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.
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
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.
According this this post by Etsy:
daniellexo says:
Hi Guys!
We’re upgrading servers this week so there may be some quirks with the virtual labs. Hang in there!
~Danielle
Posted at 2:33 pm, July 15 2008 EST
In this thread, admin EmilyBidwell addresses reported issues with Etsy checkout. Some users are getting error messages from PayPal, which prevent completion of purchases in the Etsy cart.
emilybidwell says:
RE: http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5695780
Hi Everyone,Thank you so much for your patience! We have been meeting with PayPal to find out why certain customers are getting PayPal errors at checkout in particular Etsy Seller Shops. At this time, PayPal has decided to escalate our case to a priority. This means that PayPal is dedicated to pin-pointing the problem as soon as possible for all of us. Etsy should be updated in the next 48 hours with news.
We thank Bluewaterstudio for helping Etsy and PayPal diagnose the problem, despite a super busy business schedule. We really appreciate this.
If anyone else wants to help, or report their experience, please email me at support [!at] etsy.com.
Here is information that might help PayPal figure out the problem:
- Your PP email address (PayPal username)
- Are you the buyer or the seller?
- If you are the seller, what are the usernames of the customers who had trouble?
- Describe the error message PayPal gives you
- A screen shot of the error message on PayPalMany thanks!!!
Emily
Posted at 4:31 pm, July 14 2008 EST
According to this Etsy thread, users of some ISP’s have been reporting connectivity issues to Etsy which are caused by Etsy moving their servers to a new data center. (These are the physical location of the server machines)
alternate link to Etsy thread if you cannot access Etsy
Rokali says:
Hi everyone,As people here have seen, this is a DNS issue. Anytime any changes to DNS are made, those changes have to propagate to servers around the world. This can take a bit of time.
We’re in the process of migrating from one data center to another (larger) data center. As part of this migration, we moved our DNS servers. This means they got a new IP address. (There are always at least two DNS servers, for redundancy, so it’s multiple IP addresses, and we set Primary, Secondary, Tertiary etc. status for each of them).
It’s these new IP addresses that needs to propagate. Being well aware of this, we kept our old DNS servers up & running, so as the new IP addresses propagated, even if people still hit the old IP addresses, it would work.
This did work, but we recently discovered an edge case, which causes problems. This edge case is a good example of how intertwined the Web is.
In order for Etsy not to be loading for you, the following three ingredients need to be in the recipe of how you connect to the site:
1. Your internet service provider (ISP) has been slow to update its own DNS servers (this happens daily for almost all ISPs), and hasn’t recognized the new IP addresses of our DNS servers
2. You’re hitting the secondary DNS server at our old data center
3. You’re getting a specific type of error message from this DNS server, due to how your request has been routed (what “hops” it’s taking)
*Then* you have problems accessing Etsy.
We have made special changes to how the secondary DNS server handles these requests, and we expect this to resolve the issue. It might still take a bit of time, because the fix needs to propagate out to the rest of the world.
In an ideal world, our changes would propagate out to all the DNS servers in the amount of time they’re supposed to (1-2 days). Alas, some ISPs take their time, and for that ~1% it can take more like 5 days.
As some people here have noted, you can manually change what DNS servers you use on your computer, but in general this isn’t something we’d recommend. It can slow down accessing other sites on the Web.
Of course please keep letting us know here if any of the issues persist.
Footnote: What is an IP address? It’s a numerical locator, that gets mapped to a domain name. For example, www.etsy.com is also 72.37.157.20 — you can copy that string into your Web browser and use it to visit this site. (Your browser might try and force you to use the domain name though.)
Back when the Web first started, there weren’t domain names, there were only IP addresses. But these were really hard to remember, hence the need for domain names.
A DNS server is what connects the domain name (www.etsy.com) to the IP address (72.37.157.20), approximately speaking. There are master lists on DNS servers around the world, and anytime a domain name points to a different IP, these servers need to update what domain points to what IP address.
Disclaimer: This explanation is oversimplified, and I’m not a system administrator. This is what I’ve learned from reading up on the issue, and getting some input from Etsy’s own sys admins, who have been amazingly busy keep the site up & fast. They’re doing a great job.
If you *really* want to learn more, there’s always Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address
Posted at 11:19 pm, June 28 2008 EST -
earlier in the same thread, Revolving Dork said:
RevolvingDork says:
Hi all,We’ve gotten some scattered reports of users being unable to access Etsy, generally receiving “cannot connect” errors from their browsers.
We’ve run all of our diagnostic tools, and everything appears to be running properly within our network. Our global monitoring tools also have not shown any activity out of the ordinary.
We have been in touch with various ISPs, and we believe we have found the root of the issue. With their cooperation, the issue should be resolved quickly.
We’ll share more information with you as we receive it. In the meantime, if you or anyone you’re in contact with is having Etsy connectivity problems, please post their location here and the nature of their problems.
Thank you!
Posted at 5:24 pm, June 28 2008 EST -
There was an earlier thread that was locked, in which RD said the problem was not on Etsy’s end, and the failure was most likely due to some ISP.
RevolvingDork says:
Hi all,We’ve gotten some scattered reports of users being unable to access Etsy, generally receiving “cannot connect” errors from their browsers.
We’ve run all of our diagnostic tools, and everything appears to be running properly within our network. Our global monitoring tools also have not shown any activity out of the ordinary.
The evidence we have so far is pointing towards a failure in one or more ISPs ( internet service providers ) around the world, causing routing problems and cutting some users off from Etsy’s servers. This issue is unfortunately out of our hands, as we only have control over our internal network.
We are in contact with our ISP to see if they have any more information about potential issues. They are also reporting no problems currently, but we’re working with them to figure out the root cause of the issue.
We’ll share more information with you as we receive it. In the meantime, if you or anyone you’re in contact with is having Etsy connectivity problems, please post their location here and the nature of their problems.
No kidding. The view counters have been upgraded and improved to be more stable and accurate and, in many cases, lost views from months past have been restored.
Read about it here.
RevolvingDork says:
To the delight of our engineers and (hopefully) our sellers also, we are very pleased to let you know that view tallies should be functioning properly once again.
As many of our sellers know, we’ve experienced a recurring problem for the past several months that caused listing view tallies to sporadically reset. This forced the affected view counts to drop to “1″.
We’ve developed a new, more reliable view tally system. As a result, most sellers will see a shift in their item view counts today. In addition to keeping accurate counts going forward, we were able to restore all view count data since January 1, 2008, even if a listing’s view count was reset during this time. Unfortunately, we were unable to retain data prior toJanuary 1, 2008, so some listings may experience a decease in views if they were on the site prior to the start of the calendar year. Think of it as a fresh start for the new year, with (most importantly) accurate information.We are very sorry for the inconvenience caused by this problem, and we thank all our members for your patience as we worked on a solution. We are hopeful that this new tally system is a solid solution that will provide reliable info. Giving credit where it’s due, we’d like to give big thanks to Etsy engineers, Jorge and CB aka etsybozo who solved this challenging problem. We’ve tested this system thoroughly, but there is always a chance that an issue may arise once we have it running on the live site. If there is an issue, we’ll be sure to alert you through the Storque and the Etsy News Alerts email list. If you continue to experience problems or just have questions, please let us know here!
Here is a brief Q & A about the new system:
Q. Some of my listings lost views counts AGAIN! What’s going on?
A. We’ve been able to restore all view counts that occurred between the dates of January 1, 2008 and June 17, 2008. If your listings’ views occurred outside of that range, they were not able to be included in the new count.Q. My view counts jumped up! Why did that happen?
A. Your listings now reflect all of the view activity between January 1, 2008 and June 17, 2008. If your view counts have jumped, it’s because they were reset in the past and have now been restored.Posted at 4:07 pm, June 18 2008 EST
Reports have surfaced detailing a glitch, or bug, in the listing process. Line breaks placed between paragraphs in the listing description seem to disappear at the last step (step 5 or page 5), resulting in a condensed block of text. It has been discovered that if the user clicks the ‘Finish’ button and the listing is published, all text appears to be formatted as it should be. Read about it here and here.
While trying to provide an example of the condensed description, another somewhat more alarming bug was discovered. A seller provided a direct link (instead of a screenshot) to the page containing the non-formatted listing description, as an example, and any user who clicked it ended up in that seller’s account. Access was limited to the one page being viewed (for example, clicking on ‘Currently For Sale’ in the left sidebar menu took me to MY current listings, not the other seller’s listings), but the fact that it could be accessed at all was cause for concern. The seller did end up with a duplicate listing of the item being listed. No word on whether that was caused by another user testing out the links and buttons, or by RD behind the scenes while he was investigating.
The security issue has been resolved. In the future, any direct links should lead to the brickwall graphic, accompanied by this textual warning “You’ve reached an error: You don’t have permission to change or remove this information. Go back” Thanks RD for the super-quick response!
The line-break issue is still under investigation.
RevolvingDork says:
There was an issue that allowed that final listing creation step to be viewed if the direct URL was given, but it’s now been corrected and is no longer possible.
Back onto the issue at hand, we’re checking out the spacing on step 5 and hope to have that solved soon…
Posted at 10:18 pm, June 17 2008 EST
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5670311&page=9
UPDATE by GreenMamba 6-18-08
The line-break issue has been resolved.
RevolvingDork says:
Thanks for your help in tracking this one down — it should be fixed up now!
Posted at 10:39 am, June 18 2008 EST
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5670311&page=10
After unveiling the new Shop Policies page On May 15, many members reported that their policies would randomly blank out, requiring them to input the info anew. Admin RevolvingDork started two fact-finding threads to help pinpoint the cause, and it was determined that expiring listings somehow affected the policies’ ability to ’stick’. After four days and no new reports of vanishing policies, it now appears that the issue has been succesfully resolved. Yay!
RevolvingDork says:
We’re pretty sure that the issue with the policy page has been resolved, meaning that policies should no longer be cleared out on their own.
If you have policies that have been cleared, they will not come back on their own — you’ll have to enter them again. If you have entered them newly as of the time of this posting, and they dissapear *after* that point, please let us know!
Posted at 1:41 pm, June 2 2008 EST - Report this post
UEN previously covered this issue here.
Members have been reporting that sellers and items that they have added to their Favorites are vanishing without a trace. These are not instances of items expiring or being deleted by the seller, nor of sellers closing shop, which leaves behind a greyed-out box where the item/seller used to be. Some members report having to ‘heart’ the same sellers over and over again, only to have them continually disappear.
Despite these reports, RD says:
If you don’t see something in your favorites list anymore, it’s because it is unavailable for some reason.
If it is a listing, it may be deleted or in edit mode. If it’s a seller, they may no longer have an active account.
The favorites system is working properly, and as far as we’ve seen there have been no confirmed cases of favorites being lost.
If you have any information you believe to be evidence otherwise, please let us know! :]
Posted at 9:48 pm, May 28 2008 EST - Report this post
Click here to follow the current thread, and/or add your own experiences with this bug.
An older thread documenting the same issue can be found here.
