How to delete your Etsy account permanently

By Otabek Mamadaliev · Sources last reviewed 18 August 2026 · What this means

Sellers: settle everything first. Outstanding Etsy fees remain owed after closure and can be pursued. Open orders, unshipped items and in-flight cases all block closure, and abandoning them damages buyers who paid you.

Sellers, in order

1. Complete or refund all open orders.
2. Deactivate your listings.
3. Pay your outstanding fee balance to zero.
4. Ensure any payment account balance has been deposited.
5. Close the shop, then close the account.

Close your account

1. Sign in and go to Account settings.
2. Select Privacy.
3. Under Permanently close and delete your Etsy account, choose Request deletion of your data.
4. Check your email — Etsy sends instructions to complete the request, and nothing happens until you do.

In the Etsy app: profile icon (You) → Settings → Privacy → To start the process, tap here → Delete. In the Seller app: More → Submit a request to delete your account.

It takes around two weeks. Once your open issues are resolved, permanent deletion begins and runs for roughly a fortnight. It cannot be undone, and Etsy may retain some information for legal, tax, security or compliance reasons.

Closing your shop is not closing your account

These are two separate actions and Etsy does not make that obvious. Closing the shop leaves the account alive in buyer-only mode — you can still shop, Etsy still holds your data, and you are still a customer. Only closing the account ends the relationship.

If your goal is simply to stop selling, close the shop and stop there. It is reversible in a way that account deletion is not.

The trap: your email address is burned permanently

Closing the account does not free up the email address, the username or the shop name. You cannot reuse that email on a new Etsy account afterwards, and the username and shop name are not returned to the pool for you to claim again.

This catches people who close an account intending to start clean under the same identity. If there is any chance you will return, that is a decision to make now rather than after — the address you have used for years becomes unusable on the platform, and there is no support route to reverse it.

The practical implication: if you want a fresh start on Etsy, change the email on the old account to an address you do not care about before closing it, so your real address stays available.

What you lose

• Purchase history and receipts — download them first if you need them for warranties or tax.
• Reviews you wrote may remain on shops, unattributed.
• Shop reviews and star rating — years of seller reputation, unrecoverable and untransferable.
• Favourites and lists.
• Your email address, username and shop name, none of which return to you.

What stays online after you go

Deletion is less total than it sounds, and sellers in particular should know what remains visible:

• Reviews buyers left for your shop and the sold-item pages they sit on can remain publicly visible after closure. You are removing your access, not scrubbing the record.
• Reviews you wrote on other shops may stay up with the attribution stripped rather than being deleted.
• Transaction and tax records are retained by Etsy for as long as the law requires, then purged on their schedule rather than yours. You cannot reach them in the meantime.

If a specific review or listing is the thing you actually want gone, deal with it directly before closing the account. Once the account is closed you have no dashboard, no support standing and no way to request anything about it.

Sellers: the money side, before anything else

Outstanding Etsy fees survive account closure and remain a debt Etsy can pursue. Closing the account is not a way to walk away from a balance, and attempting it with money owed simply blocks the closure.

• Withdraw your Payment account balance to your bank and confirm it arrived — not merely that you requested it.
• Download your Etsy Payments and sales CSVs for the whole life of the shop. You will need them at tax time and you cannot get them afterwards.
• Close out open cases and refunds. An in-flight dispute holds the account open.
• Cancel Etsy Plus if you subscribe, and confirm the charge has stopped.