I have had a physical product Etsy shop for years and done many custom orders through the feature attached to messaging. I opened up a digital download shop late last year and very quickly grew my sales and earned the star seller badge. Last month I had a custom request and I created the order just as I alway had, directly from the message requests. However, there was no place to upload the file so once the customer paid I manually sent them their file. The problem came with the completion of the order. It took me through the shipping process and when I didn't actually have anything to ship, tracking numbers to add, etc., my star seller status dropped off for the following month, for this one order, even though the file was immediately sent to the customer through Etsy. Ordinarily this wouldn't bother me but it does appear that my sales have dropped off this month. If I get more views due to having that badge, then that is a bit problematic, especially since I just went through the same exact thing and will most likely be affected again next month. For anyone else having this issue, I did reach out to Etsy Help to find out how to rectify this issue. Apparently a file upload is not available in any manner through the custom order tab. Therefore, you have to create a "reserved (public) listing" and send the link to your customer so that the files are sent and everything washes itself out automatically, with no dings to your status. There is no correction to your status though through Etsy support. If anyone has any tips on how to keep these little buggy issues from affecting statuses (or sales), I'd love to hear them.
