Same issues as others. No message alerts in Shop Manager to notify me that I had a message in my spam folder. Saw it after 3 days and responded immediately and it also resulted in a sale. Etsy support told me to post here. They would/could not resolve the issue or forward to technical team to change the rating. No option to forward my issue to the technical team either or chat with them directly.
If using chat, they are outsourced and there script indicates if they can't solve to have the person ask in the forums. The problem with this is many of us in the forums know we cannot answer certain questions as they can only be answered by Etsy. IF we seem rude it is because it is frustrating to us. When we can't answer because it is something only Etsy can take care of it is maddening to have a seller directed here. We feel bad for the seller who then is directed to go back and talk to Etsy.
Etsy did post that they were going to fix the glitch and then fix the star seller. It is possible since it is easy to slip through the cracks that a seller will need to talk to Etsy directly about it.
When I learn of an issue from the forums, I take steps to do a cya fix. For example for this spam issue, I made it a point to daily check the numbers in spam. If it changed then I knew I had a message to answer within that 24 hour period.
Are we being berated?
That’s a standard forum response, unfortunately, even though the sellers do know Etsy sends those with issues here. Etsy’s number one priority seems to be never dealing with sellers, ever. They don’t want to talk to us or help us. There’s also a thread linking to an article about some of the things the Etsy CEO was talking about lately admitting that the people running the site’s algorithm get to make tests with basically zero oversight. Makes sense now why things happen automatically (reserves, spamming every message, taking away SSB) that are then very hard to undo for the Etsy staff.
From Etsy: https://help.etsy.com/hc/en-us/articles/4403058372503-How-to-Become-a-Star-Seller?segment=selling
This highlighted paragraph:
"Etsy Support can’t make changes to your Star Seller data or manually award Star Seller badges. If you think your Star Seller score was calculated incorrectly, you can let us know in the Technical Issues forum."
I assume the "us" in that last sentence is Etsy?
“…you can let us know in the Technical Issues forum."
And there’s the advice to come to the forum for help.
On a semi-related side note, it was a technical issue just writing this post. Was typing, accidentally hit paste a second time. Hit undo and it undid the typing and left the paste! Seriously, does nothing around here work right?
Thank you for reporting this, @GoldDoorVintage
We shared an update on this in April and want to make sure we clarify here too. If a message was marked as spam by Etsy and you subsequently move the message out of the Spam folder, your message response rate for Star Seller will not be negatively impacted.
However, we’re aware that this isn’t being reflected in the message response rate in Star Seller dashboards. We’re working to fix the dashboard and apologize for any confusion that this may have caused.
This spam issue affected my star seller rating. I had been in communication with someone about placing and order and asked her to message me on Etsy so I could create a custom order for her. Since Etsy asks sellers to use the app, I usually do so. I kept checking messages to see if she had messaged me and then after a couple days I checked my spam folder on my desktop (since thats not available on the app) and saw her message. This resulted in a sale but it has affected my star seller rating.
I've been 3 months without my Star Seller badge because of 2 spam messages, even though Etsy continually says spam messages won't affect our Star Seller standing. They do. It takes forever to build the response rate back since only spanking new messages from people I've never communicated with count toward bringing my score back up. It's very frustrating since I did nothing wrong and should have continued to be a Star Seller these 3 months. It has negatively affected my sales.