Hello to all, if you are a Star Seller, please do not do what I have done (Cue in: "House of the Rising Sun"): I initiated correspondence with a client by sending them a message that I wrote **on their packing slip**, which was emailed to the customer after I fulfilled their order. Enthusiastic, the customer replied to me by the regular message center. To be clear, the customer was responding, so it was the END of the conversation.
However, I had to find out the hard way, because I *did not reply* to what was the end of the conversation, Etsy's AI that calculates the Star Seller rating decided to dun me for not responding to what is clear to any intelligent human being as the end of a conversation. Ety's Star Seller calculating machinery will assume you are being a bad, bad, very bad seller, indeed, for not responding to what might appear to be a first message from a customer, even if they are, in fact, responding to a message that was on their packing form.
Do not expect any help from Etsy customer service. They say their hands are tied and they cannot alter your messaging response rating, even when it is plain as day what happened. I was told that this circumstance would be "taken into consideration" for any future upgrades to the Star Seller system. In the meantime, Etsy does not care to rectify my score for this coming August, even after I've provided excellent, prompt and dedicated customer service. So I am writing this here to let you know of this inherent glitch within their Star Seller calculations as well as the grave unfairness that I shall be sadly punished for a flaw within their programming design/system.
