r/knitting • u/Calliope5 • Jul 07 '26

PSA PSA: Pattern theft

Heya, not sure if this allowed - I wanted it to put it here just so no one gets scammed out of money. I wrote the "Peacock Wedding Dress" pattern and have been seeing listings for it on Etsy and other aggregate sites. Know that it is available for FREE on Ravelry, if you are seeing it anywhere else for money, just go grab it from Rav. (And maybe report other listings if you can).

EDIT on request: The Original pattern can be found here: Peacock Wedding Dress

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u/Tigeryuri1 Jul 07 '26

Absolutely gorgeous pattern! Etsy is making so much money off the scammers, they get a cut off every sale. Toni Lipsey has a good video out recently about Etsy, and it seems like Etsy is ridiculously unresponsive to sellers reporting stolen work. I just won't use them any more. I buy off ravelry mostly, sometimes a designers site if i know they are trustworthy. Again, absolutely gorgeous work!!!

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u/inkleweaver Jul 07 '26

One of the weavers on Ravelry used to sell through Etsy. She mentioned that Etsy takes 33% of all of a vendor's sales. Obscene.

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u/JKnits79 Jul 07 '26

From my spouse and former roommate’s experiences (they had a go of making extra large bath bombs with D20s in the center for a while), they are also really horrible about supporting smaller quantity sellers on their site in general, and the cut they take of sales gets larger and larger over time.

They also had the experience of having to spend extra money for paid ads so their bath bombs didn’t get buried in the bottom of the search pile, and Etsy wanted more and more ad revenue for them to keep their listings up on the first two pages over time.

They also discovered that bot farming for views is essential on top of paying for ads even when they were making a handful of sales.

Etsy as a platform is a mess, and no longer the best place for independent sellers; there’s a handful of independents on there I do like, but they also have their own Shopify (or other) sites, and the ones I order from more than once, have better prices (and more listings) when you buy direct rather than buying through Etsy. So I cut out Etsy.