Suggested Review Policy - Investor Relations Email

[NovelShelfCo]

The email below was sent to the investor relations email address.  Have tried multiple times to get a resolution from the support team, to no avail.  Anyone else who is experiencing these "suggested review" issues please respond, in the hopes we can get some kind of action from Etsy.

[This content has been removed by Moderation. We ask that you please review Section 1, Item 2 of our Community Policies prior to posting.]

[BagmakerSupply]

@NovelShelfCo: If I had any say in the matter, I would change the default sort order for reviews to "Most Recent" instead of "Suggested" (suggested by whom?), and replace "Suggested" with "High To Low" and "Low To High".

[NovelShelfCo]

I agree Bagmaker, I think this would be a reasonable fix, and we all know it would take 3 mins for them to make this change to the default view.

[SurnamePro]

I agree with your position. Place 1-2 star reviews on the bottom as you can have 250 five star reviews on one products but the one or two bad reviews pop up to the top making the entire process unfair. Lately being unfair to ALL sellers is becoming the new Etsy standard. IMO

[NovelShelfCo]

It is unfair, an isn't helping Etsy make sales. I only have a small store and have only just started, but I'm sure some of you have much bigger operations.  Even so, I've made 150 sales so far with over 40 x 5 star reviews and yet the review Etsy puts right at the top is the only 3 star review I've ever received!

[howtobooksandmore]

I agree with Bagmaker supply on how reviews should be shown.  But Etsy is apparently not worried about loosing money the way they show reviews now.  If someone has bad feedback and then gets a review service to flood their shop with good feedback, buyers still buy from this shop and Etsy has more refunds and returns to deal with.  There are many ways to manipulate feedback for a shop and bad sellers can and do use them all.  Etsy looses less money when buyers don't buy from bad shops than they lose when they do.  If you think this is bad, you should see what goes on at Amazon to manipulate feedback.  And exactly what resolution do you expect to get from the support team.  Have you ever known a low level employee (seller in this instance) knowing what upper management is doing or have any influence over it.

[NovelShelfCo]

I honestly just think this is an example of stupidity of a large organization.  Clearly not promoting negative reviews would lead to more sales for the Etsy community sellers, and more revenues for Etsy themselves. We just need to figure out a way to get to the right product manager within the organization.

Do you know of any moderators or users with a large following on the forum pages that can help champion this effort?  Perhaps we can start a petition? Failing that, maybe we can jump on the next investor quarterly review call and ask the question directly to management on why they have chosen a review policy which so clearly harms sales and revenue.

[howtobooksandmore]

No moderators is going to champion an effort to stop anything at Etsy.  Etsy is their employer and championing an act that only benefits/hurts buyers is a quick way to looking for another job. There are no users who can influence Etsy because they view us all as being churn sooner or later. Petitions have been started about everything and anything on Etsy.  They have no effect at all on Etsy. You can try the next quarterly review call and ask the question there.  But you will get the usual corporate double speak meaning nothing for your trouble.  But it is your time to waste if you want to try that.

[CraftyCornishMaids]

I would think Etsy sees it as being more honest as a platform, therefore increasing sales overall

It may not increase the sales where these do pop up, but the buyer still probably buys from a shop on Etsy, and has more confidence in it.

[OmasFabricStash]

I have seen more and more on line sites changing the reviews to suggested. I just automatically change it to recent. 
Also I realized yesterday that when I am shopping on line the first thing I do is click 4 stars and above without even thinking about it. Not sure when I started doing it but maybe there is a little, itty bitty, something to what Etsy is doing to the descriptions. I still haven’t been in the test so I haven’t really seen it in shops yet. 

[PWOriginals]

The default is not only based on "relevancy" but also favors those reviews which have written comments.

I always sort to "most recent." Sometimes a seller starts poorly, with negative comments, but makes improvements, and all the recent comments are positive. Conversely, a shop with all good reviews can start failing for numerous reasons (getting sick and not tending to shop or overwhelmed by too many orders, etc). I want to know what's happening with the shop as recently as possible.