Is Etsy Seller Support Getting Better or Worse?
Etsy just announced an update to the very unpopular Star Seller program that they rolled out last year and yet again it has Etsy sellers divided.
This latest update is being billed as a 'perk'. Earn Star Seller status and you'll have a chat button to contact Etsy support right in your dashboard. (instead of having to search it out in the Help pages where it is often elusive and regularly moved around).
On the surface, this sounds like a good idea, if you're Star Seller. Except many sellers are questioning why access to seller support should ever be restricted or used as a 'perk' in the first place. Don't ALL Etsy sellers deserve easy access to support?
It's certainly not a new concept though. VIP customers, loyalty points earners and big spenders have often enjoyed special access to a service provider or retailer.
Personally, I think we should be looking deeper at Etsy's customer service quality instead of focusing on who gets access to a chat button, when and where.
Ever since Etsy's very first day in business they have had notoriously bad customer service. From initially having no customer service at all, to then having it but being bad at delivering it to being slow to respond and more currently, just unable to cope in any meaningful way with the sheer volume of it.
So is Etsy getting at all better at offering seller support service, or worse?
I think the answer is a bit of both. Having been with the platform for 14+ years, I've been witness to a lot of changes. Some of them are positive and some are disappointing.
One thing Etsy HAS improved upon over the years is their customer service attitude. Believe it or not they are way better at dealing with people than they used to be. It used to be pretty bad. So even if the person on the other end can't help you or actually answer your question, they are at least polite about it.
Another major improvement is that there are now multiple ways to contact or be contacted by Etsy when you need assistance. Etsy used to be an email only company. In recent years they've added live chat and telephone call backs. Ok, those aren't always available, Etsy turns them off when they're swamped or short staffed, but it's still heading towards improvement.
Myself, I've used all three contact features on multiple occasions. In the past, under email only, every response would take exactly three days. So you email your issue, three days later get a reply that doesn't help so you respond with more info, and three days later you get another reply. You get the idea. Almost everything took weeks to resolve.
Today, with over 4 million sellers, you email with an issue and maybe you get a response at some point and maybe you don't. You might get lucky with your timing and your issue might be in a shorter queue.
Different issues are handled by specialists for that particular area of knowledge, so when something breaks and everyone is contacting Etsy about the same thing, it can be a really long line, and a really long wait. Two to four weeks long has been reported by some sellers.
I've also used the chat feature a few times. And while the person on the chat couldn't help me themselves any of those times, they did raise a support request internally and I did hear back from someone via email in a reasonable amount of time (a few days tops). Other sellers are reporting similar experiences but with varying degrees of timescales.
I've also used the phone back feature and booth times felt quite lucky to not have a long wait time. The first time was less than a 30 second wait and the next time was under 10 min. The phone back function seems to be rarely available though and often hidden deep in the Support Help pages.
So where is Etsy failing? They just can't handle the volume. This has always been a problem, and was still a problem in 2019 when Etsy had just 2.5 million sellers. With that number close to doubling in 2 years, it's an even bigger problem for them today.
It means that support is rushed and/or overwhelmed, so while the service reps are polite, (when you actually hear from them) they aren't necessarily doing a good job of things. And Etsy sellers are being left frustrated at every turn.
I had a complicated issue this year that arose due to the current and ongoing banking verification process (not the usual issues) that took 3 separate calls and multiple emails to sort out. But it shouldn't have taken that much effort. I could see very clearly through that process that the individuals handling my issue didn't know the system well enough to know all the steps that were required to actually solve the issues fully, so I had to call or email for each piece of the puzzle separately, even though it was all connected to one single issue. And that issue still isn't entirely fixed 4 months later.
In 2021 Etsy raised transaction fees with one of the promised investments to be "customer support".
The big question that should be asked of Etsy more than a year later is... do they consider sellers as part of their customer base, or are they only improving support on the buyer side?
To date, since the fee increase, I have not witnessed a tangible improvement in seller support. I'd go so far as to say things are actually worse because Etsy has created quite a few messes this year requiring an elevated need for support.
Bank account verification has proved troublesome for a great many sellers which has resulted in the increased need to contact support but Etsy has also rolled out multiple bots this year to automatically take down listings and/or shops that are supposedly in some sort of violation. Except there are so many false positives that end up needing a review by a human.
Add to that the very real violations occurring on the site that Etsy cannot keep up with and it's easy to see how they'd have their hands full. And yet Etsy keeps rolling out new tools and new tests and new updates all the while not being able to keep up with the fallout from past roll-outs.
Adding a chat button to the dashboard for Star Sellers is nice, but it's not an improvement to the actual support sellers are receiving. And from what I've experienced this year, improvements notwithstanding, it's some of the worst seller support Etsy has delivered in it's recent history.