Love. Eat. Travel. Repeat.: Etsy sales $28,657 to $6,873 in 5 months

Because the owner wrote up the bad months in the same format as the good ones, we can trace most of it.

The Etsy shop behind Love. Eat. Travel. Repeat. went from $28,657.17 in December 2024 to $6,873.65 in April 2025. That’s a quarter of its peak in five months.

Print-on-demand income reports are normally written on the way up, and then they stop.

Janeen, who publishes as J.B., filed all five months of the decline in the same format.

And the reasons she gives go past seasonality.

From the best month to a quarter of it, in five months

The shop’s history is public in numbers too.

It opened in October 2022. The first full year brought in roughly $29,000, 2024 closed at $135K, and cumulative sales stood at $168.8K as of January 2025. By April she describes it as a shop past $200,000.

That single December came close to matching a full first year of trading.

Janeen is a former attorney. She started the shop at 40, left corporate work at 42, and moved her family to Portugal.

Printify handles printing and shipping, so there’s no inventory.

December is high because there are no seasonal products

Q4 strength is ordinary in retail. Her explanation sits at an angle to the usual one, though.

The December report says the shop carries only three holiday items, and everything else is evergreen.

Her reading goes like this. Q4 lifts sales less because holiday merchandise sells and more because everyone is shopping for gifts. So unusual year-round products get bought as presents, and those buyers come back for birthdays and anniversaries.

That structure shows up in the shape of the decline.

With no peak built out of seasonal stock, nothing dies in January. When gift demand withdraws, revenue simply returns to a flat level.

December’s $28,657 and April’s $6,873 aren’t two different catalogues.

They’re the same catalogue, in a month when it was bought as gifts and a month when it wasn’t.

Traffic rose 30%, revenue rose 9%

The sharpest figure in the series is a comparison rather than an amount, and it sits in the February report.

Traffic was up 30% year over year, while revenue grew 9%.

She frames this positively: more people are finding the shop, Etsy’s algorithms keep shifting, so keyword research and product testing stay essential.

We read it differently.

When visits climb 30% and sales climb 9%, what arrived was browsers, not buyers.

Put the April dashboard next to it: 9,207 visits, 172 orders, a 1.9% conversion rate, and an average order value of roughly $40. This was never a high-ticket shop.

Traffic piling up while orders fail to follow is the pattern you get when the terms a shop ranks for drift away from the terms people buy on.

What stopped was the listing work, not the sales

The March report is direct about the cause. She didn’t add much to the shop.

Her time went to rebuilding a standalone Shopify store, testing Facebook ads, and mapping email sequences. In January she’d paid roughly $2,000 for outside Shopify development.

The motive came from damage rather than theory.

In December, a separate Etsy shop of hers selling digital goods was forced into vacation mode with no explanation, and it stayed down for 72 hours. Treating total dependence on Etsy as a risk is a conclusion she earned.

The numbers stayed honest about the trade.

1. Listing stops

   Time goes to Shopify, ads and email, and almost nothing new goes into the shop.

2. Revenue falls

   Sales drop in the months after she stopped listing.

3. Back to Etsy

   She calls April a reset and returns to Etsy.

She lands the explanation on her own five-step method and on mindset.

What the reports actually record is plainer. When listing stops, revenue drops about two months later.

Nothing in these five months argues against diversifying.

What’s recorded is the ordinary exchange of one activity for another.

The weakness is written better than the wins

The series is readable because of how the bad months are written.

The April report opens by calling the month rough, then she doubts whether she’s still good at this. After $28K months and $20K months, she writes, anything below that feels like sliding.

And in the same piece she says in advance that June is shaping up worse than April.

Few people publish a report while already knowing the next one will be worse.

The structure around all this deserves a look.

The reports carry affiliate links to Printify, eRank, EHunt, Canva and Midjourney, plus paths into a $9/month keyword subscription and coaching.

She can publish the $6,873 month because it reaches readers in her situation better than the $28K month does.

A report about a decline is a record and a product at the same time.

So the candour isn’t purely a matter of temperament, in our view. That doesn’t make the figures less reliable. Dashboard screenshots are attached, and the numbers point downward.

One income stream of five, and only the five months downhill

Etsy ad spend, the actual cost of refunds and exchanges, Shopify revenue, coaching and subscription income, the niche and the product mix are all undisclosed.

So “$6,873 a month” isn’t this person’s total income. It’s the one stream out of five that gets published.

The $3,093.14 profit is also 45% applied to revenue, not a measured figure.

Order the Etsy-centred solo shops by monthly revenue and three line up.

This shop in April 2025 sits in between.

Inside the same marketplace and the same size band, physical goods, outsourced printing and self-made files give completely different margin structures.

And a five-month record of decline is only that.

Whether 2025 recovered later, or didn’t, is outside the sources cited here.