Etsy issued an update on last week’s Etsy billion error which saw approximately 0.1% of their total active sellers’ experience incorrect charges from their bank accounts. As a result, sellers saw two main problems such as managing refunds for the incorrect debits and pending deposits.
Etsy released a statement on Friday in their Community forum saying that they “sincerely apologize for the trouble and confusion this may have caused.” They said that Etsy billing error happened as a result of updating their billing system. Sellers that were incorrectly charged were refunded the fees. A smaller number of merchants saw the incorrect charges stopped by their card issuers. This could be because of the failed transactions due to the lack of funds or banks not approving the charges as potentially unusual. To resolve the problem, Etsy revised the deposits scheduled for Friday and rescheduled them for Tuesday 19th February. Here are some additional insights from Etsy into what happened and how they’re committed to taking the necessary steps to prevent future errors:
Statement on Etsy billing error
“On Friday afternoon, we made an update to our billing system. Unfortunately, the update contained an error. While we were able to reverse the error in the update within a matter of minutes, the error ultimately led to three things happening:
A small group of sellers (approximately 0.1% of total active sellers) had incorrect charges go through to their payment card on file. Within hours, we initiated refunds to incorrectly charged cards.
An even smaller group of sellers had incorrect charges that were attempted, but declined by the card issuer.
We then reversed deposits scheduled for Friday and rescheduled them for Tuesday, February 19. This included deposits for sellers affected by incorrect card charges as well as those not affected.
We notified sellers and our support team was also at the ready to respond to any questions. We continue to provide additional support to these sellers, including reimbursing associated overdraft fees.
While it’s important for us to be transparent about what happened, we realize it’s even more important to take action. We assembled a Payments task force, including senior executives across Etsy as soon as the incident began. Now that we have addressed the original error, this task force is shifting to a comprehensive review of how the error occurred. Using these learnings, we will identify opportunities to improve and strengthen our existing processes to help ensure this doesn’t happen in the future.”
– Etsy
