Hello everyone,
A few days ago, you may have experienced or heard about an Etsy bill payment error. When the error first occurred, our top priority was to fix the error and notify affected sellers as quickly as possible. Now that we’ve addressed the error, we’d like to offer our community some additional insight into what happened and, more importantly, reaffirm Etsy’s commitment to taking the necessary steps to help prevent future errors.
First off, we sincerely apologize for the trouble and confusion this may have caused. We know that all of our sellers trust Etsy to help run their creative business, and that is a responsibility we do not take lightly.
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.
I hope this information provides a little more clarity into what happened on Friday and appreciate your patience as we worked to resolve the error.
Sincerely,
Morgan Blake
Head of Payments at Etsy
