The mystery of Etsy’s map

Look at this map. Does it mean anything to you?

A map with a pin in the middle of the Lancashire countryside far from any towns

Every time I get a dispatch notification email from Etsy it includes this exact map. A pin in a random bit of the Lancashire countryside that bears no relation to the seller’s address, my address, or Etsy’s address.

Perhaps this is some weird quirk to do with my address? Some database corruption means that Etsy thinks I live in Lancashire? Not so. I checked with a friend who lives in Glasgow and she receives exactly the same map. A cursory Twitter search revealed that we’re not the only ones:

How big a problem is this?

These tweets and some digging in my emails reveal that this problem has been occurring since at least 2018 (maybe even 2016, since this is the date on the copyright notice in the footer).

Let’s do some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations. Over 1.1 million products were sold by Londoners on Etsy in 2020, and London has about 13% of the UK population, so we can estimate about 8.5 million products were sold nationally. Looking at my own purchase history, each transaction is contains an average of 1.3 products, so that gives us something like 6.5 million transactions for the UK.

Let’s make the unrealistic assumption that that number has been the same every year since 2018. That gives us a total in the region of 26 million emails. 26 million emails, all with the wrong map!

A chat with Etsy

Perhaps I’m missing something. Maybe it’s not supposed to be a map that relates to the transaction. Perhaps it’s decorative? Perhaps Etsy wants all its UK customers to go and meet at that location for further instructions? Perhaps the Forest of Bowland Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (which Google tells me is ‘a barren landscape of moorland and peat bog for walking, cycling and even seasonal grouse shooting’) holds special significance for Etsy that the rest of us are unaware of?

I reached out to Etsy to ask them these very questions. I got a reply that was either from a robot or from a human who is so lacking in soul that they would fail the Turing test. Here is an excerpt:

Soulless Etsy Agent
I understand you are getting emails from Etsy that includes a map with am specific location not related to the seller
Me
Yes that's correct. And the same is true for my friend, which suggests it's a widespread problem.
SEA
thank you Joseph for the screenshots, it looks like it is predetermined location, but I appreciate to letting us know about this situation, I definitely hear where you're coming from, and your feedback is very important as we collect insights for future adjustments.
Me
Why is it that particular predetermined location?
SEA
While I'm afraid that we don't have any further solutions to offer you at this time with regards to this predetermined location, I can assure you that I'm collecting all this information so it can review it by our products teams for future changes.

All of this robotic dialogue from a representative of a company whose motto is ‘Keeping commerce human’. Another example of a meaningless company value.

I’m a big fan of both maps and areas of outstanding natural beauty, so Etsy are welcome to keep sending me a meaningless map and it will not change how much business I give them, but it does worry me somewhat that this error has been allowed to persist for so long, and that Etsy’s support team are not only lacking in emotion but also any kind of concern about sending out the wrong information 26 million times.

Is this a one-off or a symptom of a deeper malaise?

I’m a developer, and I’ve misconfigured many things in my time, so I’m inclined to be charitable here. Let’s assume that when Etsy first implemented this feature (which some Americans really like, presumably because it shows actually useful information), they tested it properly and it worked fine. At some point it broke, and there was no tooling in place to alert anyone to this. This happens a lot, visual things are very hard to run automated tests on.

But four years is a long time for this bug to remain unnoticed. How has Etsy, a company with revenues in the billions and enough employees to make it the largest town on that map, manage to let such a colossal error persist for so many years? It’s primarily a US company, but it has at least one job opening in the UK right now which suggests it has at least a few employees here. Do these employees never order from Etsy? Do they never see the email and the map and wonder why their company has chosen to highlight the Forest of Bowland Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty?

What other less cosmetic problems might have been lurking in their codebase for the past four years? Perhaps emails to French customers contain the wrong person’s address? Maybe American sellers’ card details aren’t sent over an encrypted connection?

If you’re reading this and you work for Etsy or know someone who does, I would love to know the story.

Update: I received an email from Etsy me to ask how my chat with their support agent went. The agent I spoke to was called Michelle, the email asked me to let ‘Kateryn’ know how they did…

J. Dudley