Etsy's "Asking Members to Purchase Off Etsy" Violation: Your Business Card Photo Counts

A seller I follow got two emails from Etsy last week, a day apart, each for a different listing: "asking members to purchase off Etsy." She read both listings top to bottom and found nothing that asked anyone to buy anywhere. Then she looked at the photos. The last image in every listing was her digital business card — her socials and her .com, which redirects straight back to her Etsy shop. She pulled the card and the .com from every listing that afternoon. The next morning a third email arrived: messages muted for 48 hours for "continued non-compliance." The first two notices said she couldn't appeal. The third didn't mention appealing at all.

That is an Etsy off-platform violation in 2026, and if you have ever put a website, a handle, or a QR code anywhere in a listing, the rest of this is for you.

What Counts as an Etsy Off-Platform Violation?

The rule isn't buried. Etsy's Seller Policy lists, among the things you agree not to do as a shop owner, not facilitating off-platform transactions — and its content rules reach further than your shop practices, into listings, messages, text, photos, and videos alike:

Etsy's Seller Policy (last updated September 10, 2026) bars uploading content that "Encourages or facilitates an off-platform transaction."

Photos are named in that list, not just text. A business card in slot ten of a listing's photos is content the same way a sentence in the description is.

Etsy also keeps a separate Off-Platform Transactions policy that spells out what counts, with three plain examples:

• Making offers to buy or sell outside Etsy
• Encouraging buyers to purchase an item in your Etsy shop through another venue
• Using a QR code to direct users off of the Etsy platform

Read the middle example twice. It doesn't say a different shop. It says another venue for an item in your Etsy shop. Your own site, pointing at your own Etsy listings, is another venue.

What Happens After an Off-Platform Violation Notice — and Can You Appeal?

Etsy's Seller Policy is specific about what it can do once it decides you've crossed a line, and quiet about what you can do next.

Etsy's Seller Policy ("Your Seller Account and Etsy's Terms") says: "If Etsy has reason to believe you, Your Content, or your use of the Services violate our Terms, including this Seller Policy, we may deactivate Your Content to some or all users, or suspend or terminate your account (and any accounts Etsy determines are related to your account) and your access to the Services." On notice, the same section says: "Generally, Etsy will notify you that Your Content or account has been suspended or terminated, unless you've repeatedly violated our Terms or we have legal or regulatory reasons preventing us from notifying you."

That's what Etsy commits to in writing: it can deactivate the content or suspend the account when it believes you've violated the Seller Policy, and it will generally tell you when it does. It does not commit to an appeal path for this kind of notice.

The seller in the opening got exactly that, in three stages. Her first email, over one listing, said she couldn't appeal. Her second, over a different listing a day later, said the same thing. Her third — sent after she'd already pulled the business card and the .com from every listing — didn't mention appealing at all; it muted her messaging for 48 hours over "continued non-compliance." Nothing in the notices she received offered a way to contest them, and nothing in the policy text above promises one.

Is the Off-Platform Rule New, or Just Newly Enforced?

The Seller Policy page now says "Last updated on Sep 10, 2026," and the version it replaced is still online, dated June 9. I put the two side by side. The listing-content rule didn't move a word. The line about links, handles, and QR codes was already there in June. What Etsy rewrote is the Messages clause:

The Messages section of Etsy's Seller Policy now prohibits "facilitating or directing off-platform transactions, including exchanging personal contact, financial or other information (phone number, address, email, social media handles, external URLs, instructions for money transfer, QR codes, etc.) for this purpose; requesting buyers make payments off Etsy after checkout, including via peer-to-peer payment services or direct bank transfer; or offering discounts or incentives to purchase through another website or channel."

The June version only caught exchanging contact info "for the purposes of making an off-platform transaction." The September rewrite adds two examples that weren't spelled out before — paying off Etsy after checkout, and discounting to pull buyers to another site.

So the rule that caught the seller above is not new. What's new is that she got caught. Sellers on the forums suspect Etsy has started running listing images through the same automated checks it has long run on text; Etsy hasn't said that, but its policy does say it uses "a combination of automated systems, manual monitoring and flags" to find violations. Whatever is scanning, it is now looking at photos, and the timing — a policy refresh on the 10th, a run of violation emails the week after — tells you which direction enforcement is going. If you read our breakdown of the August 2026 policy change, you've seen this pattern before: the rule was old, the enforcement was the news.

Does Pointing Buyers Back to Your Own Etsy Shop Still Count as Off-Platform?

This is the argument every seller makes, and it's the one Etsy doesn't accept. Etsy has a help article on redirecting your domain to your Etsy shop, so it obviously allows the domain to exist. It does not follow that the domain is allowed inside a listing. From the platform's side, a URL in a listing photo is indistinguishable from a scammer's URL in a listing photo; the automated system isn't going to visit yourshop.com to check where it lands, and the policy language doesn't ask it to. The reviewer sees a link that leaves Etsy. That's the whole test.

The places where your links are allowed are the shop-level ones: the About section, the shop announcement, and the social media fields in your shop settings. Those are Etsy's own designated spots for exactly this. Links to Etsy itself — etsy.me short links, links to your other Etsy listings or sections — are fine; the seller above had those in every listing and they weren't the problem.

What is not fine, listing by listing:

• A .com in the description
• "Find me on Instagram @yourname"
• An email address
• A phone number
• A "link in bio"
• A watermark on a product photo with your web address
• A QR code anywhere in the images
• The digital business card that started all this

Is Charging Customs Fees After Checkout Also an Off-Platform Violation?

There's a second kind of off-platform violation hiding in plain sight, and it has nothing to do with links. The Off-Platform Transactions policy says a sale that starts on Etsy "may not be completed off of Etsy," and it names what that includes: "requesting additional payment after checkout for shipping, returns, import duties, taxes, customs, or any other fees not included in the original Etsy transaction." It goes further — sellers "must not take any action that results in a third party, including a carrier, collecting such fees from the buyer after purchase."

That is the "buyer is responsible for any customs or import duties" line. It's been in boilerplate descriptions for a decade. Under the current policy it's a request for payment off Etsy, and the September 10 update added a matching obligation for anyone shipping to the United States: orders must go Delivered Duty Paid, and you can't do anything that leaves the buyer paying a fee after purchase. If your description says the buyer pays customs on delivery, that sentence has to go, and the cost has to move into your price or your shipping profile.

The same policy page has one more line worth checking your descriptions against: "The price stated in each listing description must be an accurate representation of the sale." "Message me for a price" and "final price confirmed after order" run against that. Etsy's answer is the Create Custom Order feature, not a description that asks the buyer to negotiate.

How Do You Rewrite a Listing to Remove the Violation?

Most of these sentences have a version that keeps the meaning and drops the violation. A few I've used or seen work:

"Visit www.myshop.com for more designs" becomes "See the rest of the collection in the Wall Art section of this shop" with an Etsy section link. The buyer still gets pointed somewhere; it's just somewhere on Etsy.

"Follow me on Instagram @myshop for restock alerts" leaves the listing entirely. Put the handle in your shop's social links and mention restocks in your shop announcement, which every visitor sees at the top of your storefront anyway. If you want the pull inside the listing, "Favorite this shop to be notified when it restocks" is the on-platform version of the same ask.

"Buyer is responsible for all customs and import duties" becomes nothing — you delete it — and the cost goes into the item price or a shipping profile with the duties built in. If you ship to the US, the shipping profile has to be a Delivered Duty Paid one under the current rule, so this isn't a wording fix; it's a pricing fix that happens to remove a sentence.

"Message me for a quote on larger sizes" becomes a size variation with its own price. If the sizes genuinely can't be priced up front, Etsy's Create Custom Order flow exists so the price is set on Etsy before the buyer pays, which is the whole point of the rule.

Photos are the one place there's no rewording. A business card image comes out of the listing. A watermark with a URL gets re-exported without it, or replaced by one that carries only your shop name — a name is fine, an address is not. A QR code in a lifestyle shot gets cropped or retaken. None of that is quick if you have two hundred listings, which is why the next part matters.

How Do You Check a Whole Shop for Off-Platform Violations?

The seller in the opening fixed the listing Etsy flagged, and the second notice came for a different one. That's how this goes: the violation is usually a template you pasted into everything, so the fix is shop-wide or it isn't a fix. If you already run a full shop trademark audit for trademark terms, this is the same motion with a different word list.

Export your active listings as a CSV from Shop Manager and search every column — title, description, tags — for the terms that give this away:

• Links and contact details: http, www, .com, @, instagram, facebook, tiktok, website, linktree, email, whatsapp
• Off-Etsy payment and pricing language: customs, duties, import, VAT, DDU, message me for

Each hit is either a link, a contact detail, an off-Etsy payment, or an unstated price. Rewrite or delete the sentence, and if the same sentence appears in forty listings, expect to touch forty listings.

Then do the photos, because the CSV won't. Open each listing's image strip and look for text: business cards, watermarks with a URL, packaging shots that show your website, a QR sticker in the corner of a lifestyle photo. That's the check the seller above would have needed, and it's the one that's easy to skip because the photos have been up "forever."

If you'd rather not eyeball 200 listings, ListingSafe's connected-shop scan now flags external links, social handles, contact details, post-checkout fee language, and "message for price" wording across every listing at once, with the exact matching text so you can find it. Run it from the free scanner on a single listing first if you want to see what it catches. The photo check is still yours to do by hand for now.

How Many Off-Platform Notices Before Etsy Suspends the Shop?

Nobody outside Etsy knows the exact count that turns a warning into a suspension, and Etsy's 3-strike rule has never been published as a hard number. The seller above went from two listing notices to a messaging mute in three days on the words "continued non-compliance." Don't test where the line is. Clean the shop in one pass, and put the links where Etsy says they belong.

This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Policy text quoted from Etsy's Seller Policy (last updated September 10, 2026) and Off-Platform Transactions policy (last updated June 9, 2026) — confirm the current wording on Etsy's site before making business decisions.