If you’ve ever bought anything on Etsy, you might have run into a situation where you send a message to a seller, but you don’t get an answer.
There are a few things to remember when you’re trying to contact an Etsy seller, including reasonable response times, time differences, and days that the business owner might be “closed” and not answering messages.
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What to do if an Etsy seller isn’t responding to your messages.
If an Etsy seller isn’t responding to messages, you can try to contact the business through social media or through a website contact form if one exists. If you’ve made a purchase, you might have the seller’s email, and it would be fine to email them if you haven’t heard back in 48 hours after leaving a message on the Etsy convo system.
Make sure to give the seller time, especially over a weekend, because many business owners close temporarily on specific days of the week.
And remember that most Etsy shops are run by a single person who isn’t going to be available to answer questions 24/7. You might be sending messages that they’re not going to see until they come back to work (or sometimes, wake up if they’ve been sleeping at night.)
You can try emailing or sending messages on social media if you don’t get a response, but using contact methods outside of Etsy isn’t always the best option, for a few reasons.
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How long does an Etsy seller have to respond?
Etsy wants sellers to respond to all messages from a customer within 24 hours of receiving the first message, but that doesn’t mean that they will.
“Responses” can also include an automatically-sent response to let the customer know that the seller is unavailable for a certain amount of time, so you might get a response that isn’t really an answer to your question. Etsy sellers aren’t responsible for answering messages around the clock, but within 24 hours is reasonable and within Etsy’s guidelines.
Etsy has recently added a contact option that shows up on the order page where you can contact a seller after placing an order. It gives you a list of options to choose from, but you don’t need to use that form.
If you do use the “help with order” option, please give the seller time to respond to you, especially if it’s over a weekend. Etsy says that if you don’t hear from the seller within 48 hours you can open a case about the order, but that’s basically the atomic option.
Opening a case against a seller isn’t just a request for assistance, it essentially is a strike against the seller and is an adversarial move.
Most Etsy sellers will respond to a question as soon as possible, but if you file a case it’s a complaint against the shop that can hurt their business, so it won’t make them happy, to say the least.
Filing a case should be a last resort, not something that you do because you want to change the address on your order, which is an example of one of the options that Etsy has given in the “help with order” option. Things like that can be handled between you and the seller without getting Etsy involved.
Sometimes, though, the seller doesn’t respond at all, or they’ll say one thing and do another. How should you handle that?
What do you do when an Etsy seller doesn’t respond at all?
If an Etsy seller doesn’t respond to a message within 48 hours, send another message, or use an email address to verify that the original message wasn’t received.
It’s possible that the first message didn’t get delivered, so it’s important to check before reacting negatively. Customers can also contact the seller through social media messaging or through a website contact form if that option is available.
I have people send me messages through my website contact form occasionally, and as long as it’s not my personal email (I would wonder where they got that one) I don’t mind how they message me. However, I’ll probably move the messages back to Etsy.
It’s usually better to try to keep all messages in one thread on Etsy so that the seller (and you) won’t miss any details, especially for custom orders.
If the seller moves your messages from email back to Etsy that’s usually the reason. I like to keep everything in one place so that I can refer back to one thread and not miss anything.
It’s also against Etsy’s policies to move transactions that started on Etsy off of Etsy, so many sellers want to keep everything on Etsy to make sure it’s clear that they’re not participating in “fee avoidance.”
If you have to contact a seller outside of Etsy because they’re not responding on Etsy messages, and they still don’t answer you, that’s more problematic.
If you’ve already placed an order and there’s no communication and the order hasn’t shipped, you may need to file a case. However, that should be a last resort, and it shouldn’t happen until you’re just not getting any response at all, and you’ve sent several messages.
And again, keep in mind that weekends are often times when Etsy sellers don’t answer messages because they take time off.
Most Etsy sellers are solo business owners who work from home, so we don’t have customer service centers available to answer things 24/7.
If you send a message at 10pm on a Friday, you shouldn’t expect an answer until Monday.
We’re also located in many different countries, so time differences can be an issue.
Some sellers I know have had customers place an order around dinnertime, send a message in the middle of the night, then file a formal complaint with Etsy before the seller even got out of bed in the morning!
That’s unnecessary and unreasonable, so if that’s what you would do, you probably need to settle down a little bit. The seller will get back to you, but we might be asleep when you send your message!
So now that that’s out of the way, you might be wondering how to contact an Etsy seller in the first place. I mentioned the help with order button once you’ve placed an order, but what if you haven’t placed an order yet?
To read an article that I wrote about how to ask for discounts from an Etsy shop without being a jerk about it, click here!
How to contact an Etsy seller.
There are several ways to contact an Etsy seller. There is a contact button at the top of every shop’s home page, and that can be used to send a direct message to the shop owner.
This is the most direct way to send a seller a general question. To send a message about a specific listing, use the contact button on the listing page.
When you message a seller from a specific listing, the message links to that listing. This is useful when you have a question about a specific item.
When the message window on the listing page opens up, it might suggest that you check out the FAQ or listing description to find your answer. That’s often a faster way to find what you need instead of sending a message and waiting for an answer!
If you’ve already placed your order, you can use those methods to contact the seller, or you can use the message button on your order page.
If you already contacted the seller at some point you can also go into your messages and continue that thread. That’s the best way to keep all the information together, as I mentioned earlier.
For an article about how to send a photo to an Etsy seller, click here.