Star Seller affected Etsy wrongly marked as Spam

[BellberryLane]

Hi everyone,

I'm sharing this to bring attention to the issue and to kindly ask for any help or advice on how to resolve it.

I recently lost my upcoming Star Seller status for August because a genuine message was mistakenly marked as spam by Etsy, not by me. This error dropped my message reply rating, affecting my eligibility. Even though I moved the message out of the spam folder and responded as soon as I saw it (2 days later), the impact on my rating remained. 

I reached out to Etsy support last week and received the following response:

"More recently, we’ve worked to reduce the noise in your Inbox by automatically moving potentially suspicious messages to your Spam folder (which can only be seen on desktop or mobile browsers). As a result of this, some of your messages may have been moved to the Spam folder in error. If Etsy has marked a message as spam that you subsequently move out of the folder, that will not impact your Star Seller eligibility. That said, we’re actively looking into reports of spam messages impacting Star Seller status or eligibility. We’re working to improve the accuracy of these measures and we apologize for the confusion and inconvenience this may have caused."

Unfortunately, my help request was marked as completed after this message, and my star seller rating for messages was not fixed.

Has anyone else experienced this? Were you able to resolve it?

Thank you

[NanaLetha]

I have not experienced that but remember, you only need a 95% response rate.

[Taitaya]

This happened to me. I am still seeing if it affected my star seller. So far so good. It's been 5 days.

What I didn't do was to mark it as not spam, but left it in the spam folder. I am not entirely sure my customer received my reply as I've not heard from them since.

This is definitely a weakness in the spam filter/star seller metrics, as there is no notification that these messages arrive so it's easy to miss them. Therefore until Etsy sort this out I have taken to checking the spam folder twice a day.

Personally I would rather receive the spam messages in my inbox and mark them Myself as spam. But then again excessive spam has never been a issue in my shop. At the moment I risk loosing a customer messages, unless I spend extra time checking a spam folder..   At the very least five sellers the option to opt out of having spam head straight into spam folder.

Those of you reading this. Do check your spam filters and if you want to keep your star seller metrics intact, don't move the messages out of that folder (unless it's within 24 hours).

[BellberryLane]

Thank you for your response, I do hope that it doesn't affect your rating. I'd also like to know if replying while in the spam folder would work. I had moved it to my inbox because it was about purchasing a listing in my shop— which then resulted in a large sale that I would have otherwise missed out on. I don't often check my spam folder on Etsy, so I'm happy that only 2 days had passed.