Archive for September, 2008
September 30, 2008 at 6:13 pm · Filed under Categories · By Deja Vu
On October 6, 2008, at 6 PM Eastern U.S. time, a new top level Category will be launched for Dolls and Miniatures. See this thread from HeyMichelle for complete details and commenting, including a request for feedback and ideas about sub and sub-subcategories. The corresponding Storque article gives details to sellers about how to add items to this category. They have also advised that they will be creating a Category Showcase for Dolls and Miniatures which will launch at a later date (not on October 6).
This has been a long time coming, and there must be some happy DAM sellers today.
September 29, 2008 at 3:40 am · Filed under Events, Miscellaneous · By JB
On Thursday, October 2, 2008 at 2pm EDT, Etsy will have representatives from the United States Postal Service (USPS) join then in a seminar to answer questions about holiday shipping options.
Some of the areas they will cover:
Time saving techniques
Overnight and expedited shipping options
How to save on international shipping online
Where to order eco-friendly boxes
How to print postage online
Walk through the USPS shipping assistant product
The seminar will be conducted via an off-etsy web-based conferencing site, meetingplace.net. It won’t be in the virtual labs. The conference has a capacity of 100 people. If you want to participate, register at shippingrsvp@etsy.com. Etsy will then send a confirmation to the first 100 emails and send their regrets to the rest. If you aren’t included in the first session, don’t worry, USPS has offered to conduct an additional seminar (date TBD).
Please see this Storque article for more details.
September 28, 2008 at 9:16 pm · Filed under Privacy, Site Terms · By JB
Etsy updated their privacy policy on September 25.
In an effort to make the Privacy Policy easier to understand and more user-friendly, we have made a few revisions. We have also added information to the policy regarding how your personal information is used for Etsy’s email newsletters and the Invite A Friend feature.
For more information please see this Storque article.
Etsy also sent Etsy Alert emails about the change to members who are opted in to receive those emails, and they have a notice about it when you log in from the Etsy homepage.
Also see this past UEN article about the last change to the Privacy Policy. That time I went through the new policy line by line to find all the changes. If I have time I do plan to do the same thing this time, so check back for updates.
September 25, 2008 at 12:23 pm · Filed under Categories, Listings, Search · By GreenMamba
In this Storque article, admin stellaloella follows up on Etsy CTO Chad Dickerson’s Honest Beginning article, speaking frankly about the current state of Etsy’s search feature and the lag time in batch loading to category pages.
Excerpt:
Last week Etsy’s new CTO, Chad Dickerson wrote an honest account of some of the technical challenges Etsy.com is currently facing, specifically in reference to the search function. In that article, Chad mentioned some new hardware and “other tweaks” to improve things. Many of you may be curious about what we’re working on, how it’s helping and how it will impact your ability to shop and sell on Etsy. So let’s get right into the nitty gritty …
New Hardware
Without getting into too many technical details, last week we added some new hardware with the goal of improving speed. We’re happy to say so far it’s helped, and some of our slowest queries more than doubled in speed. This is a great improvement, but still below our internal goals — which means there is more work ahead. The Engineers are continuing to monitor search speeds and page load times.
The article goes on to address the following topics:
Simple Searches Redirect to Categories
Limited Number of Search Terms (or “My nots are not working!”)
Batch Loading in Search and Categories
What Does This Mean For Sellers? (or “How will shoppers find my items?”)
Excerpt:
Looking Ahead
Chad and the Engineering Team are working on longer-term solutions to our current search issues. We don’t want to disrupt site performance during the holiday shopping season, so in the meantime, the above measures are aimed at the goal of ensuring people can find and purchase the many incredible items available on Etsy.
We’ve closed commenting on this article. If you would like to comment, please join the discussion in this Forum thread.
September 23, 2008 at 10:37 pm · Filed under Vacation Mode · By dangerousmezzo
Etsy has introduced two new features on the site: Vacation Mode and Batch Deactivation.
The Storque article can be read here: http://www.etsy.com/storque/section/etsyNews/article/tech-update-vacation-mode-for-sellers-now-live/2513/
The associated Forum thread is here: http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5821667
From The Storque article:
These features provide different solutions for sellers to quickly and temporarily “close” a shop or make certain items inactive when they will be away from Etsy for an extended time. Read on to learn all about how to use these new tools in your Etsy shop.
When in Vacation Mode, items in a seller’s shop cannot be purchased. The seller’s shop will appear empty, with a special vacation announcement. The seller’s items can still be viewed via a direct item link (if they are linked from an outside blog for example), and can still be Hearted (added to favorites), but will not appear in site searches or the Category Browser. Buyers can sign up to be notified via email when the seller returns from Vacation Mode.
September 19, 2008 at 9:42 pm · Filed under Customer Service, Site Maintenance · By dangerousmezzo
Etsy has added a new alert at log in, just below the top navigation bar (where alerts currently appear regarding feedback and billing).
Today’s login alert reads
Etsy will be performing site maintenance starting 7pm Sunday EDT. Click here to read more.
In this forum thread Stellaloella asks:
What suggestions does the community have for us? What do you all think it would be important enough (other than site maintenance) to require a login alert?
September 17, 2008 at 12:23 pm · Filed under Convos, Features, Listings, The Future · By GreenMamba
Etsy announces the impending arrival (no firm ETA) of a long-asked-for feature, Shop Vacation Mode, and gives a sneak peek at how it will look and function:
Excerpt from the Storque:
Here’s a sneak peak of Etsy’s upcoming feature, Vacation Mode. Vacation Mode allows a seller to put her shop on hold if she is out of town, sick, or otherwise wants to take a break from selling. We’ll be rolling it out soon, so keep an eye out!
When in Vacation Mode, items in a seller’s shop cannot be purchased. The seller’s shop will appear empty, with a special vacation announcement. The seller’s items can still be viewed via a direct item link (if they are linked from an outside blog for example), and can still be Hearted (added to favorites), but will not appear in site searches or the Category Browser. Buyers can sign up to be notified via email when the seller returns from Vacation Mode.
How it works:
Your personal Vacation Mode settings:
- From “Your Etsy” click on “Vacation Mode” under Shop Setup.
- The Vacation Mode page has prompts for a vacation announcement, Convo auto-response, and on/off switch.
- Enter your desired announcement message and Convo auto-response about being on vacation.
- Leave the on/off radio buttons set to “off” if you are just setting up the process at this point and click “Save.”
Turning Vacation Mode on and off:
- When you are ready to go on vacation, click on Vacation Mode from Your Etsy and set it to “on” and save.
- Your shop will now be in Vacation Mode and will function differently:
- Your Shop Announcement has been replaced with your Vacation Announcement.
- Items no longer appear in your shop.
- Any Convos sent to you will get an auto-reply.
- On your Shop page, Potential buyers will see a field where they can opt into having Etsy notify them when the seller returns from vacation. Their email addresses will be kept private.
- On all of your listing pages, a banner appears across the top announcing that the shop is temporarily closed and the “Add to cart” button has been replaced with a greyed-out “on vacation” notice.
- Your items no longer appear in Gift Guides, searches, Category Browser, flash apps such as Pounce, Colors, Shop Local, or Geolocator.
For complete details about this - and a related ‘batch deactivation’ - feature, please read the full Storque article.
To comment, join the discussion on this Etsy forum thread.
September 16, 2008 at 5:44 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · By dangerousmezzo
Chad Dickerson has written his first Tech Update article for The Storque: An Honest Beginning for Etsy’s New CTO
http://www.etsy.com/storque/article/2578/
Comments are closed in the Storque article, but there is an associated Forum thread for discussion:
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5810614
September 15, 2008 at 7:22 pm · Filed under Down Time · By dangerousmezzo
The entire Etsy site is down for the second time today. Although we’ve been told in the past to check the old Etsy blog at http://fix.etsy.com for updates in the case of site down time, nothing has been updated there for quite some time.
UPDATE: After being down for over half an hour, the site is back up, for now.
Matt closed this thread with the following information:
Hello,
We dropped the ball here, and I am sorry for it. We are making sure that this will not happen again.
Please stay tuned here: http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5809148 for official word on the outage.
Thanks, Matt
Matt begins the official thread (above) with the following post:
Friends,
Today at around 7:00 pm EDT, some visitors to Etsy were unable to access the site. We are now up and running again, and investigating exactly what happened. I wlll keep you updated here as news arises.
Thank you for your patience.
Matt
Some commenters in that thread point out that the outage was more like 45 minutes. Matt also apologized in another thread for the lack of updates at fix.etsy.com and says that they’ll try to make sure that an update is added next time.
UPDATE: Etsy has updated the blog at fix.etsy.com, and has removed all content except for this new post:
“Monday, September 15, 2008
It’s an unhappy day when Etsy goes down, and doubly unhappy when the site that’s supposed to give status updates on Etsy being down is having its own set of problems.
This is what we experienced today, and we’re sorry. We’re staying up late tonight to talk about what caused both mishaps, and what we can do to prevent them from happening again.
We’ll be posting more in our own forums, and revamping this status page, too.
- Chad, Maria, Rob, Matt and all us Etsy folk”
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.
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