Etsy has Bugs

DW Jenny makes her living selling stuff and lately patterns on Etsy, the website for crafters. Etsy has attracted mockers in the form of Regretsy, which is adolescent but occasionally funny.

Etsy had been growing rapidly with sales on pace for $450 million for 2011 over the $314 million in 2010.

Etsy Sales; Note the 2011 sales are in
the original caption.

Our issue with Etsy is a bug in their software. Most sellers forward their customers to Paypal automatically to pay. Paypal extracts several percent commission, but usually this goes flawlessly. Yesterday, Etsy sent incorrect email addresses to my wife's customer -- creating confused and angry customers.

I am posting about this since there have been almost nothing on-line about this bug. (We did find a similar issue on the Etsy bulletin board.) It looks like Etsy restored some old data; presumably because the newer data got corrupted.  Jenny had her old defunct email address replace her current one, and Paypal posted the funds to the wrong account.

Etsy seems to have had a hacker attack, a virus or perhaps just bad luck with hard drives.

Anyway. Jenny lost a $60 sale, and had a customer leave multiple bad feedback. All for a software bug at the host website.

Etsy is so understaffed that it does not try to answer complaints one-at-a-time. Jenny got a form-letter back when she contacted Etsy.

I suppose it could be worse. The customer will keep her money, and no harm was done.

If anyone has had similar issue, please leave a comment. Thanks.