Friday, July 3, 2009

When Etsy Turns Evil

So I bought a Showcase spot in the Supplies category of etsy yesterday, to promote my digital alphabet collection and to ideally burn through some of the supplies backlog in my pumpkinbear etsy shop (I have a bad little habit of rescuing craft items, especially vintage stuff, that I have no plan for using myself). A showcase spot costs seven dollars and puts one of your items at the top of the page of whatever category you've paid for, in a photo bigger than the photos of the items in the lists below. When I bought a showcase spot in the Children category last month, I got a lot of hits and a lot of hearts and some modest sales, including one wholesale order, which was nice.

Who knows who could have found me through my showcase yesterday, because on etsy yesterday, the showcases were all broken.

Seriously.

If you were using Internet Explorer as your Internet browser, you could not click on an item that you saw in a Showcase, nor could you scroll through the Showcase items to see them all. And this was the case from midnight to approximately 6:00 pm.

So yeah, maybe it's not the most sophisticated or imaginative choice out there, but it is the one that comes with the box, and I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of web browsers use Internet Explorer. And midnight to 6:00 pm does contain, I'm pretty sure, some mighty popular times for internet use. So I sent an email, first thing in the morning, actually, to customer care at etsy, telling them that I'd be wanting a refund or a transfer to a different showcase date, since my showcase spot wasn't working as it was supposed to.

Here's my awesome reply, which didn't come until after the Showcases were fixed, about 10 hours after my email:

Hello Julie,

Thanks for your email. This bug is fixed and all of the items listed in the Showcase can now be viewed. Etsy shoppers who visit the site use various browsers so the amount of people not able to scroll was very limited.

Thanks for being a member of the Etsy community.

All the best,
Joe
Etsy Support

So not only are the people at Etsy browser snobs, but now they're shafting me out of my hard-earned seven bucks? A terser restatement of my request ensued, but now Joe's ignoring me, of course, so we'll have to see what happens with that.

Want to see what would have been in my Showcase, if you could have clicked on it and bought all my stuff all day yesterday?

4.15 oz of Superwash Merino in Rainbow Colors (because you can't felt superwash)
Vintage Brown Owl Needlepoint Greeting Card Kit
E-Z Bow Maker
You totally want that E-Z Bow Maker in particular, I know. You dream at night about making honking big swag bows to put on the ends of church pews.
Ooh, or maybe your front door!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That totally sucked. Think it's time to try Artfire?

I actually have lusted after the EZ bowmaker before...but I have since gotten treatment and am no longer wanting it. ;) The merino wool is still lustable even if it can't be felted.