Glitches afflict payments on Etsy, angering sellers

Etsy Inc. has had difficulty processing some transactions over the past five days due to a glitch in its third-party payments operator, leading to an outpouring of angst from merchants.

The bug in the processing system, maintained by Worldpay Group, began last Friday, just before the holiday weekend in the U.S. when merchants were hoping to sell homemade patriotic goods for picnics and parties.

Some sellers began posting on Etsy’s Bugs forum about problems with orders taking hours to process. It was still unclear Wednesday when it would be fixed or how many were affected.

Bill Massie, an engineer on the Etsy Payments Team, posted updates to try to assuage merchants, many of whom depend on sales from the site as a major source of income. The thread continued over days with Massie unable to say when the system would be back up.

The problem could be due to delays with the process Worldpay uses to settle payments after authorization and fraud checks are conducted, Massie said, adding that Etsy was working to process the backlog of payments. Orders placed with PayPal encountered no problems, according to postings on the Bugs blog by some merchants.

“Etsy has promised it’s been fixed, and it keeps on happening,” TheBouillonQueen wrote on the community board Reddit on July 2. “What’s worse, is I’m the one getting yelled at, scolded, and losing money because of this mistake. They did not issue an email out to buyers to explain the situation, nor did they tell the sellers what was going on …”

Brooklyn, New York-based Etsy said in a statement Wednesday that it’s “working with our partner to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.”