Etsy's new terms make you answerable for the bots you run. A memo to send around before December 16

The memo

To: everyone who logs in to the shop, and anyone we pay to help with it

Re: Etsy's new terms, effective December 16

Short version: we need a list of every tool that touches our Etsy shop, and a decision on each one, before the 16th.

Etsy published updated Terms of Use on October 26. They take effect December 16, 2026. Most coverage has focused on AI training, and we'll get to that. The part that changes our day-to-day is the new language on automated agents, because it applies to the tools we already use, not to something we might build one day.

Nothing here is legal advice. Read the terms yourself, especially Sections 5 and 6, before acting on anything below.

What changed about bots, scripts and extensions

The revised Section 6 defines automated agents broadly: bots, scripts, browser extensions and AI technologies acting on behalf of users or third parties. According to Value Added Resource's summary of the new terms, three things follow.

Etsy can permit, restrict or prohibit them. That covers agents browsing the marketplace, collecting data, interacting with accounts and executing transactions. In other words, almost anything a tool might do.

Agents may have to say who they are. Authorized agents may be required to identify themselves and the person or business they represent.

We're responsible for what our agents do. Users are held responsible for actions taken by agents they deploy or authorize. If a tool acts on your shop, Etsy now treats it as you.

That last line is the one to read twice. A bulk-editing extension that changes 200 prices because it misread a column isn't the extension's problem under these terms. It's ours.

What we actually run

Before December 16, write down every tool that does anything to the shop without a person clicking each button. Our guess is the list is longer than anyone expects. The usual suspects:

Listing helpers. Browser extensions that bulk-edit, relist or copy listings between shops.

Inventory and order sync. Apps that keep Etsy stock in line with a website or another marketplace, or push orders into a shipping tool.

Research tools. Anything that collects data from Etsy: competitor price watchers, keyword tools, review scrapers.

AI helpers. Anything that writes listings and posts them, answers messages or acts in the shop on our behalf.

For each one, note three things: what it does, how it connects (an app we authorized through Etsy, or something that drives our browser or reads pages), and who set it up. The "who set it up" column matters. Tools installed by a former assistant or a freelancer are the ones nobody remembers to check. The list of apps authorized on the shop, in the shop's settings, is a good place to start, but browser extensions won't appear there, so ask each person what's installed on the computer they use for the shop.

How we'll decide what stays

We'll sort the list into three groups.

Keep. Tools that connect through an official, authorized route and do a narrow job we'd be comfortable defending. An inventory sync we authorized, that only changes stock counts, is the model.

Review. Tools that drive a browser session, act in bulk, or collect data from other shops. These aren't necessarily banned. Etsy says it can permit, restrict or prohibit, and it hasn't said which tools land where. But they're the ones most likely to be restricted, and the ones whose mistakes are hardest to explain. For each, ask the vendor what they're doing about the December 16 terms. A vendor with no answer is an answer. Write down what each vendor said and the date they said it, so the decision isn't remade from memory in February.

Drop. Anything that collects Etsy data to feed an AI product. The new terms prohibit third parties from using content or data from Etsy to develop, train, fine-tune, evaluate or benchmark AI without Etsy's permission, whether it was collected by hand or by a tool. If a research tool is building its own model from what it gathers, that's the vendor's exposure, but it's our account they're logged in with.

Also: turn off anything nobody can explain. If no one knows what a tool does, nobody can be responsible for it, and the terms say somebody is.

The AI training part, briefly

The terms add explicit permission for Etsy and its partners and vendors to use what we upload, our photos, descriptions, reviews and community posts, to develop, train, test and improve AI and machine-learning technologies, "subject to any applicable opt-out rights described in our Privacy Policy." Value Added Resource reports that neither the terms nor the privacy policy identify a general way for US sellers to opt their content out while continuing to sell.

There isn't much a shop can do about that inside Etsy. What we can control is where our best content lives. If our product photography and descriptions are a real asset, the original versions should live on our own site, which we control, with Etsy getting what it needs to sell. That's also the case for a site of our own as a second channel. We wrote about Etsy's photo rules and choosing what a marketplace really needs in the one unedited photo rule.

One more line worth knowing: the terms also say users must review results from Etsy's own AI tools before relying on them. If we use Etsy's listing tools, a person reads what they write before it goes live. That should already be the case.

What happens next

By December 9, the tool list is done and every row says keep, review or drop. Anything in review has a vendor answer or a decision to switch it off. Logins and app authorizations for anything we drop get removed, not just paused. We'll check the list again whenever someone adds a tool.

If the list shows we're running a lot of the business through tools that sit on top of Etsy, that's a signal to build something more solid: a proper sync between our own catalog and the marketplaces we sell on, with one place where products are edited. That's what our marketplaces work covers. Talk to us if you'd like a second pair of eyes on the list.

Related work: Spin Market.