Archive for Bugs
March 16, 2009 at 8:20 pm · Filed under Bills, Bugs, Customer Service, Etsy Communications, Payments, policy change · By GreenMamba
Over the weekend (March 15), Etsy published a Storque article announcing some changes to the billing procedure, which included the removal of payment minimums, and the implementation of both an overdue notification process and the future plan to implement the use of a collection agency for accounts 90 days, or more, past due. In the course of these changes, it was mistakenly reported that the previous 15-day grace period had been reduced to 14 and, beginning on March 15 at 12:00 UTC, overdue notices popped up during logon, and in e-mail boxes, for those sellers with a balance in any amount that had been incurred in February (or earlier) but not yet paid.
The confusion led to a series of forum threads asking for clarification, eventual corrections by several admin, an amending of the Storque article that announced these changes, and, ultimately, an official apology from Etsy CEO, Maria Thomas.
Excerpt:
Dear Etsy Sellers,
This is the kind of note CEOs generally don’t enjoy writing. Because, this is the kind of note that says, “We messed up, and we’re sorry.”
Over the weekend, Etsy messed up. We prematurely sent out notices to sellers whose bills we had identified as “overdue.” This overdue notification was a change in our billing process. We did a poor job of fully explaining this change and consistently messaging it across the site and in other communications with our seller community. In addition, the change was poorly timed relative to the March billing cycle and poorly coordinated with our recent introduction of enabling sellers to pay their Etsy fees via PayPal. Introducing PayPal as a payment option for seller fees also allowed us to accept payments of any size, so we simultaneously eliminated the $1.00 minimum payment threshold. We now ask those owing less than $1.00 USD to pay their balances in a timely manner, just like other Etsy sellers.
Regrettably, we did not lay all these messages out in an easily digestible form, and we didn’t deliver them to you in a timely and clear way.
I am ultimately responsible for this poor execution, and I apologize. I know that Etsy sellers need clear, consistent, timely communication from Etsy in order to plan your businesses. That’s our goal, and we will all work harder to be more diligent and timely with future announcements affecting all sellers.
I asked Etsy staff to roll back the changes (that is, to go back to the billing policies and process in effect prior to March 14, 2009) until such time as we are able to more thoroughly and consistently email all of you about what we’re doing and why. Let me repeat, we have moved back to the policies and process that were in effect prior to this weekend’s communications about overdue bills. Please note that sellers will still be able to pay your Etsy bills via PayPal, and you will be able to pay your bill even if the balance is below $1.00 USD.
Read Maria’s full article here.
Editorial comment:
Kudos, Etsy and Maria, for handling this so quickly and professionally, and for owning and correcting the mistakes made during the initial rollout. This is a huge step forward in Communications, and is much appreciated.
February 24, 2009 at 2:06 am · Filed under Bugs, Site Maintenance, Views / Counters · By JB
Early this morning Etsy was down for 4 hours to perform scheduled maintenance. When the site came back up, some users reported their view counts had dropped. This bug has been fixed. Etsy has restored the missing views, except for any views which occurred between 5:45-6:45AM EST.
Source: this forum post and this forum thread.
There was an additional post-maintenance bug in the forums, a few threads got mixed up out of order and some replies are displaying in the wrong threads. The bug seems limited to a few threads posted right before or after the maintenance.
Source: this forum thread
January 16, 2009 at 1:38 am · Filed under Bugs, Site Maintenance · By JB
Source- this Etsy forum thread
matt says:
Hi,
THis is not a browser issue.
We have identified the issue that is causing the intermittent site issues in which users get a page that says “Etsy just experienced a brief hiccup.” We have a plan in place to address this issue.
We have decided to make the needed changes between 4am-8am EST when site load is typically the lowest. If we tried to correct this intermittent issue today during our high-traffic period, we could make what is an intermittent problem more severe, so we made the decision that would have the least impact on our users. The plan we have in place will NOT take the site down during this period, assuming normal traffic levels. So, for the time being, some of you will continue to have these hiccups occur. Tonight’s fix should alleviate the problem.
Please watch http://fix.etsy.com/ for updates tomorrow morning. Thanks again for your patience. We apologize for the issue and look forward to correcting it.
I think this means it’s happening tomorrow morning (Friday morning)
Update 1/16/09
Matt says
This morning around 4:00am, the changes to address the hiccup issue were completed successfully. We are monitoring them closely now.
AOL users may still be seeing the Etsy “hiccup” page because it is cached in AOL’s servers, not in your browser, so clearing your cache may not help. Others using services that use similar proxy servers may also experience the same problem. We made a change to our server configuration that will make this much less likely in the future.
We will keep you posted should anything change.
January 15, 2009 at 8:49 pm · Filed under Bugs, Shop Statistsics, Views / Counters · By JB
Source: this forum thread
Etsy released their stats (google analytics) 1 week ago, and there have been several bug reports and issues concerning the stats since then. These same issues surfaced during the beta testing, before last Thursday.
Today Etsy announced the issues formally, apologized for the problems and asked members for patience while they try to fix the problems.
Summary of the first issue: (for complete quote you can view the forum thread)
stellaloella says:
Dear Etsy sellers,
Last week, Etsy launched Google Analytics for sellers’ shops. Here is the original announcement from the Storque: http://www.etsy.com/storque/article/3141/
…
We apologize for releasing Web Analytics before fully resolving this Traffic Sources issue.
…
The Traffic Sources issue is the result of a tactical mistake in our integration. We share individual visitor tracking cookies between Etsy and Etsy sellers using Google Analytics. This results in Etsy sellers seeing Traffic Sources that relate to how their visitors originally entered Etsy in general, rather than Traffic Sources specific to their shop pages only.
…
We are still reviewing what options are best for our seller community, and we are testing possible solutions. Since Google Analytics reports update once a day, we have to wait 24-36 hours between running these tests to verify the results. We ask for your patience while we work through a few ideas and consult with Google and others to understand what’s possible.
What this means for sellers:
Your current Google Analytics stats are including some erroneous data, both referers and keywords. This bug only affects Traffic Sources. Your pageviews and other visitor data (location, etc) in Google Analytics are not affected and should be reliable.
What you can do about this problem:
Basically nothing- it has to be resolved on Etsy’s end, and changing your GA settings will not solve it.
There is a also second issue which is unrelated to the first.
Sellers have pointed out that links within the Google Analytics Content reports redirect to their shop homepage instead of the proper listing page. This is caused by Etsy giving us incorrect set-up directions about what domain to list in our Google Analytics account settings. They said to use shopname.etsy.com, and actually we should have used www.etsy.com. Etsy will be updating their set-up instructions and FAQ to reflect this as well.
What you can do about this problem:
This is one we can fix ourselves.
If you already have your Analytics set up, here is how to fix this:
– Sign in to your Google Analytics account.
– In the upper right is a menu for “My Analytics Accounts” Select your Etsy shop account. This will take you to the Overview page for that profile.
– Click “Edit” under “Actions for your Etsy shop profile.
– On the Profile setting page, click “Edit” in the grey bar that says “Main Website Profile Information”
– Change the Website URL to http://www.etsy.com (instead of username.etsy.com)
– Click “Save Changes”
– When you view your Content reports in Google Analytics, the external links to specific shop pages should direct to the correct page.
Note that editing this setting will ONLY solve the problem of clickable links in your Content report, it will not correct the first issue of incorrect referers and keywords.
UPDATE Feb 1, 2009
http://etsynews.com/868/etsy-adds-search-terms-to-referals-improves-google-analytics-stats/
January 4, 2009 at 12:46 am · Filed under Bugs, Down Time, Site Maintenance · By JB
Source: http://fix.etsy.com/
Intermittent errors
10:30am EST: As noted in this forum thread, we are done with the server reboots.
9:30am EST: By “intermittent,” we meant problems for a few seconds, if you experienced an issue at all. We just wanted to let you know just in case!
9:01am EST: You may be experiencing intermittent errors on the site right now. We are working on it.
We are also posting updates in this forum thread: http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5939800
This was posted on the morning of Jan 4th.
However just now, at approximately 11:39 PM EST, Etsy had a brief “hiccup” or downtime.
The page said to go to the fix.etsy.com site for more information, but that was down as well.
When Etsy came back up, so did fix.etsy.com.
update:
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5980673&page=2
chaddickerson says:
We did have a network issue that affected access to the site for less than a minute. We are investigating.
Posted at 11:58 pm, January 3 2009 EST - Report this post
December 6, 2008 at 12:01 am · Filed under Bugs, Site Security · By JB
Source- this etsy thread
jorgelo says:
There was a display issue on the homepage that would show random user’s login in the header.
This was just a display error on the header. A user who saw the wrong username in the header was not able to access any account information that did not belong to them.
This happened on a small subset of pages, none of them that require authentication.
Sorry about the issue, and we are working on it.
Posted at 9:02 pm, December 5 2008 EST
More info here (this thread is locked)
jorgelo says:
We just rolled out some changes with caching and ran into some snags. Though it may have looked like you were logged in as someone else, the header was just displaying incorrectly.
Your data is safe.
Posted at 8:53 pm, December 5 2008 ES
Despite these assurances that only the header was cached and no private data was compromised, some users did report anding in another seller’s “Your Etsy” page- the back end of your shop, not the public front view of a shop. The entire page was the other user’s items, from the “your Etsy” viewpoint. So it appears that in some cases, not only the header was displaying the wrong information.
October 22, 2008 at 11:01 pm · Filed under Bugs, Checkout System · By GreenMamba
Etsy sellers may offer international shipping on some items in their shops, but not on others, for a variety of reasons. Usually, when a member attempts to buy an item that does not have her/his specific country, or Everywhere Else, listed in the shipping destintions, the checkout system gives them an error message and they are unable to complete the purchase. However, it has come to light that if a buyer selects at least one item that will ship to their country, all other items from that seller will be allowed, regardless of posted shipping destinations. On top of that, only items in the transaction that are going to ‘approved’ destinations will be charged a shipping fee - the others will not be charged for shipping at all.
See this thread for details. As of this writing, there has been no official response from Etsy admin.
September 15, 2008 at 4:58 pm · Filed under Bugs, Listings · By Deja Vu
Apparently there are some issues with relistings and renewals not showing up in category searches. MaryMary says that “the engineering team is aware of these reports and is currently investigating the situation”. She has asked anyone who is affected to post with specific details in this thread.
August 3, 2008 at 12:10 pm · Filed under Bills, Bugs · By GreenMamba
Some Etsy sellers are reporting a processing error when trying to pay their Etsy bills.
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5742842
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5742843
Credit cards are being declined, or said to be expired, on Etsy’s end when they should not be. Several users reported being charged more than once after making multiple attempts to submit payments (verified through their CC companies). In some cases, Etsy does not record or credit the payment, even after payment has been completed and independently verified.
CAUTION:
Be sure to submit your payment only once. If the payment does not register on Etsy, then verify the payment with your CC company before making any further attempts.
If paying via debit card, submitting a payment more than once could result in overdrafts and accompanying fees.
update by JB, Aug 4
Stellaloella has posted this update
Yesterday (Sunday, August 3) from approximately 4:00 AM to 11:30 AM EDT a small percentage of our sellers experienced a problem paying their Etsy bills. This was due to a malfunction at one of our third-party credit card processor’s gateways. As a result, these sellers were informed that their cards were not charged, when in fact they had been. Some sellers attempted to pay their bills more than once and subsequently were charged more than once.
The malfunction was resolved by 11:30 AM EDT Sunday and all subsequent Etsy bill payments have been recorded and processed correctly. At no time were any credit card numbers or sellers’ personal data exposed.
In order to clear up this problem, our credit card processing company is crediting back all impacted bill payments that occurred during this time period. We are contacting the sellers that were affected to let them know what happened.
We apologize for the inconvenience. Since this is a billing matter, we will work privately with the sellers who were affected. Please contact billing [!at] etsy.com if you have a concern or question regarding this matter or your Etsy bill. Thank you.
Posted at 7:09 pm, August 4 2008 EST
See also: This storque article
July 18, 2008 at 12:44 pm · Filed under Bugs, Convos, Miscellaneous · By GreenMamba
Although there’s no official announcement in either the Etsy fora or the Storque, members have verified that the e-mail auto-reply system is finally up and running. Now, when members attempt to reply to a convo through the duplicate e-mail, they will get a warning message via immediate auto-reply.
Thanks go out to dottyral for the heads-up and for providing the content of the auto-reply message:
dottyral says:
This is fabulous! Thank you admin!
I like that it explains just how to reply. This is the auto reply I received right away…
__________________________
Oops! You tried to reply to an Etsy conversation via email.
To reply you’ll need to go to Etsy, login and click Conversations (in the upper right).
The message you sent was *not received* by the person you tried to send it to.
Thanks!
Etsy
Quoted from this thread.
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