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.