Responded to a message I found in spam folder...

[DoozieandBloom]

Closed my Shopify store and have decided to keep Etsy as my main shop. I've been officially back for about two months. Since being back, I've never gotten any messages. I do a lot of local craft markets and met someone at my last event at the end of August who wanted to coordinate on some custom work. I noticed a message in my spam folder about two weeks after that event. It was from her. I apologized about the delayed response as I hadn't gotten a message notification & never check my messages because I don't get any lol. 

I noticed a day or so after responding to her and setting up a meeting, I'm now getting the low search visibility/response rate from the star seller thing. I'm confused. Etsy says spam messages aren't counted. This one had been sitting in my spam folder for two weeks when I noticed it, and it wasn't spam so I responded. Since then, I've been logging in to check my messages daily for any more surprise spam messages. Does this have a huge impact on search visibility? I've never really cared about the star seller badge but curious if it actually keeps customers from finding my products. 

Thanks! 

[GroundZeroCreations]

If you responded to the message, it likely removed it from the spam folder (or perhaps you did). Once that is done, Etsy looks at the date the message was sent and it is going to be counted as a late response by you. 

You said, "I'm confused. Etsy says spam messages aren't counted." Well, you don't respond to spam messages, at least not two weeks after they are sent. 

As for its effect on search visibility, Etsy says it does. But as we have all learned, you can't always rely on what Etsy says. 

[DoozieandBloom]

I guess checking daily now would avoid this in the future but if I didn't mark it spam why populate in the spam folder? I guess that's where I'm confused, especially considering it wasn't a spam message. Grateful she was super understanding and I still got a meeting out of it. We'll see what happens. Thanks so much! Have a great weekend.  

[ZehOriginalArt]

No this is not your fault. Etsy had a glitch for a while where many sellers found legitimate messages in their spam folders and it affected their star seller rating if they answered. Etsy had said that they fixed this so it would not count late on your Star Seller metrics if you respond, but perhaps that is not indeed happening. You can try contacting Etsy about it, but I'm not sure they will do anything, unfortunately. I check all my message folders now every day.