Recently I have been so busy, about a year ago, I bought an old apartment that needed to be renovated completely. Almost Everyday in Dec, I was working on my flat, buying furniture, assembling furniture, fixing things, and trying to move a little bit of things from the rented flat I was staying. I also spent tremendous time cleaning the flat. This apartment also exhausted all my saving and I feel like I am back to zero again after 3 years. But finally at age 34, I am an apartment owner.
At the same time, another thing happened to me which gives me enormous stress. About 3 weeks ago, I woke up one day and found out that I can't log into my etsy store directly, soon I discovered my qipaomood etsy store got suspended. First, I was at a loss, because I don't know why it happened all of a sudden. I double check my email and found nothing. For more than 3 years, this business has been my only source of income, and it has helped me thru the darkest period in my life, bought me hope and helped me save money and helped my family. It is first time I had the taste of having my own business and not working for anyone. For about 2 weeks, I could barely sleep, and my stress has been building day by day while dealing with other things for my flat. I appealed to etsy support but only to get a very generic reply that an expert has reviewed my account and my shop was not qualified for restatement. This really crashed my last hope of keep doing business on etsy. For 3 years, I have sold to more than 4000 customers and with more than 1000 review averaging 4.9/5. I just could not accept it was just gone over night. I have replied the message from etsy but then I never got anything back from them again.
In these busy 2 weeks, I also started to work on my site and started to run ads on facebook, trying to bring traffic to my store. I did not know how to do any of these in the past but I was determined to learn, about a week ago, my ad was up and it started to bring some traffic to my store.
Now I am sitting at my own flat. Today I assemble a shelf for the washer, it was quite hard work for a girl alone, I was completely exhausted after this, my hands were shaking after that and I had to take a small nap. When I woke up, I realized that working on my site is exactly like owning my own apartment, I have to learn many new things and manage a lot of hard work on my own, especially communicating with my baby Turkish, but the responsiblity falls on me and I did not have choice so I was able to push myself out of my comfort zone in order to get things done. Since my shop got suspended, I have also pushed myself to leaned many new things about how to improve my site and run ads. While I had etsy, I had never really worked hard towards on my site. So The bright side is that no one will be able to close to shop anymore, and just like no one will be able to kick me out from my flat because it is mine.
I have to admit, it has been a very easy ride with etsy, I entered the business during the pandemic when there are not many competition, when it was so easy to open a shop. For more than 3 years, I have been able to run this remote with the help of my mother, everything seems to happen in the perfect timing and it helped me and my family thru difficult times. Working with my mother has been the easiest thing and there is no better partner then my mother. I also realized how lucky I have been all the time.
Deep down, I know that this thing with etsy will come to an end someday I just did not expect it to come so soon, when I am completely not prepared. But I think it is time to move forward and after this 3 weeks struggle with arranging my flat and with etsy, I finally regained my energy and some positivity. Maybe someday when I look back everything, it will give me different perspective.