My response rate included me responding to vendors I purchased from personally, which is a completely inaccurate way of calculating my customer service. My response to purchases I made personally has nothing to do with how I operate as a shop. Please fix this @etsy!!!
What messages count towards the message response rate?
"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."
We're heading into the two year anniversary of this program. From Day One, the rule has been that you respond within 24 hours to all first messages from either BUYER or SELLER.
Sellers will still be complaining 3, 4+ years from now (if the program is still going on) and wanting Etsy to fix something when there's nothing to fix.
It states this info on the dashboard, help pages, ALL NEW messages must be replied too, yet some sellers seem to think those rules don't apply to them and want Etsy to fix it. A gazillion posts about this since SS started.
What messages count towards the message response rate?
"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."
Yep, bots do not read the messages, so do not know who they are from, so all messages must initially be responded to, thats the way it’s always been, so you either respond with a quick message, even an emoji, or mark as spam.
Your response rate is not calculated incorrectly. If you truly care about star seller, you should read all the rules so you do not have any other surprises in this almost 2 YEAR old program.
I noticed just today that I bumped down to 92% for a missed message but when I downloaded my message history - all responses are "yes" replied to within 24 hours. I started a chat with Etsy support. They told me it did look to be an error and escalated to technical support. I never hesitate to contact Etsy support when I'm not able to figure out where the issue is.
