Listing Variations Causing Upload Problems

[Former_Member]

This conversation went on in a few threads so I thought it would be helpful to title a thread with it in case anyone else is trying to figure it out in the future. Right now the SD uploader doesn't work if you use listing variations because they get put on the end of the downloaded CSV file from Etsy. In order to get it to work you have to delete those columns. All you have to do is open the CSV file in Excel or another spreadsheet program, scroll all the way over to the right and you'll see them after your image links and can easily delete them. If you've never used a spreadsheet feel free to convo me and I'll help you out with it.

[Former_Member]

Karen,

Thanks for posting this as it would have been very helpful for me to know prior to all my headaches with sd. Yet they still haven't emailed me back, so I thank you so much!

[Former_Member]

I'm not sure what's up with those guys because they used to respond to support questions within an hour or so during business hours and I still haven't gotten a response since November when I asked about what was going on with the Facebook interface that was supposed to be almost ready to go well over a year ago before FB switched to timelines. It was understandable that they had to rework it for the new format but now they won't even answer questions about it. Did they even mention it with your paid membership? I think that we all knew that support would slow down once they had a lot of customers but this is kind of ridiculous. If I were paying I would be upset at having my problems ignored. I sent them a message about this problem too and they didn't reply in any way. This team can be dead for days at a time unless someone has a problem so I really don't mind if you convo me if you get stuck.

[Former_Member]

Thank you karen, yeah as of today still no word. It is a shame that they are getting to big to ignore the customer. We are what makes them the site that they are. I know I pay $29 a month for this service, and they said in my membership about excellent customer service as a perk....yeah right.

I'm just trying to find other revenue centers besides etsy. If i can get half the results on these other sites as I do on etsy, I would be rolling in green backs LOL. Right now I'm using sd, storenvy, fb shop and etsy....the other venues are all new starts so they will take time.

[Former_Member]

Thanks for the update.
Just a bump for others.

What is odd, is that I got a response from them within 2 days.

[Former_Member]

Maybe they're just going through a rough spot or they aren't getting enough new customers from Etsy for the upload to be a priority. Sometimes all it takes for a small company is to lose one key knowledgeable staff member and everything gets backed up. Even if the support gets very slow it doesn't get better than free for a mostly seasonal business like the one that I have there.

My sweater shop is one of those high price / low volume shops and I do OK there relatively speaking but I don't market my Etsy sweater shop at all. I think that between straight sales and custom orders I've made about $2,000 there in almost a year which for me isn't too bad since the vast majority of my sweater sales are custom order for local people offline. I got more orders than I could handle from it over the holidays and I stupidly took them all on anyway, worked 12 hour days and ended up in a wrist brace so that I couldn't work at all for a month and can only do it very slowly for short periods of time now. I'd be crying over it but I took the time out and invested most of the profit into opening a yarn store here and I'm doing OK with it already. I know that it will be a lot more work if it succeeds but for right now it feels like making money for doing my favorite kind of shopping and sticking things in bags in my pajamas and it doesn't cause repetitive stress injuries.

[Former_Member]

Ya'll, I find they quickly respond if you post on their FB page and TWEET them. Karen, try writing a post directly to Guy from our FB group. Can't gaurantee, but I've seen him respond when his name is mentioned. Just a thought.

[Former_Member]

Okay, so I'm a bit upset that I can't get sd to respond to me so I took your advice and wrote on their wall on FB. The post below is what I posted, and I know it isn't nice, but I'm not happy!!!!! I'm a paying customer and I hate being ignored. I wouldn't care if I was a freebie, because at that point you can take it or leave it, because its free. But every month they want their money, so I want service...thanks for the vent

Hello, I have sent you at least 3 emails via your website about uploading issues, and I still have no response. I'm a paying cod customer, and during my membership it states there is support, which I'm not receiving any. Furthermore I show 39 items in my one of my collections, but only 35 items are showing on my site. I have to be honest I wanted to keep this private, but I don't know at this point how to contact you other than social media. I live in the USA so I'm not willing to call you directly and be charged huge international fees on my cell phone. As for a paid member I'm not impressed. I look forward to your timely response! In my opinion you should act quickly to this request.

[Former_Member]

I guess I'm not the only one frustrated, here is someone wrote right after me:

Brette Krinick Your customer service is embarrassing! I've been trying to get a PROMISED refund on 2 months of service dating back to October 2012. Supadupa can't figure out how to credit on past billing cycles and told me it a problem with my bank account (which it wasn't). Rather than respond to my requests for resolution via a suggested refund check or payment via paypal, I'm just being ignored. After no response via email, I've now taken to twitter and facebook. 'Guy' is my contact person at Supadupa and I'd appreciate this issue being resolved. (my email: brette@brettejewelry.com)

[Former_Member]

Well, I have some good news : ). I just got this from Yemi. He's always really nice.

____

Many thanks for the heads-up on this, it is very appreciated.

We noticed the issue just over a week ago and have now implemented a fix to automatically reject the new fields. We were simply trying to understand how best to map the new variation fields to our product variations structure before making any changes. Unfortunately, the new fields just don't seem to map correctly as there is no direct correlation between the variation values and the single product quantity column in the CSV file.

Will be very curious to know your thoughts on how you think the variations fields work/should work - from an Etsian perspective.

Thank you once again for bringing this to our attention.

___________________________________________________

So for now it will just ignore the variations and let the upload run which is definitely an improvement. I don't use variations because my stuff there is OOAK but do any of those of you that do use them want to take a look at what variation fields are available on our SD listing page and see how they could/should map to or work with what Etsy is sending over? I can try to take a stab at it but I would feel more confident if some of you that use them took a look at it too.

[Former_Member]

Karen,

I also finally got a response from Yemi tonight as well. The funny thing is Yemi states she emailed me on the 7th, and it was probably in my Spam box. I checked and it isn't in there.

I'm glad they finally got back to me.

[Former_Member]

Ha - I always just assumed that Yemi was a guy. After spending decades in the tech industry I should know better than to always assume that.

I'm talking to her now about how we might be able to do something about this. The basic problem is that Etsy allows us to select from long lists of variations and sub-variations and if you don't like the codes that they offer you can make up your own. There's really no correlation to how SD's variations are structured and our variation fields can contain anything at all with no structure. I think that the best that we'll be able to hope for is a way to manually edit our spreadsheets and add (what looks like to me) 4 variations that work with what they have. It wouldn't be perfect but copying and pasting variations in one spreadsheet would be a whole lot faster than entering them all into each item on the other side. I had a lot of questions for Yemi about how the data needs to be structured and once she gets back to me I'll probably have a lot of questions for you all about the best ways to utilize it to get it into their types of variations.

(There are times that some of this might get kind of technical but if we figure something out I'll write it up in simple terms in instructions as a reference.)

[Former_Member]

Karen,

I don't know if Yemi is a guy or a gal, I just assumed Yemi was a girl....>LOL<....I wish they would change their shipping.....I so don't like it. I feel like I over charge my international buyers, but it is hard to gauge if they are going to buy an onesie or a set of pea pods. Therefore because it is based on money, that makes it tough to no over charge them.

They should allow us to have profiles and set it per item, not by dollar amount.

[Former_Member]

Yemi is a guy after all. I took a look at their "About" page and there were photos. He's going to keep looking at the CSV file to see if there is some way to do it without manually editing our files but in the meantime deleting them will work.

Shipping doesn't really work all that well for me either because what I pay is affected more by the size of the box than the weight. If I can fit it into a priority mail box it will cost a lot less than the same weight would if I have to go up to a coat box because the dimensions are so much larger. Most of the time I can't use them because even if I could cram a cape or sweater coat in there it would be pretty tacky to send expensive clothing all wadded up and stuffed into an undersized box. Most of the time I can come pretty close to accurate because I know how big the box is going to have to be but a shipping calculator or the ability to add it by item would be nice.