04/06/2026
If You Can't Make It, Don't Fake It!
I've been on Etsy since 2014. I still love some the platform. But right now it has a serious problem, and makers are the ones causing it.
AI-generated product images. Listings full of impossibly perfect artwork that bears no relation to what the buyer will actually receive, because no human hand could reproduce it. It's dishonest. Full stop.
If you are using AI images to sell your work, you are misrepresenting what you make. When that customer opens their parcel and finds something that looks nothing like what they ordered, they don't blame you specifically. They blame Etsy. They leave, they don't come back, and every legitimate maker on the platform loses a customer they never even knew they had.
I've spent over a decade building trust through photographs of real work. That is what product photography is for. Not to make your listing look aspirational, but to show people what they are buying.
If your work isn't at the standard you want to advertise, that is not a photography problem it's a skills problem. Go away, practise, improve, and come back when what you make looks like what you're selling. That's what the rest of us did.
Yes, I'm aware this isn't the only issue. Mass-produced Temu-style products being passed off as handmade is a separate problem, and a significant one. Etsy has been battling that for years and not very well. But that's Etsy's fight to have. This one, the AI images, the misrepresentation of your own skill level, that is a choice individual makers are making. And it's a choice that affects every honest seller on the platform.
Handmade has value because human skill has value. If you're faking one, you clearly don't believe in the other.
