How to Deal with Etsy Customers Who Don’t Respond to Messages

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Yippee! You’ve made a sale in your Etsy shop! Unfortunately, the customer didn’t provide enough information to complete the order. Perhaps they didn’t include their color choices or maybe they didn’t give you their monogram. No problem, you’ve sent them a conversation through Etsy and will start their order as soon as you get the missing information. The problem is, the customer doesn’t ever respond to your conversation. What is a small business seller supposed to do now? Each seller will have their own policies, but today I’m sharing mine.

How I Deal with Etsy Customers Who Don’t Respond to Messages

• Send an Etsy conversation and wait 24 hours for a response.
• Send a 2nd Etsy conversation after 24 hours asking for the information to be provided. I add a note to the end of the conversation that if I don’t hear from the customer within 24 hours of this conversation, I will be forced to cancel the order.
• If I still don’t get a response, I cancel the order and send a 3rd conversation letting the buyer know that I’ve had to cancel the order. I invite them to replace the order when they’ve got all the information I need collected. I tend to say something nice in this third conversation like, “I know we can all overlook conversations when life gets busy. I hope you will place this order again.”

I also include text in my shop policies that states: “If I cannot obtain the information needed to create your order within 48 hours, your order will be canceled and you will need to reorder.”

Make Personalization Details Required

In case you didn’t know, in a recent update to Etsy, many categories now allow you to require the customer to fill out a personalization section before checking out. While this isn’t foolproof, it might help cut down on personalization and customization issues.

If you need a quick tutorial on canceling an Etsy order, head to this article on Etsy.

This post leads me to an older (but great) post on whether or not custom orders are worth your time or if you should stick to ready to ship products. Read that post here.