My Experience as an Etsy Witch (and Why I Left)

There was a time when Etsy felt like the obvious place to promote my work quietly. The site looked great and easy. There was a lot of visibility, the audience was already there, and the platform promised freedom for independent creators and artists who put their soul into what they do. 

It was 2020. 

At the beginning, selling spells on Etsy worked. People from all over the world started finding me, word of mouth spread naturally, and I was genuinely happy.

Success changed everything.

A Platform Built on Constant Availability

One of the first structural problems became obvious very quickly: Etsy is built around instant, direct messaging between buyers and sellers. On paper, this is presented as a way to foster trust and connection. In practice, it creates a constant state of availability that is both unrealistic and unsustainable. 

Buyers are too fast and furious because they are encouraged to expect immediate responses at any hour. The system assumes permanent access - whether you are sleeping or simply offline becomes irrelevant. 

Instant messaging is extremely invasive. To me, the right approach is to send an email and wait a reasonable amount of hours until you get a response. Initial contact with a stranger should involve a minimum level of consideration. Of course, my customers can send me a DM on Instagram or an email anytime they want and I'm always in touch with them, but with people that I don't know, I expect basic decorum and manners.

The kind of communication Etsy wants is amateur and unprofessional. 

I felt forced to add a warning: I don't respond to unnecessary questions. This sounded snobbish but I’ve never had such an influx of abrasive messages in my life. Yeah, I don't want to reply to a DM that says hey do your spells really work or you available rn?

When I explained to Etsy that I could not realistically reply to all messages in less than 24 hours, I was advised to hire an assistant. I work alone for obvious reasons: confidentiality is essential in this path. Delegating my customer's private matters to a stranger was not possible. 

Discount Culture and the Review System

Another concern was Etsy’s constant encouragement of discounts and promotions. The platform actively rewards sellers who participate in sales and limited-time offers.

I consider my craft luxury work. I don’t sell objects. I work with transformation. Happiness, direction, protection, wealth, love - these cannot be impulse purchases. The price of my rituals reflects the time, focus, responsibility, and energetic commitment they require. That doesn’t change depending on seasons, campaigns, or platform incentives. No one pays more or less based on timing, and no one is pressured into rushing a decision before a tacky discount expires. 

A no-sale policy it’s respect. For my work, and for the people who trust it.

What was worse: Etsy's users are trained to expect not only discounts, but instant service - rituals performed the same day, or the day after, as if this were a delivery app.

Etsy promotes a fast-food model of spiritual work. 

No legitimate witch can perform rituals on the same day an order is placed. It's energetically impossible. It shocked me how many customers expected this. 

Another fundamental problem was Etsy’s review system. It treats ritual and spiritual work as if it were a physical product. Speed, immediacy, and customer mood are rewarded, while process and integrity are ignored.

Reviews are meant to reflect shipping times or product condition. Applied to spell work, they become a tool for pressure. I watched people treat negative reviews as a way to force timelines or attention, as if a one star rating could somehow improve the work or influence the outcome. Demonic magick isn’t a service you can rate for convenience. So what exactly is being judged with one star? Lilith? Lucifer? Belial?

Etsy Witches: The Reality of Selling Spiritual Work Online

My shop grew organically pretty fast and I was surprised by the crazy attention I was getting. Sometimes, attention is not good attention. Before long I felt too seen and overexposed.

Just like every popular product in stores gets mimicked, listings replicating my spells started to pop. Some were nearly verbatim, others blatantly identical. After publishing a Miserable Without Me Spell, for example, dozens of “Miserable Without Me Spell” listings appeared almost overnight.

The thing is... I offer demonic rituals that no one else can do. Titles and pictures can be replicated, but not the spell work, so I genuinely didn't understand what the heck these people selling.

Soon after, shops appeared that weren’t just inspired by my work, but structured entirely around it. They all looked nearly identical, using the same aesthetic and style of language and clearly handled by the same people - a robotic parody of myself, without depth, presence, or responsibility.

Of course I knew these people weren't spell casters. Eventually, I discovered that these shops were part of coordinated online scam networks operating remotely with rotating identities. The realization was unsettling, but it also explained the volume, speed, and mechanical repetition of what I was seeing. 

What troubled me most was the position this placed buyers in. People looking for spiritual work are often vulnerable by nature. On Etsy, they share personal situations, pictures and deeply private details, assuming a level of discretion and authenticity that isn’t guaranteed, as verification is minimal on the platform. Once that became clear, trusting Etsy became impossible. 

I remained the point of reference because ritual practice is not transferable. But what these shops did was flood the platform with noise and confusion. At a certain point, Etsy was full of hundreds of Lilith Cult-like frauds. Influencing a trend can be flattering in other contexts, but this wasn’t one of them. The scale of imitation meant that many buyers were at risk of being scammed.

Etsy actively promoted these shops with their "similar listings" system, treating them as relevant alternatives. The platform doesn’t differentiate between originality and replication. If something works well, anything that looks similar is rewarded with exposure. That logic works for interchangeable products, but in this case it meant that an organized fraud was continuously promoted.  

Beyond this issue, Etsy's metaphysical market looked overcrowded, distorted and lacking in credibility, and it made me uncomfortable to be there. 

Etsy Insane Policies

By 2021, Etsy were up to 5 million sellers, a massive jump. 

I thought the fees were excessive, but it didn't bothered me. The policies yes, because they were intended to made selling unnecessarily stressful and, at times, miserable. I can't remember now, but it felt like every day brought a new one, more absurd than the last.

Eventually, a single policy marked the point of no return.

In 2023, Etsy introduced a rule that allowed the platform to place a hold on sellers’ funds for up to 90 (and maybe 180) days under the guise of “security” and “risk assessment" to "cover any refunds. The purpose was to protect Etsy from potential fraud.

By then, I had around 10,000 sales

For small, low-volume shops, this may appear manageable. For a business of my size, it just wasn’t realistic. Freezing incoming funds for three months effectively meant asking the seller to finance the platform’s risk while continuing to deliver at full capacity.

I was extremely irritated. After three years of success, at that level of sales and volume, I did not believe I deserved to be treated as a small-scale l seller. A fund hold is not a precaution - it's a structural threat to the business itself. It also sounded like an excuse to use sellers' money interest free for an extended time.

I had to stop and take an honest look at what was happening: Etsy was cheapening my brand, and over the past year it had become a constant source of friction.

I had outgrown the platform. I wanted out.

I was advised to put my shop on holiday mode but my mind was already made up. I didn’t want to give myself room to second-guess my decision. Sometimes anger brings clarity and pushes you to act. 

The fun thing is that a few days after I closed my shop, I got an email from Etsy telling me that they were "only" going to withhold 30% of my sales. Then, another one: the hold was lifted. By then, it was too late.

"Lilith Cult is no longer selling on Etsy", what a relief. 

What Happened Next

What happened next was simple: nothing really changed. Etsy allowed my work to be seen by people across different countries and cultures and by the time I left, that visibility had already crystallized into something permanent.

The only difference now is the absence of constant stress, bad energy, and unwanted interactions. I work in exactly the same way, with the same level of dedication and responsibility, but without a platform in the middle and their interference and pressure. 

This is normal: I'm Luciferian. Doors close and open as they should. One way or another, success is permanent. It always continues. 

Thank you.

Hail Lilith. Hail Lucifer.