So long, Etsy.

Sometimes, things happen that change what you do moving forward, even if they're innocuous. Etsy has asked sellers to verify their bank accounts using Plaid. I understand, you want a safe environment, and if I wasn't already doing a lot with Square, I would. It's easy to set up. I just don't want to.

In the year or so that I've had this storefront, I have made I think less than 25 sales. Now, I could go on a marketing campaign, and keep it all up and running, but I don't want to. I have a book release coming up, and that is taking up all of my time. The book is more important to me, right now.

I could keep Etsy open, but I just don't want to give another company my banking details just to keep doing 10 orders a year. It doesn't make sense to me, and is an open security risk with little benefit. I don't want to keep paying for ads that only get people to favorite items. I'm not mad, I get it.

I'm not competitively priced with other tarot readers on Etsy. People keep my listings favorited in hopes that I run a sale, and even if I do, I get maybe one or two orders. This happens. The market is saturated and I haven't converted these interactions into sales. Everything about that sentence makes me cringe.

I don't like commerce and capitalism. I really don't. I don't like sales, marketing, and analytics. I get those who do. Maybe some day I can afford to pay someone to do that, and pay them incredibly well, because fuck exploitation. That's just not me, and that's not today, and that's ok. We all do different things. We're all at different places as businesses and what we can afford to do.

The point being, I hate looking at analytics and trying to come up with customer stories and what not, so I won't.

My content will be here, on this site. I will have some content on possibly Patreon in the future, who knows. Why Patreon? It has a large user base. I will also set up a membership area here maybe, so people don't have to use Patreon if they don't want to. But I will not be using Etsy anymore. It isn't their fault--I get needing the security measure. It's just the death of a thousand cuts.

And hey, you can still get a reading here, and I don't have to worry about giving yet another institution my banking information. I don't want to. I also don’t want to worry about increasing sales, and paying Etsy for it. I want to make beautiful things and help people, and if that means I have to go back to a day job in order to pay my bills, so be it. I don't want 80% of my life being about interactions, conversions, sales, and having to do the same financial paperwork in 80 different places.

I am still here, and I still read the tarot. I am still working on my book. I am still gathering ideas for future works. I just no longer want to worry about making my Etsy shop do well.

Most importantly, I still love y'all. 💕