Made to Order Digital does not provide ship by date

[JustArtinAround]

Currently, made to order digital items have the ability to set the turn around time through the shipping profile. Within the management portal, this feature is not available and it is only available for physical listings. We are able to have the ship by date update correctly because the shipping profile is set when listing was a made to order physical listing.

Recently, I have received messages from several customers who assumed they would receive their file within 24-48 hours. When the customers are looking to purchase the item, they are not being shown the turn around time before purchasing. Right now, it is not an issue, but when the holiday rush comes and our lead time grows from days to weeks, there are going to be a lot of upset customers. We were told to put a snip-it in the description, but as most sellers know, the customers do not read the description. Additionally, the first few sentences are vital to SEO algorithms, so adding this to the front of the description will have a negative impact on Etsy's SEO metrics. As of right now, we are planning to deactivating all of our made to order custom listings this fall to ensure we do not receive complaints from customers because a large percentage of our sales comes from referrals.

I have reached out to Etsy seller support 2x to report this issue, and they continue to say that the direction is to add this information to the description. Is anyone else noticing this issue? If so, have you contacted Etsy support? 

[mikaart]

I was wondering about this too!

When I get an order for "Made to order" digital file, first I make a digital proof and ask approval from the customer.  Sometimes the customer doesn't response for a long time and I will be stuck with "overdue" order. (Which affects on Star Seller rating)  Since there is no shipping profiles on made to order digital items, I can't update "ship-by-date" to avoid overdue. 

I talked about this problem with this a custom support chat agent, who was very nice.  But I haven't seen any changes so far.

I do like this new "made to order" digital item system.  But I think this is a bit of oversight.  It is supposed to be "made to order" custom item.  The custom items are not instantaneously made...

[AAANativeArts]

I would put it in the description lower down after the SEO stuff, then also send the customer a Convo giving them the same information.

[TonsOfPaper · Accepted solution]

Hello there,

Our engineering partners are currently aware of an issue where some digital made-to-order items are having a processing time and ship-by date. We've made sure to add your report and all the relevant information you've provided to the ongoing investigation so the team can take a deeper look into what's going on.

Thank you very much!

[mikaart]

Thank YOU so much!!

[JustArtinAround]

It would be great to get a timeline on when this will be addressed. We are currently planning on deactivating all of our custom digital listing prior to our holiday rush since they do not provide customers with an accurate representation of the processing time. Our processing time is based on the number of orders in our queue and can get to 7-9 weeks in length during the holidays. Our custom digital listings take the same processing time as our physical prints since they are time consuming to create.

Without providing customers with an accurate expected ship by date, we will be forced to deactivate these listings on Etsy and only offer them on other platforms. We really want to avoid this, but need to plan accordingly as our rush starts in less than 2 months. Thank you in advance for expediting this if at all possible!

[MaruPazLineArt]

Hi, I know this post is old, but I'm having the same problem. I changed all my listings to digital made to order, as Etsy wants (despite the fact that we do not have variants and other issues) and in my dashboard on pending orders there is a "Ship by...." and for worse it is only 2 days, despite be digital only. Could someone solve it? Thanks in advance!