account.

Ah, I've done all that, I've got nothing to hide. Wrote a nice "about me" text and all. If it was an undelivered mail... Well... Still nothing to nuke an account for.

They should refund, explain the reason for the ban, could be just brief as in “violated tos #2 with a link” and give a proper guidance to users beforehand that these items are not allowed. Seems to me like a blackhole left intentionally “unfixed” for extra revenue for etsy

Etsy is always welcome to say "we don't want that king of stuff here, sorry". Etsy is not free to keep the money they're holding.

Yeah, I always thought about them that way, too.

The wife of my friend thought Etsy would be a great place, because lots of people put caravaning accesoires up there for sale. There are also various hooks, cup holders and whatnot coming from 3D printers.

Maybe a fire safety violation? I think windows can count as escape routes and probably need to be open able quickly.

This or someone uses it expecting to keep children safe and a child falls out. Etsy gets sued.

Or neither is likely to happen but it just isn't Etsy's job to verify that.

> Etsy is also FULL of people who just print articulated dragons and other "entertainment stuff", where copyright/proper CC-licensing is, I would say, seems to be handled rather lax.

could be in the DnD space. could be some kind of hentai thing which kinda runs in that kinda direction but also way more likely to run afoul of the tos.

could be a brigade of bot accounts that reported their account as a competitor. could be all sorts of things... automated scam heuristics. tough to say.

Just search for "3d print dragon" and you'll see what I mean. Everybody is selling the same model. Licensing seems tricky to me on that model for example, not sure how Etsy would control if you've really paid the original creator or just downloaded the STL file from Thingiverse.

Anyway, that's not the space I want to work/compete in, those people shall print and sell articulated dragons all day if they want.

Well, the problem is that the HN crowd is smart enough to build that part itself and ruin any chances for me in the market. ;-)

It's an accessory for the caravaning/vanlife scene. Nothing obscene, nothing legally critical.

You really need to spell it out anyway. If you get back on Etsy it won't be long before you have copycats to compete with regardless of what you say here, and avoiding being specific doesn't help anyone here help you.

Aside from what your parent said (which is 100% accurate), we can't give you any suggestions on what might've flagged the algorithm if we don't know the contents of your listings.

Done, see above/OP.

I’m not so sure that anybody is going to go out their way to compete with you on this

You're looking at this wrong. This is free advertising here if you get your etsy site back, and if you don't it doesn't really matter, eh? If you have so little faith that paying you for the item is time better spent than creating it theirselves or putting up a store to do it theirselves, then you don't really have anything worth protecting. If it is worth just paying you a few euros/dollars, then all you're doing it foregoing a bunch of free advertising while also keeping anyone from actually helping much.

My spouse uses Etsy as the primary way to sell goods. It's a crappy company with crappy policies for sellers, so I'm with you on that, but all you've done here is take much of the initial interest in your story and immediately route it to a dead end.

Ehhh. It doesn't sound like you were selling massive orders of them, so this sounds like an excuse to me. If it was genuinely that simple to re-create and easy to sell, you'd have a million counterfeiters who would have stumbled upon your publicly accessible Etsy site and copied it en masse.

In what country are you? Keeping the money and not referencing why exactly (i.e. proving fraud on your side) is obviously illegal almost everywhere. Small claims court or your local equivalent should handle this.

In the US, I have heard of small claims court dealing with this, especially given that the Big Tech defendants are often unable to provide to the court any reason for their action (since it came from an algorithmic black box that they don't really understand either).

Having said all that, I notice you don't mention what this part that you're printing is? It would give your story more cred if you mentioned that. Unless, you know, if it's something that would give your story a whole lot less cred.

I'm in Germany. Not sure about the whole legal thing, I think even talking to a lawyer would probably be more expensive than just moving on. Which is kind of "giving up", but yeah...

Find a lawyer who seems appropriate and has a "initial call for judging if even appropriate to hire" free offer, or maybe the WBS Discord I heard, which seems like a German version of reddit's legal advice subreddit. (If WBS didn't right a bell, they have a disable YouTube presence.)

This is assuming you'd prefer to make them pay as long as it's net-positive for you and not excessively much effort.

Yeah, I know WBS. Still thinking it would most probably not be worth the money and that I should really get a law protection insurance in the near future. :-D

that wouldn't have been worth it in this case either. You spent anywhere between 0 and 150 Euros on collateral, and there are countless hours spent first convincing the insurance that you have a relevant case, then talking to a lawyer with the same info again and so on and so forth

The part you're making might have some legal issues?

Other than that, I do keep noticing a strong downward spiral of all customer support services. Everything is becoming generic, automated and useless. There are multiple hoops you constantly have to jump through to get in touch with a real person and even then you might still get generic answers.

> The part you're making might have some legal issues?

Well, then they should tell me and we can figure that out. Or come to the conclusion that this part should not be sold on Etsy. That would be fine for me, too.

But this generic "we won't tell you, but we'll keep your money, now fuck off" attitude really sucks.

Seems like maybe a safety/liability issue? Someone has this part on their vehicle when it rolls over or ends up in a lake, etc, and a kid drowns or dies a fiery death because they couldn’t open a window? Seems unlikely and all, but I could see a lawyer deciding they don’t want that potential liability.

Etsy went down the enshittification path a long time ago. The real sad thing is the formerly good competition they once had they relentlessly bought up and enshittified it too, like Reverb.

You made the mistake of mentioning that they could be used for child security I bet. And that opens Etsy to liability so they booted you.

You have to pretend it is for pet monkeys only.

Last long enough and every platform is a villain:

- Amazon

- Ebay

- Shopify

- Stripe

- PayPal

...

At scale there's a relentless torrent of fraud, scammers, and automated processes trying to steal anything not locked down. Platforms under invest in customer support, rely heavily on heuristics (machine learning and ... AI!) based automation to stop the bleeding, and there's always a story like this since these systems are very imperfect. I don't know what the solution is, but I do remember Etsy being a darling (supports small businesses! Down with Amazon!) only to see it now full of cheap Chinese knockoffs (not at Amazon levels, but getting there) masquerading as bespoke items from small shops in Italy.

When I used it over 10 years ago it already had a bit of an issue with low-effort crap. "Browse latest items in this category to see random stuff" was difficult because half or more of the items were the same 3 things over and over.

The solution is kind of obvious: keep it small scale, know your sellers instead of a free-for-all, stuff like that. But Etsy is a publicly traded company netting $2.6 billion/year (and somehow still making a $659 million/year loss in profit, wut?) so that's obviously not going to happen.

> The solution is kind of obvious: keep it small scale, know your sellers instead of a free-for-all

How would you pull that off without keeping out a large number of small, legitimate sellers?

That's a good question and I don't have a clear-cut answer to that because I don't work for Etsy so it's hard for me to judge. But in general I think it's okay to accept not everyone from the entire world is on your platform and some curation isn't necessarily a bad thing. What would you rather have? 7.5 million sellers with a large number of them peddling crap or 50,000 high-quality sellers? That's already more than you could possibly browse or what's available in all of London, NYC, etc.

I am actually looking at your story because the same thing happened to me and I hope someone here will provide help. I sew my own items and after $100 in sells I ended up with only $6 after fees, then lost that when they refunded my last order that was already delivered before banning me. Same as you. No explaining what rule I broke, and my appeal did end with an email that confirmed I am banned but with no reason.

Sorry to hear that and the best of luck that your account gets reinstated!

Sounds like theft to me. I would sue in small claims on principal. But thanks for sharing, noted: I will never sell on Etsy lol

Where would you sell? Seems like with these kind of things, you just have to expect that they won't be fair with you out of sheer lack of diligence and laziness. Be prepared and have a plan when it does happen to you.

It doesn't matter if it's YouTube, Paypal, Amazon, or esty. Going alone is harder and more expensive.

The other options is to change regulations and that's something can't merely be done by a person.

Most scenes I'm aware of have some kind of real-life community.

Board Games has PAX. Anime conventions (ie: Cosplay accessories) have Anime Expo, Otakon, etc. etc. There's more conventions than I can keep up with these days. Almost every single one has an "Artist Ally" or other small shop where you can hawk unique goods to people.

It really depends on your niche. Maybe a state fair (farmers?) is where you set up shop. Etc. etc. I'd honestly try to setup at those places first these days to test out a product idea.

-----------

I don't know anything about vanlife. But I dunno, Burning Man maybe? Where do vanlife people meet up?

> Where do vanlife people meet up?

Quartzite Arizona, every January

Could try selling on eBay and Facebook Marketplace, and find places to spread the word about the listings. There are vanlife Facebook groups that are specifically for sharing things you are selling.

As commented somewhere else: Not sure if this would be worth it at all.

What type of printed parts were you selling?

Here's what I can say: It's an accessory for the caravaning/vanlife scene. Nothing obscene, nothing legally critical.

is it some kind of safety item?

See "edit2" in OP.

I was very careful not to advertise the part as "the one solution" for any security problem.

That was mostly out of fear of liability, but I also wanted to make people think about whether the part would really help them with a specific problem or if it was just a gimmick.

Disingenuous post. OP was making things that are normally regulated, at least in some places.

https://ftt.roto-frank.com/int-en/company/press/press-releas...

https://www.en-standard.eu/din-en-13126-5-building-hardware-...

Bullshit, that's not in the slightest what I was making.

The rule is "Devices that restrict the opening of windows and door height windows". I can't see the details of it though.

In your edit: "My friend asked for this, so his children would not be able to open the windows and fall out."

I guess it's "not in the slightest" because it restricts the handle and not the window. But the handle restricts the window??? Or can I assume the standard only covers something like what is pictured in the first link?

The links you posted refer to windows for buildings, not for those built into caravans.

Ah I see, I won't bother finding any other examples, because you seem to believe it's not adjacent to regulations but is in the domain of duct tape and other hacks, so sorry for suggesting you intended clickbait in this way.

Edit: plus my raising of this issue is redundant, I read the comment at the top of this thread but not this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36132457

> edit2: The part in question is a little addition to the normal window locks. You can slide the part over the window lock handle and it will anchor itself between handle and window frame due to its geometry. My friend asked for this, so his children would not be able to open the windows and fall out.

Were children mentioned in the product description? Etsy prohibits some large classes of children's items. It doesn't sound like your product falls into any of those classes, but maybe someone there thought it did.

Pay Pal did this to me as well. There’s very little consumer protection law in US to disused these companies from just freezing your account and taking your money. The worst part is that these companies usually avoid giving any proper recourse by automating most of this process so good luck finding a person that is willing to help you out. Guilty until proven innocent.

The law is probably the opposite, incentivizing companies to block stuff as opposed to preventing them from doing so.

On the flip side, if it wasn't that way we'd be bombarded with knockoff stuff all over Amazon and others.

lol, I signed up and was banned after just a couple hours. No explanation, no idea why I was banned, I don't think I'd even put a product up, just started making the shop (selling clocks/clock designs - maybe they got confused).

I appealed, and a week later the very same user dismissed the appeal and perma-banned me without recourse, blah, blah. I think I found another complaint email addr, and eventually got re-instated with an apology. But honestly, the experience put me off completely - if I'd been relying on it for my livelihood I'd have been screwed.

Do you mind helping me out with that mail address? You can find mine on the profile page.

Oh sorry just checked, and maybe I'm getting confused with something else about finding another email addr.

I simply replied to the permaban (user 'Naz' banned me, and then rejected the appeal) with 'Seriously, no explanation at all, etc, etc ... Bye and Good Riddance!', and then user 'Marlene' responded a week later and unbanned me with an apology.

So I guess try that.

Ah, I see. Their Zendesk doesn't show any addresses for me at all. Will have to look into that, though.

I replied to support@etsy.zendesk.com

Call it clickbait.

In case I can't get my account activated again, others might save the time with setting up on Etsy and just do something else right from the start.