Etsy experienced an incident on Monday that had sellers so concerned that some were putting their shops in vacation mode while they waited for answers.
When visiting a listing page on Monday, a black button labeled “E Admin” appeared on the bottom right of the screen, remaining in place when scrolling down the page. Clicking on the button opened up a screen that showed information that appeared to be meant for Etsy staff only.
An Etsy seller reported the issue on the Bugs and Technical Issues forum at 5:36 pm, writing the following:
E. Admin Showing Up In The Lower Right Corner of My Listings. What’s this?
In the lower right corner when I click on one of my listings, in bold black letters, I see the words “E. Admin”, on each one of my listings. What’s up with this. When I click on it I get this – see below: PS I just clicked on other people listings and it shows up on others as well, not just mine.
Admin Tools
Page Info
Controller
Request Info
A/B Tests
Events 4
Development & Accessibility Tools
We were able to view the same data when clicking on a listing belonging to the original poster, which included details about A/B test Etsy is running. (The list of tests was quite long and proved interesting to sellers who viewed it.) During the incident, it appeared any visitor who clicked on the “E Admin” button could toggle and reset AB tests.
Initially we believed it was a list of tests Etsy was running on the particular listing we were viewing, though it may have been tests Etsy was running on our account as a visitor to the listing page.
We alerted Etsy to the incident on Monday evening after readers reached out to us. A spokesperson did not address our questions but referred us to the following response on the forum thread posted by a moderator at 8:47 pm:
“Hello! Our engineers have tracked down the problem you’ve reported here and pushed out a fix. Thanks very much for posting and letting us know about it.”
We responded, asking Etsy again if users’ data had been at risk, but we have not received an answer.
Let us know if you were aware of the incident and if you received a satisfactory response from Etsy about your concerns.
