Update 8/11/08:

We spoke with our credit card gateway provider, and while they assured us that the refunds were imminent, they told us that those involved may not see their refunds reflected until later this week or beyond depending on how their banks process the payments. We are truly sorry for the delay, and promise to share any information as it becomes available from them.

We will be directly contacting the sellers involved to share this development with them. I will also be sure to update this article and the forums once we have confirmed that the refund process has been initiated.

I do want to be abundantly clear that this was an isolated incident at our payment gateway. The problem was completely rectified hours after it occurred and no longer effects the functionality of Etsy's billing system.

We truly appreciate your continued understanding and patience in this matter.

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Original Post from 8/4/08

Yesterday (Sunday, August 3) from approximately 4:00 AM to 11:30 AM EDT a small percentage of our sellers experienced a problem paying their Etsy bills. This was due to a malfunction at one of our third-party credit card processor's gateways. As a result, these sellers were informed that their cards were not charged, when in fact they had been. Some sellers attempted to pay their bills more than once and subsequently were charged more than once.

The third-party credit card processor resolved the malfunction by 11:30 AM EDT Sunday and all subsequent Etsy bill payments have been recorded and processed correctly. At no time were any credit card numbers or sellers' personal data exposed.

In order to clear up this problem, our credit card processing company is crediting back all impacted bill payments that occurred during this time period. We are contacting the sellers that were affected to let them know what happened.

We apologize for the inconvenience. Since this is a billing matter, we will work privately with the sellers who were affected. Please contact billing@etsy.com if you have a concern or question regarding this matter or your Etsy bill. Thank you.

We have closed commenting on this post and would like to direct discussion to this forum thread.