Regarding May bills, Chris / Revolving Dork posted Etsy “plan[ned] on auto-charging between the 15th and the 27th” but Emily later posted it looks like “the auto-charge has not gone through yet, and it still may not work this time again.”
From looking at my own bill, it looks like the next auto-charge is scheduled to be between June 15 and June 27 and Feb-May bills have not been auto-charged.
Thanks to electrikolor for pointing me to the threads.
EDIT:
Here is the email etsy sent out to users (I received mine, copied below) April 28 which gives instructions for paying bills manually:
Dear Etsy Sellers,
Due to a delay in the setup of our new credit card processor, Etsy bills will not be auto-charged this month [April]. If you wish, you can manually process your unpaid Etsy bill by logging into your Etsy account and visiting Your Etsy -> Your Etsy Bill. There is a link to pay unpaid bills at the bottom of the page.Due to this delay, no lateness penalties will be issued for any sellers until after the next billing period.
Next month, all unpaid bills will be auto-charged between the 15th and 27th [of May]. Be sure to check the remaining balance of your list of unpaid bills to ensure you’ll be ready for the charges.
We apologize for the inconvenience! The new payment service we are installing will allow us to expand Etsy into new, exciting directions that have previously not been possible. We’ll release more details about these possibilities in the coming months.
Thank you for making Etsy what it is!
-The Etsy Team
EDIT:
As far as I can tell, the following months’ bills have not been auto-charged - basically any charge incurred in 2007:
Feb 2007 bill - representing charges incurred in January
Mar 2007 bill - representing charges incurred in February
May 2007 bill - representing charges incurred from March 01 through May 29
That’s right, the May 2007 bill represents 3 months of charges. OUCH.
May 30th, 2007 at 7:16 am
At the risk of sounding like an ass, I’m gonna go right ahead and say it..
I refuse to pay my bill manually. Until Etsy comes forward and admits that they can’t fix this problem, I won’t pay them manually. Every month, I get notice that they WILL auto charge my credit card on file. Not once, since January, has this been true. I think it was Liskidder who said in that thread “Stop spreading filthy lies!” That made me giggle.
Anyway, I don’t do a lot of business on Etsy. Sure, a fair amount, but not a ton.. I think for the past five months, total, my bill is something like thirty dollars… so it’s really no skin off of my back. What really bothers me, is the people who have huge bills, and don’t realize they aren’t being autocharged. Yeah, believe it or not, I think there are people out there like me, who just put it on a credit card and never look to see if its a correct amount, or even if it was ever charged….
May 30th, 2007 at 7:19 am
Ps. I don’t recommend working your finances the way I do… I’m just lazy. And apparently, I LIKE to scramble around at tax time trying to figure everything out. It’s fun for me… puts a little extra umph in my step come April.
May 30th, 2007 at 11:03 am
Hi Amanda, I also witheld from paying my bill manually, mainly for the reasons you give above, but I have done now. I just got fed up with the amount hanging over me. It’s billed to an obscure credit card of mine and I wanted to be sure I would notice to pay on time when the autocharge came thru so I didn’t get ding-ed with charges. The level of customer service for the customers ie. the sellers on Etsy really stinks currently.
On a realistic note though Etsy must be functioning on very little cashflow if all the autocharges are not working. Unless a significant number of sellers pay manually Etsy must have v little money coming in since its cash flow I guess comes from the autocharged sellers’ fees. I’m not a great seller so my bill since jan is only around $30 - not very much on its own …. but if that was an average for lots of sellers …?
Should we as customers be worried about a company which doesn’t seem to be able to get its cash flow in order let alone the myriad of other areas of concern we’ve been cataloging since the start of this year??
May 30th, 2007 at 11:53 am
I tried to pay it manually last month and it just gives errors and times out. It doesn’t actually work. So I will just wait until they take it automatically.
I wonder how much interest they are losing by not collecting their fees on time? Also what if someone was making a lot of sales, racked up a lot of fees and then closed the account and closed the credit card? Etsy wouldn’t even realize until 6 months later.
They must be getting a lot of VC funding that they can afford to ignore collecting their money from us.
May 30th, 2007 at 7:00 pm
Should we as customers be worried about a company which doesn’t seem to be able to get its cash flow in order let alone the myriad of other areas of concern we’ve been cataloging since the start of this year??
EXACTLY. This is what bothers me most.
They must be getting a lot of VC funding that they can afford to ignore collecting their money from us.
Yeah, the financiers must be absolutely thrilled.
May 30th, 2007 at 9:04 pm
“Also what if someone was making a lot of sales, racked up a lot of fees and then closed the account and closed the credit card? Etsy wouldn’t even realize until 6 months later.”
I have wondered about this also. Surely it has happened at least once. Especially in March when so many were upset about the new constitution.
May 31st, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Their VC funders must be happy with the company’s progress if they authorized all those new jobs. I mean if they actually hire all the people listed on their jobs board that will double the staff. That money isn’t coming from our fees, clearly.
But they will want to see a return on that pretty soon, I would expect. They aren’t really angels, they are businesspeople! I’m just kind of shocked they haven’t fixed the billing yet. My company has lots of old bugs that don’t get fixed but if any new bug comes up related to payment, that is fixed lickety-split. Red is not the new black. :p
If etsy’s growth graph was readable and had actual dollar values on the axes, you could roughly calculate how much money in fees they would have made since January and calculate how much interest that money has been earning us by keeping it instead of earning etsy money if it was in their bank accounts instead of ours. It has to be a significant amount.
The people who sell a lot would be smart to not pay their bill manually, there isn’t any penalty for late payment since the lateness is etsy’s fault and why not let the money work for you in the meantime?
May 31st, 2007 at 3:41 pm
I’m one of those people. I have most of my bills on autopay and it’s only this month I realized etsy has not been autocharging.
You’d all die if you saw my outstanding charges - from Jan (feb bill) through now.