It's not me, it's you

We all know that when a seller has a technical problem with their Etsy store, it’s their fault. I mean, all they have to do is clear their cache, reboot their computer, download and install Firefox, and go to Brooklyn to smack a few IT people in order to fix it.

Over the years, there have been some amazingly unresponsive responses from Etsy engineers regarding seller problems. And though some of the time it really is a matter of the seller being unfamiliar with the site (like inactive and expired items), the fact remains that there was a time when shop policies disappeared, counters reset, the site came up blank when no others did, the servers dragged, the site crashed, the line from New York was cut for some places in the world, and new features were implemented with bugs. Yet, it was always the seller’s problem.

Here are some classic, yet recent, Revolving Dork responses you may loathe as much as I do.

• ‘Be sure to click the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the Shop Policies page after you’re done entering them — if you don’t, your policies will not be saved. Also, look for the message “Your shop policies have been successfully updated.” — if you see that, we’ve received your data and it shouldn’t be going anywhere.’ (Bullshit – he later conceded that there is an issue)

• ‘We haven’t been able to reproduce any occurance of “dissapearing” policies, and we haven’t seen anything in the logs that points to this happening.’ (Yes, he actually put disappearing into quotations and uses this line often! And he can’t spell)

• 'If you’re still having issues, it may be best to use an alternate free browser for file uploads on Etsy.' (Heaven forbid they make Etsy work for Macs)

And remember the expired listing bug, where renewing out of inactive would give less than 4 months?

'Closing this to prevent further misinformation — there is no known issue with expired listings. If you have a specific example of something that looks wrong, let us know and we’ll try to reproduce it.'

Some contradictory responses from other admin –

stellaloela: “The Engineers are aware of this concern; it’s on their list of thing to improve.” (Well obviously not)

SarahSays: “I wish I had an answer for you. All I can say is that there are some valid concerns in this thread. I spoke with some Etsy engineers on this issue.”

kfarrell: “This issue affected a handful of users, and to our knowledge it has been resolved.”

And the classics, and unnecessary when a dozen threads and hundreds of posts have already been directed towards the bug effort:

• 'Internally, everything seems to be running smoothly, and none of our engineers have been able to reproduce the issues that some of reported….You can help us track this down by supplying us with some information.'

• 'This is the way it’s intended to work, and will likely continue to work — but we’re working on revisions that should make things easier.'