On Etsy, technical glitch = permanent problem

As implied by Chad in his Storque article, Etsy's infrastructure is a hot mess of patches and hacks, fundamentally flawed and being crushed under an ever-increasing mass of sellers. Think of Bre's hammock, duct-taped and full of sumo wrestlers.

Although admin grudgingly admitted the issues in this forum thread and Storque article nearly a week ago, there are still sellers posting in Bugs and Business wondering WTF is going on with listings and categories. For those still confused, here's the straight shit.


The batch upload lags are permanent.


The problem will not be fixed before the holidays.


Now, dear EB readers, stop your wailing and rending of garments. After all, haven't you seen that little notice during the listing process stating that listings may take as long as 24 hours to appear? Etsy already covered their ass on that one, and, as Stella says, it's not that the system is broken, "it's just not meeting your expectations".

Your silly, foolish expectations. Your ridiculous expectation that when you list something at 9am it might show up in the system before noon. Your utterly stupid expectation that when buyers browse a category page they might see more than just the same 21 items sitting there for an hour. Your outrageous expectation that listing and browsing should be a swift, intuitive and simple process for a site with over 60 employees and millions of dollars in investor backing.

Expectations that have been encouraged and promoted by admin themselves, not only recommending renewing as a promotional method in the forums, but renaming "Expiry Dates" to "Renew Items" so that method of spending our 20 cents is just a little bit easier to find.

But hey, chin up! Etsy feels your pain. They're just asking for your patience and understanding... for the past three years. Oh, and they know it's "little consolation" to sellers who've seen their own sales drop - but Etsy's overall sales are doing great! Sales are up! Listings are up even more than sales! Never mind that when the rise in listings is greater than the rise in sales it means sales-to-listing ratios are actually dropping! Just chug that kool-aid and think of how much money Etsy is making and everything will be fine.

In the words of one sharp seller on that thread, Etsy, don't try to placate or distract us. You created this clusterfuck by exploiting a piece of bad site design that turned out to be profitable. Now your sellers are paying for it, literally.