An order completely lost?

[VeghavenArt]

I am a new shop owner and I received and order yesterday. The app showed the "congrats for your first sale" writing and my profile still shows "1 sale" but my stats page says 0 for orders and revenue and that order is completely lost. It is not shown in any section anymore. Is there such a thing as spam order or is there something I don't know about orders? I don't think it's how it works? 

[CryzalisMasksUK]

It must be a glitch, when I click on your 1 sale, it shows nothing. Normally it would show which item has been sold.

All sales will appear in your dashboard under orders, if there is nothing there, then there is no sale

[TheBeeStop]

But to answer your question directly what happens with the phantom sale is that if you happen to check your dashboard at just the right time you'll noticed that you received an order with no other indication that an order has come in. And if you go to your sold out listings you'll see the item the person intended to but. However once their system catches up that the sale never went thru. Your dashboard will be updated AND the item that was preciously marked as sold out will be relisted. 

[TheBeeStop]

Sometimes this happens to me. Ive heard it being called a "phantom sale" I think it's when someone tries to place an order but their payment is declined. Only a handful of times have I had a customer reach out to me after experiencing this phantom sale, telling me that they tried to place an order and it didn't go thru. One of the times the customer was using apple pay. And she tried with apple pay one more time before I encouraged her to try a different payment method (at which point her payment went thru)  . One customer even sent me the email they received after they're attempted order did not go thru and the wording of the email sort of implied that it was me, the shop owner, who had some how declined or was unable to accept their sale. 

Whatever the cause is, I don't like them. I think etsy should share with its sellers when someone has attempted to purchase something but it didnt go thru for them. 

[BagmakerSupply]

@TheBeeStop:"I think etsy should share with its sellers when someone has attempted to purchase something but it didnt go thru for them." Out of curiosity, how would you use this information?

In very simple terms, there are two points where an order may be 'cancelled'. The first is before the order is even accepted - usually an invalid card number or expiration date, insufficient funds, bad security code, etc. You could be having hundreds of those every day and would not even know it. The second is after the order has been accepted but has not yet been fully approved by the payment processor - generally flagged by the payment processor's fraud detection algorithm and showing to you as 'pending'.

However, even an approved transaction can be reversed. For example the card holder may have reported an unauthorized transaction.

This is something that a merchant can and does experience anywhere, even on your own site with your own payment processor.

[FashionClozet]

It happened with me a couple of times. The transaction is stuck somewhere and hasn't gone through. Wait for 12-24 hrs. Either it will go through or decline.