Support Email Issues Resolved
Stella says everything’s working fine now.
Thanks for the update, Stella!
Archive for April, 2007
Stella says everything’s working fine now.
Etsy Will Not Restrict Solicitations In Fora
Solicitation, whether for money (personal or charitable) or for action (petitions or activism), has been quite a hot-button topic on the Etsy fora recently. Etsy (via Stella) made an announcement this morning to clarify Etsy’s stand on this issue:
stellaloella says:
The Etsy staff are compassionate people. We absolutely love helping others. In fact, it’s an integral part of Etsy’s mission — helping people make a living making things.Helping others builds community. It reinforces connections between people — either as one person helping another or by uniting individuals around a common cause.
For these reasons, we are reluctant to institute a “no solicitation” rule on the Forums.
The true spirit of charity is is to help someone other than yourself without expecting any personal gain in return. As long as this spirit is evident, I don’t see any reason to disallow threads about charitable causes on our Forums.
A thread on the Forums is not the same as a message in your inbox (which would be spam). It is not addressed to an individual but the community at large. It’s like tacking up a notice on the bulletin board at the post office, not stuffing all the PO boxes with fliers or knocking on people’s doors in a confrontational manner. Because it’s not personal, you have a choice whether or not to read and respond to it. You have no obligation (social or otherwise) to participate.
If it gets out of hand, we may change our position. But for now, we want to keep the door open to kindness, generosity and community. (If we discover that someone is using the guise of charity fraudulently, we will of course take the appropriate action in that specific case, because that’s just not cool.)
As far as charitable solicitation in the marketplace side of Etsy (within your listings), what I’ve previously posted on that still stands:
You cannot create a listing solely for the purpose of collecting money for a charity. The listing must be for an ITEM for sale. If you choose to donate some/all of the proceeds of the item’s sale to a charity, that’s fine, but be certain you can/will do that if you include it in your listing. False advertising is bad business.
Posted at 11:17 am, April 30 2007 EST
It’s great to have the clarification.
Showcase On Sale April 30th (Today!) at Noon EDT / Make Up Spots Now Different
Excerpts from this blog entry, which you should read for complete details:
The next two weeks of Showcase spots (May 5th - May 18th) will be going on sale April 30th at 12:00 P.M E.D.T.
Rescheduled Spots To Make Up For The Site Issues On April 22nd and April 23rd:
Please Read Carefully
If you had a spot in the Main Showcase or the Mother’s Day Showcase on April 22nd or April 23rd* you will be rescheduled as follows:
[snip]
*yes , I know I mentioned April 21st and 22nd before. That was incorrect, the site was up for the full 24 hours on the 21st
Please note the difference in who gets replacement spots.
Also, here’s a link to the Showcase Gateway.
Help Etsy Squash the Search Bug - Check Your Items
EDIT: Based on the discussion now happening in the thread, the search problem looks pretty serious. If possible, you should really check your items for search both by tags/titles, and within categories.
In this thread, a non-flaming Haim posts an update to the problem with some items not coming up in search and a request:
haim says:
We’re aware of an issue with listings sometimes not properly showing up in searches/category browsing. It remains a difficult bug to reproduce and we could use your help.If you don’t see your listing showing up in search results within 15 minutes of completion please post here with as many details as possible.
For example:
- Listing id
- Was it a new listing, relist or renew?
- How long did it take you to complete the listing?
- Did you do anything to the listing after it was completed, moved to a category changed to edit, etc…
- Anything else odd you may have seen.Together we’ll squash the little bugger!
- H
Great post - thanks Haim! Anyone who has info, please add your experience to his thread - thanks!
Auto-Billing Not Working, Yet Again
In an email sent to sellers (Edit: being sent in batches over the weekend), Etsy says:
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. 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. 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
Bills stopped being autocharged sometime early in the year (March 27). Then Etsy said April bills would be autocharged (April 5). Now, apparently, those bills will not be autocharged.
If you’re a seller, check your bills, so you don’t get an ugly surprise.
Edit: Also, there is no specific mention of “lateness penalties” anywhere on the Etsy site - not the TOU, the FAQs, the D&Ds, or the Fees page. There is a sentence in the D&D about accounts being suspended until overdue bills are paid, but it’s not clear that’s to what the email refers, since “penalties” is plural. So clarification would be nice.
(Thanks to Cindy/StarryDesigns and others for the heads-up.)
Error: Some Items Not Showing Up In Search (Updated)
EDIT:
Rokali has acknowledged the problem, although no fix is yet in place:
Rokali says:
We’re aware that this problem exists and we and investigating why. Once we find this out, we’ll fix it. We know it has something to do with caching & the read-only database (which exists now that we have replication in place).
Posted at 4:07 pm, April 28 2007 EST
(Thanks to schoollocker for the heads-up. Man, am I glad for all you folks who send us info!)
According to several sellers, some newly listed items are not only not showing up in their category, but are not able to be found by search.
The workaround seems to be that if you edit the listing and finish, it will then start showing up in searches and the category.
EDIT: This doesn’t seem to be limited to newly listed items. Also, the edit/finish fix may not work the first time. Please see this thread for more details.
We strongly suggest you check to make sure your items are searchable.
(Thanks to greenchairpress for the heads-up.)
Duplicate Item Listing Error
Several people have posted threads in the Etsy fora about a problem with duplicate items appearing after a listing, and when deleting one, both items are deleted, resulting in having to start over again with the listing.
The workaround seems to be that if you edit one of the items and click finish, the other will go away. In some cases, the duplicate has stuck around for a while, though. Whatever you do, don’t delete one of the duplicates; both listings will be deleted. And if you just can’t get the problem to go away, email support@etsy.com.
Image Speed Issues Resolved
In this thread, RD says:
RevolvingDork
Etsy Admin says:
Thanks to some configuration changes made by Haim late last night to the imaging system, the images should be running much more quickly than they were.Let us know if you are experiencing any issues with them here!
Posted at 10:06 am, April 27 2007 EST
Definitely use that thread to report any problems - and we’d love to hear feedback here at UEN on whether you are experiencing improvement on the site!
Technical Issues With Support Email and Etsy Blog
From this thread:
stellaloella
Etsy Admin says:
Just wanted to let you all know that the support team is experiencing a few problems with our email server today. We thought this was an internal-only issue, but it seems some users are getting errors when trying to send email to support [!at] etsy.com, abuse [!at] etsy.com and flagged [!at] etsy.com.This impacts our out-going emails also, so there may be a delay in replies today.
We’re working to fix it ASAP. Thanks for your patience, and our sincerest apologies for the inconvenience.
Posted at 1:10 pm, April 26 2007 EST
And related, in another thread:
matt says:
The whole blog is having some issues. We are working on an internal email issue, so that might be messin’ with it. I’ll keep you updated
Posted at 3:45 pm, April 26 2007 EST
Do You Know The Secrets of the Search Bar?
From the revised FAQs:
You can use multiple terms in a search to narrow down the results. You can also use special operators. Using NOT in front of a word will exclude that term from your search. You can also use % as a wildcard operator to search when you only know part of a term. For example, using “sellers: usernames” on the drop-down menu and searching for “%love” will return results for all shops with the word “love” somewhere in the name.
Hope this helps!
