Very odd thing has happened, now twice! I am in the process of (hopefully) getting this resolved with Etsy, but in the meantime I wanted to see if this happened to anyone else and what was the explanation and result.
A month or so ago, I had 2 orders come through for the same customer, not exactly at the same time but within 24 hours of each other. When I say that the 2 orders 'came through' I was viewing them not in Etsy but in the 3rd Party shipping software I used called ShippingEasy to capture all of my orders from the different marketplaces where I sell.
The orders had almost exactly the same items in them. It struck me as a bit odd so I reached out to the customer and asked her if she intended to place both of those orders. She said that no, she only placed 1 of those orders. When I put each of the order numbers in Etsy (in the search bar in Orders & Shipping), only 1 of them came up as being a valid order number. Interestingly, the one that DID come up, was NOT the order that she said she placed. The order that had the items in it that she said she wanted was the order number that wasn't coming up. It was so weird. I reached out to Etsy and they weren't able to give me any explanation for why this happened, but did confirm that only 1 order was in fact placed so I could just disregard this "other one".
Today, I received an email from a customer stating that she received an item from me that she never paid for! She said she looked all over but couldn't find a record that she actually paid for the item. She said she'd had it in her cart at one point, but then removed it. She never proceeded with the checkout process. Yet, I had an order number for her, I had her first and last name, her address, her email address...all of this was pushed out from Etsy to my shipping program. How else would I have gotten this information? Something about having the item in her cart and then removing it somehow triggered an order number and for Etsy to send all of her information to me...without her paying for anything. Naturally, when the order came in, I fulfilled it. So now, she has the item but I am out the money. The crazy thing is, the order number doesn't come up in Etsy at all. Not even as cancelled. It's as if it doesn't exist. When I reached out to Etsy today, the rep couldn't tell me anything; only that the order number doesn't exist in their system. Well then how did I get it? How did I get all of the customer's information? It is disturbing to say the least.
A follow-up message to me told me to have the customer open up a case with Etsy support. I am not satisfied with that, and believe that Etsy needs to resolve this with me directly. This customer (kind and sweet as she was to tell me what happened) was not at fault and I don't think she should be inconvenienced. I just think it would sound very unprofessional of me to ask her to open up some tech support case on my behalf because she received something in the mail that she didn't pay for. I have gone through all of my orders for the past 2 months (so far) and it seems these are the only 2 occurrences. But since it has happened more than once, there is definitely some bug and I can't have been the only seller it has affected. If anyone has experienced this I would love to hear the explanation and what Etsy ended up doing about it. I realize that this would probably only affect other people who were using 3rd party shipping services, unless you happened to check soon after the order was generated (before it "disappears") in Etsy.
