[Journey] Etsy shop from 0$ to 10k$ a month selling magic spells. (Yes, you read that right) [Week 1 - 100$ earned]

Yohru said:

I think you people are massively overestimating how good of a detection system etsy has. One my friends decided to try his hand at this idea, bought himself three reviews, and they were all done on the same browser, with the same paypal account, one three different accounts. His store is still up. I really don't think Etsy is doing anything close to checking people's individual addresses.

You people are forgetting Etsy is in many ways a platform for boomers and older people. Not necessarily old-old, but for example most of my clients are already on their thirties. Thus they have the necessary security for their intended clietns, nothing more. I don't think they're as ready or as willing to deal with blackhat tactics as much as they want you to think they are

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Yohru said:

I think you people are massively overestimating how good of a detection system etsy has. One my friends decided to try his hand at this idea, bought himself three reviews, and they were all done on the same browser, with the same paypal account, one three different accounts. His store is still up. I really don't think Etsy is doing anything close to checking people's individual addresses.

You people are forgetting Etsy is in many ways a platform for boomers and older people. Not necessarily old-old, but for example most of my clients are already on their thirties. Thus they have the necessary security for their intended clietns, nothing more. I don't think they're as ready or as willing to deal with blackhat tactics as much as they want you to think they are

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georz said:

How do you think you got caught then? Exactly the same payment method?

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Yohru said:

Get caught? I didn't?

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georz said:

"Both me and my partner are teenagers so we run on basic stupid emotions. Yesterday seemed slow so we decide to fuck around and try to increase traffic despite the fact that a sale a day is a pretty decent milestone for any etsy shop, let alone one that is not even a week old. Another account, another "sale". We tried to repeat it again but get jumpscared when Etsy tells us our account has been banned. Thankfully it was just the buying account, and apparently paypal's fault, but we stop because now we are scared shitless."

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Yohru said:

Yeah, exactly - we had PAYPAL decline a payment, thus the buyer account got temporarily banned until we refunded the cost. We did not simply because we weren't sure why, once again, PAYPAL, not etsy, declined the payment in the first place. As far as Etsy goes nothing has been an issue with the self-reviews

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Yohru said:

I think you people are massively overestimating how good of a detection system etsy has. One my friends decided to try his hand at this idea, bought himself three reviews, and they were all done on the same browser, with the same paypal account, one three different accounts. His store is still up. I really don't think Etsy is doing anything close to checking people's individual addresses.

You people are forgetting Etsy is in many ways a platform for boomers and older people. Not necessarily old-old, but for example most of my clients are already on their thirties. Thus they have the necessary security for their intended clietns, nothing more. I don't think they're as ready or as willing to deal with blackhat tactics as much as they want you to think they are

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ibuddybo said:

When you say your friend bought himself 3 reviews, do you mean paid someone for those reviews, or just bought his listings 3 times and left his own reviews from the same device and PP account?

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Yohru said:

The later, lmao

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theflash96 said:

I have tried to leave 3 reviews on my own Etsy products. I did some research and apparently a new Google Pay account each time will mask your details to the merchant. All they can see is a unique google pay account number. So I did this with 3 different virtual cards linked to each Google account for extra safety and a 4G unique IP for each account. First purchase and review went through fine. Next two purchases have been flagged. "Payment Processing" and have been for over 12 hours. Etsy says this can take 5 days to complete a review. So now I am scared an actual human is looking at my stuff and will ban or punish my seller account. I'm hoping the google play masking will work, the purchaser accounts have random names and addresses so they should not be linked. But now I am left wondering what triggered the payments to be flagged into a manual review state.

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Yohru said:

ve up around a couple months ago, and

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Yohru said:

Week 3 - Unethical PR tactics and cetaceans. [2761$ Earned]

Shop is growing steadily. I realized my paranoia from last week comes from me never actually having owned a successful business, so mentally I'm trying to just detach myself from the daily numbers and focus on the overall trend. Sure enough, it's going upwards. My patience, on the on the other hand, is on a downward spiral. Let's get right into it.

Day 15

Last week we ended it on a 1074$ net gain, and a pretty consistent ~150$ a day in earnings.

Well, fuck that. We break a new record; 200$ earned on a single day. Bunch of customers, bunch of reviews, nothing really happens. We get a couple complaints of spells not working, we offer free recasts to those who seem able to leave a bad review, we ignore those who don't seem smart enough to figure out they need to download the pdf that came with the purchase to do so.

So far we have a 100% hit ratio.

Introducing S-Girl and G-Dude - the twin whales. Nickname unrelated to their body size, as far as I know. They come and buy a spell. Then the next day they buy another. Then they drop by over the course of the week and buy seven and six spells, respectively. Each one of them has already dropped 105$+ on our shop for no discernible reason.

Also we put two new listings up of stuff that seems popular.

Day 16

Well, fuck that (again). New record; 300$ dollars earned on a single day.

We spend the day lazily doing spells and playing GTA V.

One thing we start to realize is that there are two kind of customers: the ones you can pretty much copy and paste all your answers from previous interactions with other people, and the parasocial weirdos who seem to think you are not only a spellcaster, but also a beer buddy and professional therapy. I try to deal with them as best as a dude with little social skills or tolerance for people allows, and so far it has worked perfectly fine.

I want to use this little corner of the internet to thank those who work on customer service. I will never make fun of you again.

Day 17

Sales go down a little bit, but it's still on the 250$ range. Someone comes and once again says spell isn't working. Before we can reply they have already left a "bad" review. That is, a 4 star review saying that she trusts our magical abilities, but that it simply didn't work for her.

sighofrelief.jpg

Cue in Corporate speak Yohru to the rescue. Girl said that the spell could simply have not worked because their target was "stubborn". I leave a reply focusing on that, saying that she should have mentioned it (she did), that that specific case requires a specific approach - basically mumbo jumbo to say it's her fault (it isn't) and that if she had mentioned it before the review we would have done a recast, free of charge (we wouldn't). After that we apologize and say that we have offered a full refund (we haven't) because that is our personal policy (it isn't). I think that manages to turns things around and make us seem even better in case someone manages to find that review, basically implying they will get their money back if spells don't work.

Also I talk to the whales and give them some sob story about how this person didn't give the necessary information and then blamed it onto us or something. They buy it, we get like 6-7 reviews, and the dissident voice is buried in the depths of hell, never to be seen again.

Day 18-20

Nothing much happens. We do spells, get some reviews to try to further drown the only negative voice around, do our best to ignore the complaints of grown adults just figuring out magic isn't a thing or gaslighting them into believing things are changing.

Yeah, neither of us is getting into heaven, that's for sure.

One of our previous customers says that "she feels the energy and that it's working" and sends a friend over to buy a couple of spells for her kid. Earnings fluctuate between 155-245$ dollars earned for these couple days. Couple complains, couple whales; it all balances itself out, really.

Day 21

354 bucks earned as of writing this. All around pretty decent paycheck for a basically two hours a week worth of work. I also implement a new marketing strategy - raise the prices then offer a big discount. We'll see if it works.

Total earnings for the week: 1685$

Total earnings:2761$

Conclusion

Nothing much to say, actually. Business is growing steadily and each 'interesting' situation is variation of "wow, I can't believe people can't find true love buy burning a bunch of twigs" or "this random 50 year old woman just dumped her entire backstory on our dms like a badly written anime character". There is also only so many snarky comments an introvert like me can make without worrying about people thinking he is obnoxious rather than funny, so let's leave it at that for this week's journey update.

I'm planning of reinvesting this into other money earning ventures. Any ideas? So far I'm thinking on youtube automation and personal branding. Will keep you all updated.

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Yohru said:

I think you people are massively overestimating how good of a detection system etsy has. One my friends decided to try his hand at this idea, bought himself three reviews, and they were all done on the same browser, with the same paypal account, one three different accounts. His store is still up. I really don't think Etsy is doing anything close to checking people's individual addresses.

You people are forgetting Etsy is in many ways a platform for boomers and older people. Not necessarily old-old, but for example most of my clients are already on their thirties. Thus they have the necessary security for their intended clietns, nothing more. I don't think they're as ready or as willing to deal with blackhat tactics as much as they want you to think they are

Click to expand...