Star Seller is not being calculated correctly

[doggydaddyshop]

If star seller is to reward sellers for outstanding customer service then why am I getting dinged for not responding to solicitations? These people know too we have to respond which is taking time out of our precious day to serve our real customers, not happy…

[TheVintagePineapple]

If it's spam, put it in the spam folder.  

[JackisJustVintage]

All messages need a response. It does not matter where they came from. You either reply or mark as spam.

[GlassyFields]

the response can be to mark it as spam

messages marked as spam won't count against your star seller stats

[NoFrogsAllowed]

Star Seller is overseen by bots.  All the bots know is you got a message, not who it is from.  If the message is a solicitation, send it to spam then it won't affect your rating.

[Former_Member]

Than what is Etsy's excuse for not correcting bad reviews? I have proved to them several reviews were not even meant for my store. Do not even sell what they were reviewing. Etsy still does not change their errors and they do not care!! Worst "sellers" customer service in history. We should be able to grade them. Would most likely be a zero from all sellers. 

[Former_Member]

On top of that issue, our customers are now mixed up on who they are giving feedback to. ETsy has confused them, to who they buy from and made our shops merge. I have proved to ETsy the feedback was for another and they refuse to take down the bogus reviews. Which makes my numbers drop. 

I wish we could score them for high fees and lack of service. Sad. 

Etsy does not seem to be willing to support legitimate stores that have been here for years. 

[CraftyCornishMaids]

The reviews for items are very clear, 

some customers just will be confused, however clear it is.

Etsy has limited reasons for removal, there are a lot of laws regarding being able to remove reviews, , in case the platform removes unfavourable reviews to make things look better.

Etsy , along with other platforms, can't remove reviews because a customer may be confused 

[BeaRobertsArtist]

I got something like this the other week, a totally irrelevant message, so I just replied to it with "sorry what?" or something to that effect. Just in case it affected my star rating. I didn't want to take the chance of not replying - there's some weird (read nasty) people about who may just be trying to ruin someone's rating out of spite or for a laugh, so just to be on the safe side I answered back straight away. They, of course, never came back to me.   

[BagmakerSupply · Accepted solution]

@doggydaddyshop: "why am I getting dinged for not responding to solicitations" Because those are the rules that Etsy made. As it says right on your Star Seller page, you need to reply to the FIRST message of EVERY NEW INCOMING THREAD within 24 hours. It does not matter who sent it, the subject matter, if it is a duplicate or blank or anything else. If it is SPAM then it should be marked as such.

Almost everyone on this forum can sympathize with you but a quick search of this forum would show you innumerable threads about your exact issue. If the unanswered new thread is not a Help Request, at least for the time being, it appears that marking an unanswered message as SPAM (even after the 24 hour deadline has passed) will cause your reply percentage to change in a day or two if the original message was within the current star seller period (but not retroactively). Note that subsequent messages from that account may go directly to the SPAM folder.

[doggydaddyshop]

I get the rules, I read the rules...I know if you want change though you have to speak up and that's what i'm doing...

[BagmakerSupply]

@doggydaddyshop: "... if you want change though you have to speak up ..." Completely agree with you about that and I hope that everyone who is unhappy with Star Seller continues to let Etsy know that - unfortunately these forums do not appear to be the best way of doing that. But until (and if) Etsy makes changes we have to play by their rules. The danger, of course, is that any "improvement" will only make things worse for the seller.

A solicitation (non-transactional message) is against Etsy's Terms of Use and should be reported to Etsy as well as marked as SPAM.

[OmasFabricStash]

You’re getting dinged because you didn’t respond to, or send to spam, all messages. There is at least one thread about this every day, many more the first of the month. 
Customers don’t read and understand everything in a listing and sellers don’t always read and understand everything in Etsy’s rules for their site. I don’t think anyone reads and understand anything any more, as I get older I know I’m getting bad about skimming articles and not always understanding everything.

I like looking things up and in just the last week there was 11 threads specifically about not responding to messages and getting dinged. Just a little bit of useless information. 

[mommawhazelsquilts]

Have you ever wondered how many of those complaining about being dinged for unanswered messages (which kind of suggests they haven't read the rules) are the same people that complain about buyers not reading descriptions?

[doggydaddyshop]

update: marking it with the Spam designation works