Your Google Drive link works for you and not for them

You've sent a Drive link to a customer. It opens perfectly when you click it. They say it asks them to request access, or shows nothing at all, or wants them to sign in to an account they don't have.

You are testing as the owner of the file. Google grants you access because of who you are, not because of the link. Your customer has neither of those things, and the only way to see what they see is to stop being you.

Fix it in three settings

1. 1

   Open sharing on the folder, not the files

   Right-click the folder in Drive and choose Share. Setting permissions on the folder cascades to what's inside it, which is far more reliable than sharing thirty individual files and missing one.

2. 2

   Change General access to "Anyone with the link"

   This is the setting that actually causes the problem. If it says "Restricted", only people you've named individually can open it — everyone else gets the request-access screen. Change it here.

3. 3

   Set the role to Viewer

   Immediately to the right of that setting. "Viewer" is what you want. If it's set to Editor, anyone with the link can rename, edit or delete your master files — an equally serious problem in the opposite direction.

Then test it as a stranger

Changing the setting isn't enough on its own, because you still can't see the result while you're signed in. Test it properly:

If the incognito window shows the files, your customers will see the files. If it doesn't, they won't — regardless of what the sharing dialog claims. The same test applies if you sell Canva templates on Etsy, where there is no file at all — only a link.

Other reasons it fails

The same problem on Dropbox and OneDrive

Everything above applies just as directly if you deliver through Dropbox or OneDrive instead of Drive — the mechanism is the same failure wearing different menu names, right down to the work-or-team account that can block external sharing outright. Dropbox has its own version, including its own “Link for viewing” versus “Link for editing” trap, and so does OneDrive.

The failure that costs the most

It isn't the link that never worked — a buyer emails you and you fix it. It's the link that worked for months and then stopped, because you tidied your Drive.

If you've sold a product with that link baked into a PDF, every buyer who bought it now has a dead file, and you have no way of knowing until someone complains. Most won't complain. They'll leave a review, or ask for a refund, or simply not come back.

• Never move or rename a folder you've shared in a product. Create new ones instead.
• Keep product files in a separate area of Drive from your working files, so a tidy-up can't touch them.
• Re-run the incognito test on your live products every few months.
• Better: don't put the raw Drive URL in front of buyers at all — see below.

Putting a link you control in front

The structural fix is not to give buyers the Drive URL directly. Give them a short link you own, which points at the Drive folder. If the destination ever changes, you repoint the short link once — rather than re-issuing every PDF you have ever sold. That pattern is the backbone of how to deliver digital downloads on Etsy without collecting bad reviews.

That's what AccessDrop does. You paste your Drive, Dropbox or Canva link in, and it produces a branded delivery PDF with a QR code and a short link — and it checks the link is actually reachable from outside your account before you ship it, which is the incognito test, run for you, every time.

£19 for a year, one payment, up to 5 deliverables. It doesn't host your files — Drive still does — it makes the handover reliable.

Does it just check once, when you set it up?

No — every live delivery link on an active pass is re-checked automatically once a week, not just on creation. The point of the recurring check is the scenario above: a sharing setting that was fine in month one and gets tightened in month four, silently breaking every PDF already sitting in a past buyer's Etsy downloads. Without a repeat check, that kind of regression goes unnoticed for the rest of the year.

If it's already cost you a review

A broken link rarely arrives as a question first — most buyers who hit a request-access screen just leave a review saying the file didn't work. The fix above stops it happening again; it doesn't undo the review you've already got, and the two are worth treating separately.

• Reply to the buyer privately first, publicly second. Etsy lets a buyer edit a review within 100 days of a digital download, but only while they haven't had a public reply from you — a public response freezes it. Fix the access problem and message them directly before you post anything the rest of the world can see.
• Don't chase a second time. One polite message is help; a follow-up reads as pressure, and "seller keeps messaging me" is a worse review than the one you started with.
• Assume it may stay. Etsy's own policy is that a review complying with their rules doesn't get removed on request, however clearly the fault was a sharing setting rather than the product. A calm public reply — "this was a Drive permissions issue on our end, fixed the same day and the buyer now has the file" — is for the next buyer reading it, not this one.

The full version of this — which message to send, and exactly why replying publicly too soon locks a review in place — is on what to send when an Etsy buyer can't find their digital download, written for the app-and-guest-checkout causes but the review-handling section applies just as directly here.