It doesn’t happen very often, but every now and then, you’ll buy something on Etsy and then realize that the shop is closed after you’ve purchased from them.
How should you handle this situation? There are a few ways, and if you think that you have been scammed on Etsy there are ways to handle that situation too.
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Table of Contents
- What does it mean if it says the shop isn’t currently selling on Etsy?
- What does it mean when an Etsy shop is closed?
- What should I do if I bought something, then the Etsy shop closed?
What does it mean if it says the shop isn’t currently selling on Etsy?
If you are on Etsy and click onto a listing or a shop and you see the message that says that the shop isn’t currently selling on Etsy, it could mean that Etsy has closed the shop or that the shop owner has closed the shop themselves.
Another message that you might see is that the item or shop isn’t available on Etsy. That’s another situation where the item might be sold out, but it might also mean that the shop is closed.
The messages are a little different because those are two different situations, and because Etsy can close shops for multiple reasons. Plus, the seller himself might close a shop temporarily or permanently.
Either way, if you see the message that the item and shop are unavailable, it means that the shop is not open for sales, and there might not be a way to contact the shop owner.
You can still go through Etsy to file a complaint if the other things that you try don’t get a response from the shop owner, but even though you probably won’t lose any money, it’s still aggravating.
What does it mean when an Etsy shop is closed?
As I mentioned above, when an Etsy shop is closed it could be for a variety of reasons. Not all of them are permanent, so read on to see some of the things that could be going on.
Why would Etsy close a seller’s shop?
The main reason that Etsy closes a seller shop is because the seller has received too many complaints or has violated the rules too many times, or is selling things that are not allowed to be sold on Etsy.
Basically, if the seller has been violating Etsy’s terms of service, they run the risk of their shop being closed permanently by Etsy, and there’s no way that they can open it back up unless Etsy allows them to.
There are other times when Etsy would put a shop on forced vacation mode. This isn’t the same as closing the shop, it’s just putting it on vacation temporarily, usually because Etsy sees an unusually large number of orders coming in at once.
What Etsy will do then is temporarily close the shop and put up a vacation announcement, and then when Etsy sees that the orders that they’ve received have been shipped out, it will reopen the shop again on their end.
This can be really frustrating for sellers, because Etsy doesn’t really say what the threshold for “a lot” of orders is.
When Etsy puts a shop on forced vacation mode they don’t usually give us any reason other than something vague, and they don’t really give us any information about when it’s going to be opened back up.
The shop owner still has access to all of the orders and is able to ship orders out, so you don’t really need to be worried about receiving your products if that’s the case.
You’ll also still be able to message the seller, so you should be able to send them a message to ask when your order will ship out and what’s going on with their vacation mode status.
Could Etsy close a shop by accident?
Etsy does close shops by accident sometimes, because they use a lot of automated bots, not humans, to make the decisions about when to close a shop.
Recently, Etsy has been removing listings and closing shops if they think that the shops have violated the copyrights of other products that they’re finding on other sites online.
They’re doing this by having bots look at the photos in people’s shops, and if they can find those photos on other websites they’ll remove the listings and close the shop if there are too many of those listings on there.
The problem is that a lot of Etsy sellers have their photos stolen by other websites in foreign countrie, and by scammer websites who aren’t really selling the same thing.
This makes it look like the discount websites have the same products that the Etsy sellers do, even if that’s not possible because the Etsy sellers are making everything by hand.
I’ve had my photos stolen multiple times, and these cheap knockoff websites will not take them down. If Etsy sees my photos on their website the bots that they use can’t figure out which person has the original photo, so they might take my listings down.
Sometimes that means that Etsy sellers are penalized for not doing anything wrong, and we then have to go to Etsy to try to get them to understand that those actually are our photos, and that we weren’t the ones who stole them.
If the seller is able to contact Etsy and get them to figure this out, they’ll reopen the shop and just say that it was closed in error.
Can people temporarily close their Etsy shops?
Etsy sellers are able to temporarily close their Etsy shops by putting them on vacation.
However, if a shop is deleted from the Etsy system, it will just be gone and you can’t open it up again.
If you’re a customer who has purchased from a shop and you go to that shop and see that it doesn’t exist, it probably means that either Etsy or the seller has removed their shop from Etsy completely.
If the seller has temporarily closed their shop they would have to use vacation mode, and you would see the announcement that the shop was taking a short break.
Everything would still be available to look at,, but you wouldn’t be able to buy anything from that shop.
This isn’t the same as closing your shop, it’s basically just putting it on pause for a while. The thing is, there’s no limit to when vacation mode has to end, so sellers can temporarily close their shops and not sell on it anymore, but still have a presence on Etsy.
So basically, if you go to Etsy and you can’t find the shop at all, and Etsy says there’s no shop by that name, it could be that either Etsy or the seller has deleted their account and the shop doesn’t exist anymore.
Can a seller close their Etsy shop without sending orders?
Etsy sellers can’t delete their accounts completely if they have orders that are in their queue. They have to finish those and send the orders or cancel them before they can delete their accounts.
They can put the shop on vacation mode if they want to without filling all the orders, so that does leave open the possibility that a seller will just close their shop and not fill any orders and just walk away from the whole thing.
If that happens to you and you think that the seller is trying to rip you off, you should try to contact them first to see what their response is and how they explain what’s going on. If that doesn’t get your order in the mail you should contact Etsy.
Etsy will refund the cost of any orders that a fraudulent seller has tried to ignore by putting their shop on vacation mode and walking away.
What should I do if I bought something, then the Etsy shop closed?
Like I mentioned above, there are a few things that you can do if you think that you’ve been ripped off on Etsy because you bought something and then the Etsy shop closed after you purchased.
The steps that you should take are going to vary depending on what the situation is, though, and sometimes you don’t even need to worry because your packages have already gone out in the mail.
What do I do if the shop closed but my package was already shipped?
If the Etsy shop closed but you can see that there’s a tracking number and the packages are on their way to you, there shouldn’t be a problem at all as long as you do get those packages eventually.
If your order arrives and everything is as you ordered it, you don’t need to worry about it and everything is fine.
If you see that the order has been shipped with a tracking number but then you never get it, you can contact Etsy and be refunded through the Purchase Protection program.
Either way, if the package is showing that it’s been shipped with tracking, you should be fine and if you have a problem with the actual order itself Etsy can help you with that if that situation does come up.
How do I get a refund if the Etsy shop I bought from closed?
If it does turn out that you bought something from a shop that closed without sending anything out, you can go to your purchases and reviews page on Etsy and your personal profile and file a complaint.
In your purchases and review section there should be a list of everything that you’ve ordered on Etsy regardless of whether the shop is still open or has been closed.
With that list you can go find the item that you’re looking at, and click to contact the seller to see if they actually answer you or not.
If they don’t answer you within 48 Hours, you can file a complaint with Etsy using that same form, and Etsy will handle refunding the transaction or dealing with the situation as it exists at that point.
For the most part, when Etsy closes a shop permanently it will cancel any orders that the shop had before Etsy closed it.
If that doesn’t happen, though, going through that form in your purchases and reviews will get your money back. And even if it doesn’t, you can file a complaint through the payment method that you used.
In other words, if Etsy won’t refund your money for some weird reason, you can always file a chargeback with your credit card company or with PayPal, depending on how you paid.
It’s definitely aggravating that you would have to go that far, but for the most part Etsy will refund for situations where the shop was closed, especially if they were the ones that closed it.
To sum this up, you shouldn’t worry about getting ripped off on Etsy if you purchase something and then the shop closes.
There are systems in place that are there to protect buyers in cases like this. It would be very unusual these days to actually lose money by purchasing something on Etsy, even if the shop was closed after you bought something.