2.23.2008

The Day The Views Died

Today was an interesting day in the world of Etsy. If you are an Etsy seller and haven't been stalking the threads today, go check out your item views. Notice something?

No, you're eyes aren't playing tricks on you and no, you have not entered the twilight zone. Our views are all reset, back to 1. Etsy explains it this way:

Today at roughly 2:15pm EST, there was a failure on one of our load balancing machines that rendered the site inaccessible. We recognized the failure immediately, but were unable to restore full connectivity until 3:30pm EST.

Unfortunately, tracking down the issue required all of our servers to be reset, which in turn erased all view tally data from listings. It is unlikely that we will be able to retrieve this data to bring them back, but we will try.

We're now investigating the causes of the issue, and tightening everything back up. Those that had a showcase scheduled for today will be refunded.

We apologize for any inconvenience this outage has caused, and we’re doing our best to ensure that it won’t happen again.

Well, at least we got a quick explanation, but I'm still left with a sour taste about this. I was one of the many who used the views to help determine the popularity of an item (should I make more, should I wait until it sells, etc) and the amount of views when first posted. Those things are important to shop exposure, not necessarily sales, but we all know, selling items is only part of the Etsy equation.

*sigh* There really isn't anything that can be done and I suppose it will be interesting to see what items start to get new views in my shop even though they have already been listed. For example, in the screen shot above, all items are at 1 view except my Sea Glass Kaleidoscope Earrings. Not sure what drew people into those... perhaps a treasury? Who knows, I shall go checl.

It seems as though life will go on and the sun will come up tomorrow. This isn't the end of the world, just one of the hassles of business I suppose. So I shall take the Etsy lemons can go make an Etsy Lemon Drop.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was so bummed about this.

Drat.

Oh well. :)

I think someone posted on a thread somewhere that we should all go look at our favorite seller's shops to spread some "hit" love. I think I might do just that!

Martha Hughes said...

At least we didn't loose our hearts...

although I miss my views.

Anonymous said...

I was bummed but I honestly wonder if those items that had views waaaay up there might not benefit. Folks may not wonder why no one else has bought it yet!

Hobocamp Crafts said...

After a while on Etsy I stopped paying attention to the counts- and then I hadn't been on all day and saw all the comments and now reading your blog- I saw how much people were upset.- Like Dancing monkey said- at least we didn't lose our hearts(knock on wood) :) off to hit up some favs!

idyll hands said...

All true all true. I am having fun seeing what items are getting views since then. A few earrings, my favorite bracelet, and some scarves (I thought the scarves were a dying breed in my shop!).

And yes, had hearts been lost then I would have had need to really complain. Not because I would have lost them but because I LOVE looking through my favorites. That would have been a sad, sad day.

Junque Rethunque said...

Yeah, I think if my favorites were gone I'd be PEE-ISSED!!! When I find a shop and favorite it I may not ever see it again, most of them are accidental finds.

My computer guru hubby says the losing of the views is bogus - he doesn't think a server problem should have affected their databases, which is where views should have been stored. I'm not so upset, my views don't equal sales.

IMakeCuteStuff (aka Marlo M.) said...

Thanks for blogging about this! I'm not sure how long it would have taken me to notice (I've been quite lazy about my Etsy shop lately). It is interesting to see which items are being viewed since the reset though...makes me want to renew a bunch of stuff just to see what would happen!

Anonymous said...

I had an item in my shop that was on the front page a few weeks ago, has a bunch of hearts, and had over 1000 views, but still no sale. So when the counters got reset, it was actually kind of fun... because I kept saying, somebody buy these things already!! Lol, but now it doesn't bug me as much. Haha...

Denise Felton said...

I didn't know I loved my view numbers so much until they were gone. Annie and I screamed identical profanity at the same time from different parts of town and then posted it to one another simultaneously. At least it was an opportunity to use my favorite curse word.