WEBSTER GROVES, Mo. – The owner of Zoey’s Attic in Webster Groves says she woke up on Jan. 27 to find her Etsy shop in “vacation mode.” The problem is that she wasn’t traveling and didn’t select that setting.
Erin Delanty shared a picture of what her site’s homepage looked like last week. In vacation mode, her listings aren’t visible to shoppers and her items don’t appear in searches.
“Etsy had forcibly put us on vacation mode while they were pending verification of our business, which I found to be interesting considering we have been up on Etsy since 2008, clearly had been verified in the past, and had the same tax ID number, all the same information,” she said.
Delanty immediately followed the prompts and shared all the information Etsy asked for, but days went by, and she hadn’t heard from the company.
“Keep in mind, every day sending emails, trying to get in touch with anyone, doing anything I can personally say, ‘Hey, help me. Help me.’ We can’t pay our employees, potentially. We’re shut down; we’re dead in the water. Nothing. One week, we lost probably—if we had to estimate—$15,000 to $20,000 in revenue that week,” she added.
She lucked into learning on her own that there was an issue with the charter number associated with her account. Once she adjusted it, the store was taken off of vacation mode. In reactivating the account, Erin says Etsy charged her $650 to relist her offerings.
“To today, (I) have not had anyone at Etsy reach out to help me,” Delanty told FOX 2 Tuesday.
We reached out to Etsy on Delanty’s behalf, hoping to find out why this happened and what’s taken so long to fix it. A few hours later, Erin told us she got some good news.
“I did hear from seller support, a senior seller support manager at Etsy who had reached out, read some of my previous messages, and was able to refund the $650 in listing charges they automatically put on my account. They also extended a $200 ads credit,” Delanty said Wednesday.
All Etsy told us was that the shop was reinstated and that they had reached out directly to the store owner.
“Absolutely grateful, and my thing is, if this opens the door for a conversation with me and Etsy, my thing for Etsy would be: Just reach out to us sellers. We have invaluable information we can provide you,” Delanty said.
With Valentine’s Day just days away, she is happy to be back in business
“It was great to meet you, and this really did make a difference,” Delanty said.
