This situation seems entirely unfair to me and I am surprised that a lot of people here are siding with Etsy. If they had such clauses and information in their Terms and Conditions, then fair enough, comply or leave. But the worrying situation we have here is that Etsy appear to be making up non-publicly stated terms, targeting a guy who obviously hand assembles his own equipment. Sure, the guy didn't provide every bit of info they were requesting, but why should he? He complied with every Etsy request until they started asking for photo's documenting every step of the process which is just ridiculous.

99% of the supposed hand made goods on Etsy are not hand made, they're outsourced products and drop-shipped goods. Maybe they're trying to crack-down on that, and maybe they should publicly state that and update their terms. Try searching, "laptop bag", "iphone cover" and I can almost say with certainty that most of what you see is not hand made, but rather slave labour or outsourced.

Etsy have bigger problems to worry about than whether or not a guy is actually making his own electronic devices when there are substantially larger stores moving larger volumes of product (like some of the clothing and shoe stores you see on Etsy) who should be questioned first. And if this is indeed the process, maybe letting your sellers know IN ADVANCE before they've already made the product to sell might result in easier compliance.

Just because he is hand assembling a product using already constructed components like a pre-fabricated PCB and perhaps even pre-soldered components, does that make it any less hand made? Do people seriously think every component in the new car they're buying was made by the car manufacturer? No. Do you think Apple hand make every component in their iPhone or Macbook computers? Do you think the artist who painted that portrait made his own canvas and made his own paints? Fair enough that Apple or car manufacturers aren't fobbing their goods off as hand made, but it gives you an idea how reliant we've become on component assembly opposed to the non-scalable DIY approach.

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And the final nail in Etsy's argument is this blog post they wrote in 2012: http://www.etsy.com/blog/news/2012/defining-handmade-on-etsy...

The relevant part of this post is this defining paragraph:

To be clear, when we talk about “hand-assembled” on Etsy, we don’t mean simply putting together a kit where all the pieces are already chosen and provided together. For example, if someone bought a flat-packed bookcase from IKEA that came with all the pieces pre-cut and all the necessary hardware included, and then put it together as directed by the enclosed instructions, that assembled bookcase would not qualify to be sold on Etsy as a handmade item. “Hand-assembled” on Etsy also does not include gathering commercially-produced items and repackaging them in a gift basket.

Which links to this DO's & DON'TS link: http://www.etsy.com/help/article/483 which features these key lines:

On Etsy, the term "handmade" can additionally be interpreted as "hand-assembled" or "hand-altered."

To be considered handmade, the seller must substantially alter the design of an item produced from a "ready to assemble" kit.

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Nowhere did I find anything that stated pictures or any documentation whatsoever is required to account for the construction process. The fact the guy is making his own enclosures by Etsy's own definitions of hand made is deemed to be hand made and not merely commercially assembled. If he was buying every component and merely assembling it, then that is definitely not hand made at all.

I've emailed Brendan directly with a link to this comment, which hopefully helps him out. Maybe those above aforementioned links can help the author get this store restored.