The Two Things Etsy Makes You Disclose Before Your First Sale
On Amazon, nobody ever asked me who prints my products. I opened the account, listed, and that was the end of it.
Etsy asks. It asks before you sell anything, and it asks again on every listing you put up.
If you're moving print on demand onto Etsy, or starting there, this is the setup step that catches people out. It takes about five minutes, it sits in a corner of the shop settings you have no reason to visit, and nothing tells you it's missing until something goes wrong.
Why Etsy lets you do this at all
Etsy is a handmade marketplace. Read that literally and print on demand shouldn't exist there, because you didn't make the mug and neither did anybody you've met.
But the rule was never "you have to physically make it." The rule is that you have to have designed it. A designer with no press, no printer and no warehouse is still the person a buyer is buying from, and Etsy decided that person belongs on the platform. So the door is open, with one condition hanging on it.
You designed it. Someone else made it. Say so.
Everything below is just the paperwork of that one sentence.
What Etsy actually wants
A production partner is anyone outside your own two hands who helps make the finished product. For POD, that's your print provider, whoever you use.
Etsy wants it in two places. Once in your shop settings, where the partner gets registered. Then on every listing that partner touches, where you point at them from a dropdown.
Do it before you list rather than after. Setting it up first means the dropdown is already there while you're building listings, instead of a job you have to go back and repeat.
Setting up the partner
It lives in Shop Manager, under Settings. Etsy has renamed this page more than once, so look for production partners, or partners you work with, and add a new one from there.
Then it asks you to fill in a handful of things.
The private name. What you call this partner internally. Nobody but you sees it, so name it whatever makes sense to you.
The public name. What buyers see. This does not have to match the private one, and it does not have to be the company's actual name.
The description. A plain few words on what they are and what they do for you, like a print shop that prints and ships the products you design.
The location. Where they actually are. Not where you are.
💡 Two names, on purpose. The private name and the public one are separate fields because Etsy only needs your buyers to know that someone else prints your products, not which company does it. Disclosure is about the arrangement, not the supplier's name.
Then three questions, and these are the ones people stall on because they read like a trap. They aren't. There's a true answer to each.
Why are you working with them? Because you don't have the equipment or the technical ability to make the product yourself. That's an option you can pick, and for POD it's simply the truth.
Who does the design work? You do. That's the whole reason you're allowed to be here.
What do they handle? Production, all of it. They print it, they pack it, they ship it.
That's what I put down, and it has never caused me a problem.
The other thing Etsy asks that Amazon doesn't
AI. Etsy wants to know whether generative AI shaped what's in a listing, and it's a live rule right now rather than something coming later.
What I do about it is small. A line at the bottom of the listing description saying AI assistance was used in generating it. It costs one sentence, and I'd rather that sentence be sitting there already than be something I go looking for after a listing comes down.
Nothing about disclosing has ever cost me a sale.
What happens if you skip it
I don't know from experience, and I'm not curious enough to find out.
What Etsy says is that an undisclosed production partner is a policy violation, sitting in the same bucket as misrepresenting what you're selling. The stated outcomes run from the listing coming down to the shop being closed.
That second one isn't theoretical. Etsy closes shops, and it closed mine twice. I got it back both times and wrote out exactly how here, but the honest summary is months of appeals, chat rounds and waiting, for something that would have taken an afternoon to avoid.
So the maths on this one isn't close.
Five minutes of settings, against a shop you might not get back.
Set the partner up before you list your first product. Write the AI line into your description template so it copies itself onto everything after. Then forget both of them, because that's the point of doing it once at the start.
Etsy isn't being difficult here. It's asking you to be honest about a business that's genuinely honest anyway: you drew the thing, somebody with a printer made it, and the buyer gets to know that. There's nothing in that story you need to hide.
I write up whatever I hit on these platforms as I hit it, the settings that trip me and the ones that cost me real money. If you'd rather not learn them the same way I did, you can follow along by email.
Stay out of trouble,
Nick T
