Please Help Me Keep The Shop

Hey everyone, hope you are doing well. I'm sorry I haven't been posting much, I'm not sure what else to say other than life gets increasingly difficult for me in some ways and while I've been getting through it, I'm increasingly exhausted and depression comes and goes.

I've been forced to indefinitely close my shop until I can afford to reopen. I wish I could say I knew when that will be, but I just don't know. I've been struggling to print and pack orders fast enough due to volume, but that isn't the reason for the closure - despite the imperfections, I had fantastic reviews and very few complaints. I'm forced to stop because Etsy is withholding the entirety of my income without a specified reason.

Early this month, they set a "reserve" on my account without any warning or reason, seemingly. On first glance, it seemed frustratingly difficult to work with but not something I couldn't deal with: They would hold about 30% of the income from my sales and set them aside as a fund for fees, refunds, shipping, and that sort of thing. According to them, you might be able to get the funds from a sale faster if you ship the item. But if that doesn't happen it will be released after 40 days. I was pretty angry about this just being put on my shop without any sort of warning when my shop is in great standing with a years-long history of successful deliveries, so I tried to contact support.

I talked to around six different Etsy employees and they all more or less said the same thing: they either don't have a reason this happened to my shop in particular, or refuse to tell me. And it really only gets worse from here - the more time that goes by the more it's evident that it's not just 30% being reserved, the reserve has a minimum amount of funds that goes into it, and that amount goes up with each sale. Meaning with each sale, Etsy reserves 30% of the sale's value, and then pretty much the rest of it also goes into the reserve, because the 'minimum' isn't being met otherwise. The result is I perpetually have nothing to deposit even if I'm making sales. I tried to communicate this, that I wasn't getting paid at all to Etsy support and not one person even slightly shifted their position - this was all working as intended and more or less, I better just deal with it if I want to sell on Etsy.

I have little hope that they're going to pay me in time to pay my rent and bills, and even if by some miracle they did, I haven't been able to take orders most of the month and it's been a massive loss. I've shipped almost every due order and they still show zero sign of paying me or that I even made any profits at all for well over 300$ worth of orders. I depend on this income primarily to live and while it's enough, something like this has completely thrown me off course and I'm not sure what the future holds for my business. I have been working an unsustainable pace almost to the point of burnout to keep up the obligations of the shop and on a lot of other fronts, I am simply failing despite trying more than my best. This decision by Etsy truly could not come at a worse time for me, as I have very little resources to get through such a sudden change.

Anything helps. I'll need time to finish current obligations and re-open my shop on a different platform, but firstly I need to make sure I stay afloat.

Funds will generally be used for necessities and bills, but here's some big ones:

Rent

Utilities

Gas

Groceries

Website/Social media maintenance costs

Restocking materials for custom orders

And the funds will cover the time needed to set up a new website or something similar where I can sell my art again.

Thank you for reading, I'm sorry for the bad news. Running this shop has honestly been a dream come true and this has all been heartbreaking for me.

-Grey