No way to vary delivery times with Etsy

[GoosehouseDesigns]

In March this year, my entire local region experienced terrible floods.  More than three thousand homes were washed away or damaged beyond the point of ever being usable again. My whole town flooded. My studio flooded. Thousands of people are now homeless, etc. It was a terrible natural disaster that is taking a long time to heal.

The local post office did not re-open until a month ago. So naturally I had some issues re getting my orders out on time. Some orders were more than two months delayed.

I communicated clearly with my customers at all times - everyone was fine and accepting and understanding.

Not bloody Etsy, though? Eh? Why doesn't Etsy show some flexibility in their Order/Postage/Overdue times? How can anyone in such dire times of natural disaster continue to earn the priggish little "Star Seller" badge that has been foistered on us? If the post office, the town, all the roads in and out, your workspace etc are actually underwater for a length of time, making it impossible to actually send items, why can't Etsy allow us to reflect that, instead of just punishing us and lecturing us about "How to provide better customer service"? 

I give great bloody customer service. It's Etsy that is giving me rubbish service.

[ThePurplePuppy]

WEll, I can add to that as I had the exact same thing happen to me last summer except it was due to a wildfire. At the time this was the largest wildfire in the entire USA and ended up burning more than 500,000 acres of timberland, homes, ranches, etc.  When I found a library in our town where the evacuation center was  and tried to communicate with chat --"he" did not even know what a wildfire was. Kept having me repeat (retype)  the word--then put me on "hold" to "consult" with someone "higher up".  Came back and back to the script about pushing out the ship date.

I am convinced that I was "talking" to a "bot" and Etsy simply had not programmed the word "wildfire"  into their program. They probably do not have "flood" programmed in either!  I am truly convinced Etsy is run entirely by bots

This was just before star seller was launched so yes, I had orders that were late and some I had to cancel and did not qualify for the first coupe of months. However--to me that was "small potatoes" compared to the rest of the ordeal.  Now I give the exact same customer service to my buyers that I always have in the past--if I qualify, I do, or if I don't, I simply don't overly worry about the small stuff.

[nineteen27]

In this case, I would have refunded and asked them to reorder once your local post office re-opened.

Etsy is not a human person with feelings. They just aren't.

[ThePurplePuppy]

@nineteen27 

You are correct--Etsy is a business--they have one goal--to earn money for themselves and their stockholders. Nothing else matters to them.

The sooner, we as sellers, understand that the better we can conduct OUR business--and hopefully as a cottage industry we give better than we get!

[AAANativeArts]

You can extend the ship by date once, and that will preserve your star seller status for shipping on time. But I'm not sure the limit you can extend it, I'm thinking it is like 6 weeks. If you need more than that, you should refund the current orders and put your store on Vacation Mode until you can resume. Or bugger the stupid Star Seller badges. From all reports I've seen, they do nothing to increase sales or improve search engine rank, anyway.

[ThePurplePuppy]

@AAANativeArts 

I found out last summer the longest you can "Extend" the ship by date is 3 weeks.  

[TonsOfPaper · Accepted solution]

Hello there,

As of the moment, we can only adjust the ship-by-date for up to 21 days before the original ship-by date has passed. If the order needs to update the ship date that exceeds 21 days, as of now this will negatively impact the on-time shipping & tracking, but Etsy is aware of this issue and we’re working on solutions to address this.

On the other hand, please know that we're sorry to hear about the effects of the flood in your hometown, and I want to assure you that we're here to help support you and your business. We recommend checking out the following Help article on Managing Your Shop In Case of Emergency, which offers suggestions on how to manage your shop during this difficult time.

Thank you so much!