Add buyers phone number field

[#1]

Please can Etsy add a field to collect buyers phone numbers. I cannot believe this isn't a feature for such a large website, particularly one that is international and encourages sellers to sell internationally. Phone numbers are necessary for the vast majority of couriers for international shipments. Furthermore, with tracked services being the norm for most domestic couriers nowadays they provide buyers with a better user experience enabling end to end tracking updates, leading to more reliable delivery. This is true for both international and domestic shipments. Almost all other websites collect this information and it is completely normal to do so. 

The only way to collect this information is by adding 'personalisation' to all products and denoting that this is to collect customers phone numbers for delivery purposes. This causes confusion for many buyers who still think items can be personalised, causing wasted time with back and forth messaging and delays with orders, further damaging the buying experience on Etsy. It also puts off buyers who think items have to be personalised but don't want them to be so.

Please make the simple change of adding a phone number field to the checkout. 

[BlissMuseum]

I'm in Australia and have always used manual customs forms. Auspost have decided to not have that option for much longer. So today I have been attempting to fill in the digital form. I cannot fill it in without a buyers phone number. 

[BagmakerSupply]

@BlissMuseum: If we do not have the customer's phone number, we have been able to use 000-000-0000 with no ill effects so far.

[Lionfishvintage]

........

[StoneNestJewellery]

Completely agree. I have been having the same issue with pretty much all my orders, as I sell mainly internationally. There is simply NO way to ship the products to most countries that I have sold to without a buyer's phone number. My solution for now is to reach out to individual buyers after receiving their orders to ask for this missing information, visa Etsy message and email. Unfortunately, this has been wasting a lot of my time even with the small amount of orders that I have achieved so far. Sometimes it takes many days for the buyer to reply after several times of trying to reach out to them. I understand that there may be legal complication with making this information compulsory for Etsy, however, an optional field could be a possibility, no? Especially that we as sellers would have no problem to sign on legal agreements complying the GDPR rules, for example.

[BagmakerSupply]

@StoneNestJewellery: "There is simply NO way to ship the products to most countries that I have sold to without a buyer's phone number." To date, we have used '000-000-0000' on orders where we do not have a real phone number and have had no ill effects or problems.

"... an optional field ..." If it were optional, I suspect most buyers would just refuse to provide it.

[AVAArtsSupplies]

You can put a required personalization in. Many people will probably leave 123-456-7891 or some other made up phone number. But they cannot check out until the information is added. (Or this used to be thing, I never used it)

[VieNostalgique]

I cannot physically complete the purchase of a shipping label from La Poste here in France without the customer's telephone number.  I've only had one occasion when the customer didn't reply to my messages requesting it so I went online, searched her name and address and found a number associated with the address and used that (I had sent her about 5 messages asking for the phone number and I also sent her a message telling her what I had done to get a number before I used it).  It is also obligatory when using a service such as Mondial Relay for both the customers phone number AND their email address.  It's also key to note that European privacy laws prevent me from using that number for anything other than the purpose it was collected for

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