Etsy No buyer protection after a seller doesn't deliver your purchase Brooklyn New York

In mid November, upon receiving a wish list from my sister in law, I noticed that she wanted a leather jacket. What was really great though was that there was no guessing required. She had the size she wanted and a link to an Etsy seller with exactly the jacket. I promptly ordered it.

A few days later, we received a communication from the seller promising that event though it was coming from overseas that the jacket would arrive in time for Christmas.

I began to get concerned when, several weeks later, there had been no further communication from the seller and no shipment confirmation. So, we reached out to the seller and asked about shipping. Silence. We repeatedly attempted to contact the seller while simultaneously hoping that the package would arrive in time for Christmas.

I had a feeling that we were in trouble when, on December 24th, there had been no package and no word from the seller. Over the Christmas holiday, we wrote the seller a scathing email explaining our disappointment at the lack of communication and the lack of the jacket that we’d paid for and been promised weeks earlier. The holiday came and went without any additional word from the seller.

Eventually, just after the first of the year, we decided that enough was enough and contacted Etsy for help. The seller was totally non-responsive and the jacket had still never arrived. We assumed that surely Etsy would see the communication stream and penalize or remove the seller as well as refund our money. Boy were we wrong.

Apparently, tucked somewhere in Etsy’s terms and conditions, there’s a NO RECOURSE clause. So, after 60 days, you can go straight to hell as far as Etsy is concerned. No package? Seller who’s a scammer? Defective product? It doesn’t matter. Unless you contacted Etsy (not the seller) within 60 days, you’re totally out of luck.

So, we went back and forth with Etsy over this policy for days and got nowhere. We were blown away – truly baffled that a company like Etsy could have customer service this repugnant and a policy that makes as little sense as their 60 day no recourse one. It doesn’t matter that we’d been trying to reach their seller through their messaging system the entire time, we were completely out of luck. It doesn’t matter to Etsy what communication you’ve had with the seller on THEIR website!