Introduction
Are you an Etsy seller using third-party apps or services to streamline your store? If so, Etsy’s latest integration restrictions might directly impact how you manage your listings, orders, and fulfillment.
In 2025, Etsy rolled out new guidelines for third-party integrations, aimed at improving platform security and protecting buyer trust. While this sounds positive, for many Etsy sellers—especially those using print-on-demand services or external order processing tools—these changes could disrupt workflows if not addressed properly.
In this guide, we’ll break down:
- Do I need to Reconnect My Etsy Shop to FinerWorks?
- What do these restrictions mean?
- Why did Etsy introduce these restrictions?
- How can you stay compliant without hurting your sales
- Alternatives and smart workarounds
Let’s dive in.
Do I need to Reconnect My Etsy Shop to FinerWorks?
No. Actually, if you had connected your Etsy store before October 21, 2024, DO NOT disconnect it and then try to reconnect it; otherwise, important features, as we will discuss here, may not work.
This only affects Sellers who connected their Etsy shop to FinerWorks after October 21, 2024. If you were an early bird and connected your shop before that date. You’re in the clear, and it’s business as usual; however, if not, then you will want to continue reading.
What do these restrictions mean?
Etsy has made some updates that may make it more difficult for 3rd parties like FinerWorks print-on-demand services to fulfill orders for newer Etsy sellers. We actually only discovered that some changes were made that were not widely known in the developer community until after it was implemented.
Starting October 21, 2024, Etsy introduced restrictions for Sellers based in the U.S., Canada, and Turkey wanting to use 3rd party fulfillment services or print-on-demand companies that drop ship orders for them.
This is related to Etsy wanting to be able to control which third-party “Shipping Partners” can be used. Which companies are used to generate shipping labels for orders? You can check out their article here:
How to Use a Third-Party Provider to Ship Your Order
For the U.S., only GoShippo and ShipStation are approved as third-party “Shipping Partners” for shipping label access. The article doesn’t say anything about Order Fulfillment partners like us, which are adversely affected.
Unfortunately, for now, we cannot find anything on the Etsy site or anywhere else that seems to define either an “Etsy Preferred Partner” or an “approved category”. We have reached out to them for some additional instructions on what we need to do, if anything. We are also reaching out to some of our friendly competitors to see how they are handling this.
Why did Etsy introduce these restrictions?
Earlier this year, they stopped sharing buyer email addresses, which at least makes sense from a privacy standpoint. But now? They’re blocking shipping addresses and stopping fulfillment partners from updating orders with shipping and tracking info. Maybe. But if that’s the case, why wouldn’t it apply to all sellers and not just those connected after October 21?
Some believe it is because Etsy has entered into some revenue-sharing agreements with GoShippo and ShipStation in the U.S., Canada, and Turkey (which are the countries affected). There is no evidence of this, however, if it is the case, in all likelihood, these same sort of restrictions will soon expand from there to include the EU and Great Britain.
If anyone has some insider knowledge or wants to swap conspiracy theories, feel free to chime in. Meanwhile, we’re digging into this and hoping to find a solution that works for everyone.
In the meantime, let’s keep calm, carry on, and remember: if you connected before October 21, you’re golden. If not, well… welcome to the club of Etsy API mysteries.
Alternatives and smart workarounds
We have created a few workarounds for new Seller connections to our Etsy integration. We have added the ability to “Paste” the recipient’s address when the order is imported. This is not as streamlined an approach as we would like, but it can save time from having to manually enter an address line by line. It is not perfect since not all addresses fit a standard or common format, but for most residential addresses in the U.S. and even some International, it should work fine.
Another solution is to download the orders as a CSV file and turn them into an Excel document. You can then use our Excel integration to upload your orders. This method is recommended if you have many orders (25 or more) that you want us to process. You can download your orders for the month from your Etsy Dashboard by going to your menu, choosing “Settings > Options,” and then going to the “download data” tab. You will need to remove the orders you do not want to import.
Update 12/10/2024: We have not found a lot of additional information on this; however, we have discussed this with a pretty substantial 3rd party platform used for e-commerce order management, which many Etsy Sellers use. They have indicated to us that they, too, have been affected by this and are also waiting to hear back from Etsy on a solution to this problem.
Update 12/17/2024: We are looking to build a workaround that will allow us to retrieve the necessary shipping information; however, the Seller will need to connect their Etsy shop to a GoShippo account. Once we have this ready, we will be posting more info and instructions in our Etsy App Documentation.
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