Etsy Seller Secrets: Do Customer Reviews Really Matter?
And who's responsible for those annoying notifications to review *every* purchase???
Welcome to Turkey season! Thanksgiving is just around the corner for us Americans. We’re in the second half of fall and I can’t believe how quickly Halloween has already passed us by.
Fall is my favorite season. It reminds me of two important facts:
Every year has this built-in season of change. Next year is our chance to correct the mistakes from this year, as well as start new adventures.
The rest of this year will go by much faster than we want. It will be Christmas and New Year’s before we know it. In fact…
LOL. I love Christmas music and started the Mariah Carey “All I Want For Christmas” madness yesterday. My husband will lose his nerve in about 2 weeks, if not sooner…
Fun fact: Did you know Mariah Carey makes *millions* every year just on the royalties of her #1 Christmas song “All I Want For Christmas”? Well played, Ms. Carey!
Back to more serious matters…this month’s post is another Etsy Seller Secrets insider look! It covers one of the biggest customer engagement features: reviews.
Do Etsy Customer Reviews Matter?
First, let’s discuss customer reviews. Do they really matter? How do they matter?
In a nutshell, yes, they do matter. There are at least 2 main reasons why they’re important:
Reviews signal to other customers what the experience is like purchasing from a particular Etsy shop. Expectations vs. reality. We live in a high consumerism culture. Therefore, customers need ratings to help them weed out the bad shops from the good.
Star ratings directly impact a seller’s Star Seller badge
Not every customer will leave a review. I can’t remember what I was initially told as an Etsy seller, but I think it’s something like we can expect 10-20% of customers to leave a review. Etsy has developed some (annoying) app features to help sellers get more reviews…more on that soon.
Wait…What is the Star Seller Badge?
Going back to point #2 above, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of you are like “What is that? I’ve never heard of this!”
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An Etsy Star Seller badge is a special designation for Etsy sellers. It’s earned if that Etsy seller meets the minimum requirements on 4 levels for a rolling 3-month period. I won’t go into all the details (you can read more about those requirements here), but essentially, it’s a scorecard based on how quickly an Etsy seller responds to customer messages, how quickly they ship (and whether they use tracking), their sales, and their average star rating from that period.
The average star rating is what I’ll focus on here. If you’re a shop that doesn’t have a lot of sales, every customer rating matters. A seller must maintain a minimum average of 4.8 stars to qualify for the badge. That’s difficult to do if every customer isn’t giving you 5 stars on every item in their order. (And note this is why sellers may send you a follow-up message to ask why you didn’t rate them 5 stars. They’re depending on your rating.)
It’s also challenging if customers don’t leave ratings at all.
In addition, some customers limit their 5-star ratings. They’ll hold back based on personal beliefs and give out mostly 4-star ratings instead.
And you can see why all of the above puts Etsy sellers in a conundrum if they’re trying to attain the Star Seller badge.
Does the Star Seller badge make a difference for Etsy sellers?
To be perfectly honest, right now I don’t think so. I’ve earned this badge almost every month since the inception of the program and I haven’t seen any evidence to prove that it benefits me as a seller. It doesn’t hurt…but it doesn’t help. Etsy promised sellers great things when this program was first rolled out. I’m not sure why they haven’t done more with it. I think sellers like me are holding onto the badge just in case Etsy changes the program in a positive way.
It’s important to note that some sellers can’t earn the badge due to the nuances of the program. For instance, there are Etsy shops that offer local pickup (i.e. for large, bulky items like furniture) and that works against the badge. Many of these sellers have posted in Etsy seller forums that not earning the badge has not hurt their sales.
I think customers are mostly unaware of the badge. So my guess is customers aren’t looking for this designation when they make purchasing decisions on Etsy.
What About Those Annoying Etsy App Notifications To Review Purchases?
Moving on…let’s now talk about the (super annoying) Etsy app notifications related to reviews. If you’ve ever purchased anything on Etsy in the last couple of years you know what I’m talking about. Right after your order reaches its final expected ship-by date, you suddenly get a slew of notifications from the Etsy app to review *every item* on your order. And you not only have to give your experience an overall star rating but there are multiple, detailed star ratings *and* you’re also asked to enter a text review that’s a minimum of 5 words long. And *then* you get prompted to leave a photo or video review (although, optional)!
It’s aggravating. Especially if you’re a binge customer like me and order 25+ sticker sheets in a single order. That’s 25+ review requests that ask for my attention for months.
Just so you know, we sellers get the same thing. We don’t get a get-out-of-jail-free card because we have an Etsy shop. These notifications go to *all* Etsy customers.
In addition, the app has some kind of bug where even after I complete the reviews, it doesn’t register that I did. So the notifications don’t go away until many months past the final ship-by date.
Unfortunately, as far as I know, there’s no way to turn these review notifications off without turning off *all* Etsy app notifications, which can be dangerous if you're a customer. If your seller needs additional information from you about a purchase, you won’t see it if your notifications are off.
So who’s responsible for these notifications? Etsy is. Period. NOT the seller.
I point out the above because there are customers out there who believe the shop seller is responsible for these. They will give the seller a bad review because of them. Please understand that we sellers have no control over these notifications.
Anything Else We Need to Know About Customer Ratings?
Yes! I forgot one more thing (and have added this after the fact)…the average customer review you see next to an Etsy shop is their average rating for the past 12 months. It is not the shop’s lifetime average customer rating. Therefore, if you see horrible reviews in their past, it’s possible the seller got their stuff together and started performing better in the recent past.
Happy Thanksgiving!
So that’s it for today’s Etsy Seller Secrets post! I hope it was informative.
For those of you who celebrate American Thanksgiving, Happy early Thanksgiving! And happy Black Friday to the serious shoppers out there as well - I hope you get some good deals this year!
My Etsy shop will be on vacation during the Thanksgiving holiday, as we will be joining our family this year. We will celebrate it with a grand turkey feast. Gobble ‘til you wobble! ❤️
Next month I hope to do an awesome unveiling of my new Truly Yours Baum-kuchen customized planner covers. And with some added Christmas cheer! Until then…