The crafts and vintage Etsy marketplace experienced some technical difficulties on Monday afternoon that impacted shoppers using the site. Described as “performance and availability issues” they persisted for around 3 hours. From reports, it seems specifically that there were problems with accessing the website and difficulties using the search facility
Unverified comments on DownDetector about the issues ranged from difficulty accessing seller manager to problems with printing shipping labels. Do let us know if you experienced any problems using Etsy yesterday and what they were.
The Etsy status board was updated at several times during the incident, and the updates were also issued on Twitter. The most full description regarding the nature of the problem was:
Investigating – Search results are about an hour behind after our performance issue today. The search systems are being updated and we’ll post here when results are completely fresh. Sep 17, 16:10 UTC
– Etsy Status board
As we reported last week, Etsy migrated its website systems and app technology to Google Cloud during two scheduled maintenance periods in August. They have subsequently said that the transition was entirely successful and there is no reason to suspect that the move is in any way responsible for the problem the Etsy marketplace suffered.
One thing that is striking about the merchant comments related to this problem are the mentions that Etsy raised fees earlier in the summer and also rolled postage costs into the total sales price. It’s a useful reminder that when you become more expensive that customers do start to expect more too.
As we often say, problems will occur and technical issues are inevitable with every web based service. But it’s how those glitches are dealt with that counts. Etsy has performed creditably in this instance by providing a swift resolution to the problem but also being transparent and communicative with users.
