A message received from a purchase I made counted against my star seller rating

[BrookwoodHandmade]

I pride myself on replying to every message quickly. A week ago or so I placed a digital order from an Etsy shop and received a "thanks for ordering" message from the seller. I didn't reply to it, and now I see my message response rate has been dinged. This seems like an oversight if the goal is to ensure a shops buyers receive prompt communication. October would be the first time since opening my shop ~3 months ago I will be eligible for a star seller rating, and was looking forward to it. 

[ChillwolfArt]

Hi, Sorry you were dinged for the Message.  The SS Metrics requires that whenever you are not the Initiator of a Message, you must respond or Mark as Spam.  It could even be from another Seller who you are friendly with ("How's it going"?). Because you didn't Initiate it, the same applies. I received a Thank You from a Seller I recently purchased from, and I responded. I always did the same before the SS Metrics came out.

Hope this helps.

[UniqueGiftOrnaments]

That's because the star seller info states that we have to answer every new message or put it into spam.

[PristinityJewelry]

Mark it spam quick, and it might not fall into this 90 day metric coming up.

[BrookwoodHandmade]

Thank you, that might be the best solution to get it removed. I'm still learning the quirks of Etsy and this one wasn't intuitive.

[audreytherese]

You are correct this was an oversight, but that was on your end, the program is clear that messages from both buyers and sellers count. If you are using the same account for both buying and selling then Etsy does not know the purpose of the message (and I really don't need them reading my messages trying to decipher what's what) and all messages count towards this metric. If you don't want your messages as a buyer to count then I suggest creating a second, buyer only, account. 

[BootifulLabels]

The rules clearly state that all new messages require an answer or to be marked as spam within 24 hrs in order to qualify for SS. It doesn't matter who they are from or what they are about, no-one reads your messages, the system is automated and simply compares the time-stamps for receipt and response to determine compliance. If you mark that message as spam now, it should update your stats within a day or two (hopefully in time for the end of month calculations, but I wouldn't count on it).

If you don't want your purchases to affect your SS status, you have a couple of options.

1. You can use Auto reply to send a "thank you" or an "I'll get back to you shortly" message. This counts as a response for SS, but needs to be reset every five days.
2. You can create a few snippets with various messages and send quick responses that way in just 3 clicks, Snippets/Select/Send.
3. You can create a new, buyer only Etsy account and keep all your purchases separate from your shop.

Number 3 is the easiest option, once your buyer account is set up it requires no ongoing maintenance and you never have to worry about messages from other sellers interfering with your SS rating.

[BrookwoodHandmade]

It's really not intuitive, and I would argue this isn't clear.

---

@BootifulLabels wrote:

The rules clearly state that all new messages require an answer

---

The qualifier "all" is never used. All of this information is contained in the seller dashboard. Why would messages I get from an order count? It simply isn't clear.

[CatsWhiskersCurios]

@BrookwoodHandmade it is clear. Under the 'Messages' tab on the star seller dashbord it says:

"Your message response rate is based on just the first message in a conversation, not ongoing conversations. This means you just need to respond to the first message within 24 hours. This applies to messages both from buyer and seller accounts. Messages from Etsy staff do not count toward your response rate, and neither do messages that you mark as spam. You can also now find a breakdown of your message response rate score by downloading a CSV."

[audreytherese]

Etsy's program is simple.

It reads something like: a message was received, did it get a response within 24 hours? Yes or No

There are no other contributing factors to consider.

The program does not ask: is this a message from a shop this shop has bought from?

Even if it did, Etsy believes the sellers you buy from have the potential to become your buyers. I've had this happen. I made a purchase and needed to message the seller about something. That seller happened to look at my shop and made a purchase from me. So in that conversation we were both the buyers and the sellers. Whose message should have been ignored?