How do I deal with a difficult customer on Etsy?

You deal with a difficult customer on Etsy by deciding what you want the ending to look like before you type a word back, because winning the argument and ending it well are different jobs, and only one of them gives you your evening back. Nearly every difficult message that lands in a handmade shop's inbox is one of a small handful of things, and most of them are cheaper to solve than to argue with, which is good news once you can see it through the adrenaline.

Because what nobody warns you about is how out of proportion it feels. One message can ruin a whole day, following you round the house while you read it back over dinner and draft replies at 11pm that you would never send, and I sold on Etsy for long enough to know that feeling never fully wears off. When you make the thing yourself there is no customer services department to hide behind, so the complaint arrives at you personally, because it is personal... somebody is unhappy with something your hands made.

What should I do first when a difficult message arrives?

Nothing, for at least 20 minutes.

Do not reply from your phone in the moment, standing in the kitchen with your heart going, because the reply you write in that state is a defence of you, and what the situation actually needs is a decision about the ending. Put the phone down, make a cup of tea, let the first wave pass. The message will still be there, and you will be a different person when you come back.

While you wait, work out what has actually happened, because the right response depends on it. Nearly every difficult message is one of these:

• A genuine mistake of yours. The wrong colourway posted, a name spelled wrong on a personalised order, a seam that gave. Every maker who ships enough parcels makes one eventually.
• A postal problem outside your control. Late, lost, or arrived looking like it travelled under the van instead of in it.
• A misunderstanding about size, colour or timing. She pictured one thing, your listing said another, and somewhere in the middle those two pictures never met.
• Buyer's remorse wearing a fault as a disguise. The "colour looks different" message about an item that matches the photos exactly.
• And occasionally, rarely, somebody trying it on.

Only one of those is an attack, and it is the rarest of the lot. The rest are solvable problems arriving in an upset tone of voice, and solvable problems have endings.

What should I actually say to an unhappy customer?

Answer the feeling first and the facts second. This one move resolves more difficult messages than everything else on this page.

Your first line does the work, something like "I'm so sorry it arrived like that, you must have been so disappointed when you opened it", and then, plainly, what you are going to do about it. Most upset customers are checking whether you care before they decide how hard to push, and a first line that shows you do takes the heat out before you get anywhere near replacements and refunds. Opening with the tracking number and your returns policy wording does the opposite, even when every word is correct.

Keep the whole conversation in Etsy's messages. Moving it to email or Instagram feels friendlier and loses the record, and if the case ever escalates, that thread is your evidence. Which is also why the tone stays level whether or not you are being treated well... write every reply as if someone at Etsy will read it later, and you want the person in that thread to be the calm one.

Should I just refund a difficult customer to make them go away?

Sometimes, and the useful bit is deciding when, long before you are in the middle of one.

Sit down on an ordinary quiet day and draw your line: what you will replace, refund or remake without argument. For most makers that ends up being anything faulty, anything lost in the post, and anything priced below what an hour of arguing is worth. Whatever yours is, treat everything inside it as a cost of doing business, the same bucket as packaging and fees, rather than a defeat. Then when something lands inside the line you act quickly and generously and it is over by teatime, decided long before the pressure arrived.

And I want to be honest about the uncomfortable bit: a small number of people cannot be satisfied. Far fewer than the dread suggests, but they exist, and with those few the quick, generous ending is nearly always the cheapest one, because being right pays nothing and can cost you days. A lot of the urge to keep arguing is really the fear of the review sitting underneath it, and if that is where your head has gone, I've written about what to do when a bad review lands separately, because the two problems are next-door neighbours.

Abuse is different, and it deserves its own paragraph. A complaint is somebody unhappy with a product, whereas abuse is somebody emptying their bad day into you, and buying something from your shop does not buy the right to speak to you like that. You are allowed to stop responding, to block, and to report it to Etsy, and none of that makes you bad at customer service, whatever the knot in your stomach says.

How do I get fewer difficult customers in the first place?

Set the expectations at the listing, because that is where most difficult messages are actually born, weeks before they arrive. If something takes 2 weeks to make, say 2 weeks, however tempting the shorter number looks, and give real measurements rather than a hopeful "medium", and photograph the true colour in daylight with a line admitting that screens vary. It is quiet, unglamorous work and it prevents more grief than any perfectly worded reply ever will... I've written about what actually belongs in a listing description if you want to go through yours.

There is a quieter thing underneath all of this though, and it is the one I would sit with. Notice how much of the sting comes from this person being a stranger, someone with no idea who you are or that a real human is reading her message at the kitchen table. Now think about how a regular opens a complaint, someone on her 3rd order who knows your work... it almost always starts with an apology. "So sorry to bother you, I love everything I've had from you, but this one arrived with a mark on it." Same problem, completely different conversation, because she is writing to a person she trusts rather than a shop she found.

But have you considered that the ratio of strangers to regulars in your inbox is something you can actually change? Etsy search will send you strangers forever, that is all it can do. Regulars get built after the first order, by being able to reach people who already know your work is good, and shops that can do that end up with gentler inboxes as a side effect nobody mentions.

That shift, from a shop full of strangers to a shop with regulars in it, is more than one post can hold, so I've put the starting point into a free email course called 7 Days to Shift Your Shop, one short email a day for a week on why the shift matters and what it changes. If you want it, it's there.

The customers who found you complain to a shop. The customers who chose you write to a person