I am working with a client on a custom portrait. I am sending messages directly in the conversation. She receives an email that allows her to reply, but each time she does, it creates a new separate conversation. In the past, it would publish clients' replies directly into the existing conversation. I know have 7 conversations for the same client and is becoming unmanageable. As a side note, each conversation that I don't reply to with that conversation gives me negative points against my star seller ratings. If anyone has any knowledge about why this is happening, or some setting I can change to fix it, please let me know. Thanks.
I'm not sure why it's happening, but she needs to sign in to her Etsy account and answer you within the convo instead of replying to the emails. If she won't do that, you'll need to mark the other messages as spam. I wouldn't start replying to them all just to reply, because she'd just get more emails about your replies.
Don't mark the messages as spam or you will not receive any more from the customer. Write and ask her to reply to the ongoing thread or simply open each of the seven ones and put in a standard reply something like "See original thread".
This whole star seller thing is effed up; the messaging badge in particular. In the last three months I've had 8 messages. Two of which were from the same customer with the exact same message. I answered the one which had the most conversation and the other slipped on by knocking me off the star seller badge. This might haunt me for three more months which is bogus. Etsy needs to add more time to their qualifications, like a year or lifetime of the shop for us to be able show the world what we are made of. Otherwise we are at the whim of a one starred review from a disgruntled buyer who refuses to communicate to solve a problem, one missed DUPLICATED message, and one misstep of our beloved post office!
@ShadowMoon Spot on. Just hope Etsy gets rid of the dang thing.
"She receives an email that allows her to reply, but each time she does, it creates a new separate conversation."
That's why it's happening. If they log into etsy and reply there in the convos/messages then it won't create an entirely new message chain. It's the following a link to reply from the email notification of message that is the issue.