Message Response Rate

[Purrsonified]

I noticed today that my messages response rate dropped to 80% today because I didn't respond to ONE of FOUR messages in February. This ONE message was from another seller I had purchased from asking for a 5 star review. My auto-reply did not activate because this was a message regarding my order, not a message to me as a seller. 

Yes, in retrospect, I should have responded (that their product was not satisfactory) or marked this spam immediately, but I didn't want to hurt their standing. 

The bigger question is why are sellers messages to me as a buyer, counting against me as a seller? Especially if the autoreply doesn't activate fr the buyer end. The service rep says there's no mechanism for Etsy to tell the difference between a Message to Seller vs Message to buyer and there really should be. The other seller isn't my customer, I'm theirs. Did they get docked when I didn't respond? 

Meanwhile, I had a customer message me last week, 1 message a day in the same thread and that auto-reply activated EVERY.SINGLE.DAY.  

Maayyyybe fix the autoreply and message streams before docking me points. 

[UniqueGiftOrnaments]

It doesn't make any difference if buyer of seller. Just put it into spam. The information on star seller is very clear.

[BagmakerSupply]

@UniqueGiftOrnaments: We now have to be careful with the 'put it into spam' advice for unanswered new threads which are not really spam. According to Etsy "You won’t receive any new messages from that member, and they’ll be unable to reply to messages in an existing thread." https://help.etsy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000343128-How-to-Handle-Scams-and-Suspicious-Messages

[BagmakerSupply]

@Purrsonified: "The bigger question is why are sellers messages to me as a buyer, counting against me as a seller?" Because Etsy says so. Clearly they do not want to deal with deciding the nature of a message. Remember that you can be both the seller to and buyer from an account, so then the message is from which? How many threads would there be in this forum that "some bot incorrectly classified my message"?

"Did they get docked when I didn't respond? " No, because the Star Seller metric for messages is very simplistic and binary - either you replied to (or marked as SPAM) that first message of a new incoming thread within 24 hours or you did not.

[WitticismsRus]

Pretty sure autoreply can distinguish between buyer or seller so it has to be something else. Which autoreply are you using? The standard one or the one where you set your dialy work hours? If it was just the standard autoreply be aware that you need to reset it every 5 days. 5 days is the max length of time that one can be set up for.

[WitticismsRus]

Typo oops. That first line should read 

Pretty sure autoreply can't distinguish between 

[BootifulLabels]

If you use your shop account to make purchases this is what can happen.  Do yourself a favour and open a separate account just for buying, then your purchases will not affect the SS rating on your shop account.