Why Your Faire Orders Dried Up (It's Not What You Think)
There are many things that are vexing for brands about Faire. (And many things that are great about Faire, too, certainly.) But the thing that is hands-down vexing-est is when you have months or years with consistent, steady orders on the platform followed by months or years where those orders slow to a fraction of what they were.
People have a lot of theories about why this happens, including:
Faire gives you a lot of orders at the beginning just to get you hooked but then once they dry up, that's pretty much the reality of the situation.
Faire intentionally throttles orders of established makers because they want you to pay for promoted listings.
Store owners are buying less nowadays.
That the brand's products have become off-trend and that's the problem.
Because Faire doesn't hesitate to promote other brands' products on/near your store page, stores that used to buy exclusively from you end up wandering to replacements (thereby decreasing reorders.)
I'll be honest – up until the last few months, I wasn't actually sure what the cause was of these order falloffs. Some of the above seemed to resonate… while others just didn't make sense. And I've actually learned that all of the above are largely myths and that the reality is pretty straightforward. In most cases, the drop isn't about your products and it isn't because you did something wrong.
Your orders dried up on Faire due to one of 3 reasons:
1. The early visibility window closed and when the smoke cleared, you weren't doing what the platform wants you to do.
Faire gives new brands a temporary boost in visibility. For roughly the first one to three weeks after you join, the platform surfaces your products more than it normally would, creating more sales.
Yes, that gives sellers some temporary momentum and encouragement. But much more important than that, it gives Faire data on how your brand does on the Faire marketplace. It's how the algorithm gathers data — do buyers click? Do they convert? Do they reorder? What kind of buyers are they?
After this initial visibility period, the Faire algorithm uses what it learned about your brand during that period to choose how and how much to show your brand to buyers. The test period ends and normal algorithmic sorting takes over. (More on what that algorithm wants from you below.)
2. You were doing well before the supply surge but then the rules changed.
This one affects brands that have been on Faire for years, not just new sellers. Around 2022, the platform opened its doors much more broadly to inbound brand applications. The number of sellers grew dramatically — and that changed the competitive math for everyone already there.
As Faire's own team told us:
"Any brand can see success on Faire but you must be an active participant in that happening. It does require some elbow grease."
Before that surge, being present was often enough. There were fewer brands per category, less competition for buyer attention, and the algorithm didn't need to be as selective about who it surfaced. After the surge, the same buyer search that used to return your candles alongside five competitors now returns them alongside fifty. The algorithm had to get pickier, and "good enough" stopped being good enough. If you built your Faire revenue before 2022 and haven't significantly changed your approach since, this is very likely a major factor in what you're experiencing. Your products didn't get worse. The crowd got bigger.
3. You were doing well on the strength of your product or buyer demand… but then some weak points in your Faire presence started to degrade your algorithm performance.
This is the sneakiest of the three, because it can happen so gradually you don't notice until the drop feels sudden. Maybe your catalog got stale — you haven't added new products in months and your listings haven't been refreshed. Maybe your response times slipped, or your lead time accuracy drifted. Maybe you lost Top Shop status without realizing it, or your reviews plateaued while competitors' kept climbing.
The Faire algorithm reads all of these signals continuously. It's not just evaluating you once — it's watching how your brand behaves over time. And when the signals start pointing toward disengagement or inconsistency, the platform quietly surfaces you less. The visibility you had was partly earned and partly borrowed from earlier momentum, and once the algorithm recalibrates, weaker fundamentals get exposed.
The frustrating part is that your products may be just as good as ever. But on Faire, the algorithm doesn't measure the quality of your work directly — it measures the signals around your work: freshness, reliability, responsiveness, and conversion. When those drift, orders follow.
So, what do you do if your Faire orders dried up?
In any of the three cases above, the solution is the same – your orders will increase when you align yourself better with what Faire's algorithm is looking for. We go deep into how to align yourself with the Faire Algorithm in the Making Faire Work course. But here are the core insights:
Your listings are the foundation. Weaknesses there will impact everything downstream — your conversion rate, your reorder rate, your search visibility. If your product titles are vague or overly branded (think "The Cassidy" instead of "Gold Chain Link Necklace, 18″ with Charm"), buyers can't find you and the algorithm can't match you to the right searches. If your photos aren't clear or your descriptions don't help a retailer understand why their customers will want this product, you'll get views that don't convert — and low conversion is one of the fastest ways to lose visibility. Faire's own data shows that unclear images and capitalization errors alone resulted in a 21% and 23% drop in conversion respectively. This is one of the highest-leverage places to invest your energy.
Faire demands newness, freshness, responsiveness, and engagement. As they explain it, this comes downstream from that being what retailers like and need. Faire's algorithm favors brands that regularly add new products — brands that update their catalogs are ranked 20% higher in the marketplace and new additions surface your brand on the "New Products" page within your category. The platform recommends adding new products at least once a quarter. And this doesn't have to mean constantly expanding your line: seasonal bundles, new colorways released over time rather than all at once, or limited edition products all count as fresh activity. Beyond new products, regularly refreshing existing listings — updating photos, revisiting titles and tags, retiring underperforming items — also sends the right signals.
Your performance and policy metrics are key. Faire is actively tracking your behavior as a seller and using what it observes to decide how visible you are to buyers. Late shipments, order cancellations, missed messages, missing items, damaged goods — all of these are monitored, and all of them have thresholds that, once crossed, can make it very difficult to recover. As the Faire team put it directly: "Once you get above 25% on any of your customer service metrics, it can get very, very difficult to boost your sales." Beyond those tracked metrics, your order minimums, shipping terms, reorder rate, and conversion rate all feed into how the algorithm treats you. Brands with lower minimums, faster and more accurate lead times, and strong reviews get surfaced more. It's the whole iceberg, not just the part Faire shows you in the dashboard.
This isn't work you have to do. But it is work that's possible to do.
Knowledge really is power: understanding the work required to succeed with the Faire algorithm gives you options. You can do that work, and very likely succeed on Faire. Or you can decide that it's simply not the way you want to spend your time and bow out. The only thing that doesn't make sense is pretending or hoping Faire will act differently than it does… or that you can “wait out” a dry spell.
The encouraging part is that these things are fixable. Not overnight, and not without effort, but the levers are real and they're within your control. And if you want help thinking through how Faire intersects with your business, you might find Making Faire Work helpful — its designed to give you clarity and confidence around what has been a mystifying tool for so many.
4 Things About Faire Most Makers Get Wrong
Get your free guide & discover:
🔓 What Faire actually requires to succeed (and what most sellers never find out)
🔓 The real limits of the platform — before they cost you time and money
🔓 Exactly how to decide if Faire is worth it for your specific business