I was completely on track to meet the Star Seller requirements for this last period, but at the very last second an error brought my score down below the goal. In short, I shipped several orders on 10/31, but the On Time Shipping and Tracking spreadsheet shows one of them as not having shipped at all, despite the Etsy website itself showing that it shipped. The support chat folks told me that there was nothing they could do to help due to the automated nature of the system. This is the third or fourth time something like this has happened. Proof here: https://imgur.com/a/Fspr8OC
The system seems to stop counting a couple of days before the actual end of the month. So sometimes there will be a few days missing in the calculation. I don't think Etsy has explained why this is just that it happens. It's super frustrating that they can't seem to create anything that works properly.
If that's so, wouldn't all the orders I shipped that day be marked wrongly? Why only one?
The system takes 48 hours to update at the end of the month. I learned that hard way when I shipped something on September 31 and the tracking didn't update until the afternoon of October 1 tanking my star seller for that month. I posted in the forums and other sellers called it the "end of month black hole." So now I am just not going to ship on the last 2 days of the month.
Not discounting that there are all sorts of glitches with the Star Seller system especially with tracking, based on our analysis of the CSV files it appears that messages are assigned to the month that the 24 hour reply window ends (not when the message was received or answered) and orders are assigned to the month that they are scheduled to ship by (not when they were placed or shipped). Dates are determined by UTC not the sellers timezone. And add to that the delay in picking up the actual first scan of the package.
But in either case, I shipped both of the orders I mentioned at the same time, at the same post office. Shouldn't they be recorded the same way no matter what the method is?
This just happened to me... I have been a Star Seller for over a year straight and this error just ruined my streak. Really unhappy.
@TheArchitectMouse: "Shouldn't they be recorded the same way no matter what the method is?" If they were both first scanned at the same time, then yes. But we are completely at the mercy of if, when and how often AfterShip checks the tracking number and updates Etsy.
It should update automatically.