Messages from purchases affect star seller message response rate

[georgiabsoaps]

I lost my star seller badge because I didn't respond to a message from a seller I purchased from thanking me for reviewing an item I purchased. I was not aware that messages about personal purchases affected my business stats and I'm very disappointed with this. I worked hard to maintain this status and what I think it's very unfair for what you do with your personal account to affect your business account. With these badges I think Etsy should separate business and personal account messages (I wasn't even aware they went to the same place). With this message the "have a problem with your order" section popped up, so it clearly had to do with purchasing rather than selling. I know they probably won't do anything to remedy this since sellers are not their priority, but it's frustrating. Has anyone else dealt with this issue? 

[bradgoodell]

Buyers are sellers and sellers are buyers, just like you are.  Which is why Etsy has always stated:  "All new messages from buyers or sellers..."   It has been a couple of years now, so I doubt Etsy is inclined to change.  Nor will they adjust your account.  

Your choices have always the same.  1-Reply, 2-Send to Spam, or option 3-Set up auto-reply.

Sorry you were blindsided by this.  

[audreytherese]

Yes, others have dealt with this. There's dozens of these posts every first of the month. If you don't want your personal messages to affect your business account, then you need to separate them and have 2 different accounts. Etsy does not know you are using the same account for business and personal purchases. It also states this in your dashboard under the SS program, "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."

[BagmakerSupply · Accepted solution]

@georgiabsoaps: Probably almost everyone on this forum can sympathize with you but as it says right on your Star Seller page, you need to reply to the FIRST message of EVERY NEW INCOMING THREAD. It does not matter who sent it, the subject matter, if it is a duplicate or blank or anything else. If it is SPAM then it should be marked as such.

Etsy is now putting a blue text warning / advisory (blue banner on desktop, and a blue dot on mobile) on those messages they consider to be a "new message" but should semantically be called a "new thread".

If the unanswered message is not a Help Request, at least for the time being, it appears that marking an unanswered message as SPAM (even after the 24 hour deadline has passed) will cause your reply percentage to change in a day or two if the original message was within the current star seller period (but not retroactively). Note that subsequent messages from that account may go directly to the SPAM folder.