Thanks @Chris Cavanagh for your reply, it really resonates with me! At the end of the day your workflow is pretty close to mine, and it's kind of what I already thought about eRank/Everbee, you shouldn't follow them to the letter. The thing that resonates with me the most is anticipating the trend rather than jumping on it once it's already there, totally agree with you on that. You said you surf the web and go by what's happening around you (social media, friends, kids...), that intrigues me, can you tell me more? What's your method for sorting through all that and spotting what's actually going to take off?

@Dennis Moellmann Good question, I pulled the month by month breakdown, July through September. Etsy search: 159, 160, 154. Pretty much flat the whole period. Etsy marketing/promotion: 763, 634, 293. Held up fairly well through August, then dropped 54% in September alone. Direct/referral traffic: 170, 200, 63. Actually went up in August, then dropped 69% in September. Etsy paid ads: 192, 77, 0. Gradual, and that one's on me, I cut my Etsy ads at the end of August once I saw they weren't converting anymore. So search barely moved across the whole period. The drop is really a September thing, concentrated in Etsy's "Marketing and SEO" bucket and in direct/referral traffic, not in keyword visibility. Before jumping to the conclusion that Etsy pulled back on promoting my shop, one question for you: did you also cut or reduce your Etsy ad budget over the same period? Because on my end, that could actually explain part of the drop in "Marketing/promotion" and direct traffic, if Etsy ties some organic boost to whether you're running paid ads or not. If you didn't change anything on the ad budget side and you're still seeing the same drop in September, that would point more toward a real algorithm change at Etsy, rather than just an effect of us both cutting our budgets.

@Henry Tang Thanks for the question, and I'm genuinely sorry about what you went through with Etsy. Some background on my journey: before doing POD, I printed and shipped the posters myself at a local print shop, together with a business partner, for 12 years. We had an eBay shop and an Amazon shop, he handled Amazon and I handled eBay, and we were doing around 700 to 800 orders a month, with Amazon making up about 80% of revenue. A bit less than a year ago, it was actually because I was handling the printing and shipping myself that Tom reached out to have me take care of printing and shipping PrintShrimp's A3/A4 orders for France. That's how I discovered PrintShrimp in the first place. Six months ago my partner had to stop to focus on another full time activity, and he shut down the Amazon account at the same time since that was his side and he assumed I'd be stopping too. Since I was now on my own, I couldn't keep up with all the in house printing work, so I switched to independent POD on my end. I kept eBay, restructuring pricing and positioning, and opened Etsy starting completely from scratch. So to answer your question: it's not really a "switch" from an already favoured position on eBay. My history and reputation there didn't carry over to Etsy at all, the two algorithms are completely separate. I opened an Etsy shop mainly so I wouldn't depend on a single platform, since we'd already felt how fragile that is when Amazon disappeared overnight the moment my partner left. As for your specific situation, I haven't been through what you went through so I'm not really in a position to give you a definitive answer, but setting up a separate structure/account tied to a genuinely distinct activity might be worth exploring with a lawyer or accountant, rather than working around the ID verification.