I too experience this in spurts - the last week or so has been OK, but some weeks it seems like a twice a day occurrence. I recently realized that one of the big reasons is that Etsy offers multiple ways to sign in -- not just Etsy userID/pwd, but also Apple, Google, and Facebook. This occurred when yet again, one buyer said she couldn't find her files, and I could see she was messaging me from a different account than the one she bought her patterns on. I had always assumed this happened when someone had multiple Etsy accounts, but she didn't think she had multiple accounts. After I told her about needing to sign into the same account she made the purchase under, she finally realized that she rather randomly signed into Etsy using FaceBook or Google but not often her Etsy account, because she couldn't remember her Etsy password and would just use the account she could immediately remember the password for. She admitted that she'd always found Etsy downloads confusing because she had to so often go back to sellers to ask them to send her patterns to her because she couldn't find them in her account.
She wrote back later to say she was grateful I mentioned it to her, because she'd then been able to go back and find a lot of previous digital purchases she'd made but lost track of. I'm not sure exactly what she meant or how she did it, but it's clear that this multi-sign-on flexibility causes problems for digital downloading.
The Apple sign-in ability is almost worse, because the email address is scrambled by Apple. One woman wanted me to email her the pattern she ordered, but wouldn't give me her email address because she "protects her privacy." But she couldn't manage Dropbox or GoogleDocs, and in the end I swore on my grave that I would never sell her email or spam her, and we finally resolved it. All that for a $3.50 downloadable pattern. Yes, it's the cost of doing business, but I wish Etsy's download system weren't so complicated for so many people.
