If it’s a true credit account then no, it would be reversible just like swiping your card (although I’m surprised such a transaction wasn’t automatically declined instead). These cases will get resolved a whole lot easier because no actual money exchanged hands yet - although they will probably be hit with over the limit fees which Etsy will have to refund.
If it’s a debit card with something like the Visa logo on the card, then that’s just the same thing as linking your checking account. The back end settlement still might use the ACH network in the background though.
Trust me, the whole US payment ecosystem is an opaque mess. The fact it works at all is really a miracle.
Another reason why I advise never link your bank account directly to anything or use a debit card if you can help it. Using a credit card (and paying off the balance monthly) will protect you far more.
Given the fact that Etsy has sent me (and many others) an incorrect 1099 for the SECOND year now, I have zero faith in their ability to get anything right
Oof. This is why I’ll never link my bank account with anything but my employer for direct deposit. I learned my lesson from all the Paypal horror stories back in the day.
They switched to automatically deducting your fees from your sales before the money gets transferred to you. It used to be manual payments (which could come from payment account or your bank/cc/Paypal) And before that they didn’t even have a payment account option just CC/PP. If you have more fees than money from selling, like if you listed a lot but didn’t sell anything, I believe you can still pay that manually, or you can set up autobilling. I wonder if this only affected autobilling people. I’ve never set that up and wasn’t affected by this problem.
In a sane world, this would be the end of etsy’s business and a total loss for their investors.
In a sane world, this would be an end of the transaction model in which you give an individual or business all the information and authorization necessary to empty your bank account while you sleep.
This is very dependent on the vendor and how you set it up.
Instead of giving the gas company your bank info. Give your bank your gas account number and initiate the payment from the bank’s online bill pay. Low risk your bank screws up your gas account.
Even vendors that don’t support credit card payments often support electronic billing. From your banks bill pay, request electronic bills from the vendor you previously paid. Now, if you trust the bills are right, you can set up auto payment when the bill shows up. Or just pay manually when they do.
Push from your bank to venders vs letting them pull directly.
You can use a bank’s bill pay sister system (god Google keyboard is shit) for some things, but it’s awkward, and often means that the transfer takes a lot longer. Moreover, a lot of the companies that bill me have removed support for bill pay over the years, particularly credit cards.
I have long wondered about this. Is America the only insane country where we have to give literally all our online billers access to our bank accounts?? I hate doing it but its the only option. Is Europe different?
Don’t live there, but I was told years ago that European banking regulations required that banks be able to give customers single-purpose routing numbers, or something to that effect.
What else is new. Yet another of countless examples of how modern business screws people in a direct way, with no real equal consequences for them. Buisnesses get away with more heinous shit foisted on people for no reason if not sheer incompetence, and there is never, never any real resulting consequences with teeth to snap them to attention and make them bleed for screwing normal people.
Even the thoughtless apologies can’t be bothered with anymore, you can see how little they care.
I regret thinking of even starting an Etsy account now for my blacksmithed goods. Id rather learn to make my own website first than deal with these scum.
In concept, it’s super simple, just flip things around - instead of you giving them your bank info and free access to withdraw from it, the receiver (biller) gives you their bank information and you deposit to it. They can even post it publicly, because it’s for a receive-only account. So you can’t withdraw from it, but can send to it to make payments. They don’t need to know anything about your bank info. Why we don’t do that, I have no idea.
As for what caused the Etsy issue, from the reports it sounds like they might’ve deployed some code that had unexpected side-effects when it met up with real-world data. Maybe something they didn’t think to test for, maybe their test data just didn’t happen to trigger that case, or maybe they accidentally deployed the wrong code. In any case, must’ve ruined a lot of people’s weekend. Another good reason not to deploy software updates on a Friday.
@anon81034786 and @Bob_Brinkman Etsy is pretty primitive in terms of technology. They probably look at the volume of transactions needing to be reversed and see an impossible number of man-hours, as they would have to manually review and transfer or credit each amount they took.
Here’s the weirdest thing about this: Etsy has long been held up as an example of top notch software engineering. They’ve hosted a blog about it, https://codeascraft.com , for at least a decade. I studied their practices when I was completing my master’s degree. They have excellent, open information about their test driven development practices, agile methodologies, automated build chains, CI/CD, dependency management, constant releasing, everything. They are known for building and running quality systems.
So WTF happened? How could their payment system suddenly start trying to suck their customers’ bank accounts dry??? This does not seem like a small mistake. It seems like a train wreck that should have been caught before deployment.
This is going to be quite the stain on their reputation. However, I expect they’ll post mortem this on the blog, once they own up to their shame.
I don’t know about the rest of Europe. In the UK, the equivalent is “Direct Debit”, which allows a company to take money from your account. However there are rules (one of which is telling you a certain amount of days beforehand), and if they have not followed the rules then you can request the bank give you your money back, including any consequent charges, and it’s up to the bank to take it up with the company.
