Star Seller and your reviews

The Star Seller card appears on Today only when your review average sits below 4.8. It shows the gap, how many five star reviews you have, and how many are at three stars or below.

Read what follows before acting on it, because the card deliberately measures one thing and Star Seller is not one thing.

What the card measures

The average of every review Elistit holds for that shop, across all time.

That is a useful number for you. It is not the number Etsy assesses you on.

Why your Etsy figure may differ

Etsy judges Star Seller over a rolling review period, not over your shop’s whole history. Etsy’s own shop rating is calculated over the past year.

So the two averages answer different questions:

• Elistit’s figure: how this shop has been reviewed, ever.
• Etsy’s figure: how this shop has been reviewed lately.

A shop with a rough first year and a strong recent year will look worse here than on Etsy. A shop that has slipped recently will look better here than on Etsy. Neither is wrong, and neither is a bug.

If the two disagree, Etsy’s is the one that decides the badge.

What Elistit cannot see

Star Seller is awarded on several criteria. The review rating is one of them. The others involve how you run the shop, including how quickly you reply to messages and whether orders dispatch on time with tracking.

Elistit reads listings, reviews and order data through Etsy’s API. It does not see your message response times, and it is not told how Etsy is scoring you against any criterion.

So the card can only ever tell you about the rating. Hitting 4.8 here does not mean the badge follows. Your Star Seller dashboard in Etsy shop manager is the only place with the complete assessment, and it is where you should check before concluding anything.

We show the rating criterion because it is the one we can measure honestly, and because it is the one most often fixable through the work you are already doing.

What moves the average

Reviews are heavily weighted by delivery experience, and for digital products that mostly means whether the buyer got their files quickly and could open them.

Worth checking if your average is drifting:

• Delivery. Files reaching the buyer promptly, in a format they can use. Most digital review complaints are delivery complaints, not design complaints.
• Expectations. A listing that oversells what the file is produces disappointed buyers who leave accurate, low reviews.
• Response. A buyer who has a problem solved often revises a review. One who is ignored does not.

Chasing an average directly does not work. Fixing the reason for the low reviews does.

Working through the low ones

The reviews page filters to your lowest rated reviews. Elistit can draft two responses for a review that has text: a public reply for shoppers to read, and a private message for the buyer.

Neither is posted for you. You copy the one you want and send it from Etsy, because a reply in your own voice to a specific buyer is not something to automate.

FAQ

Why does the card not appear at all? Because your average is 4.8 or above, or the shop has no reviews yet. The card only shows when there is a gap.

Does replying to a review change my rating? Not on its own. It can lead a buyer to revise theirs, which does.

Can I remove a bad review? Not from here, and generally not at all. Etsy removes reviews only where they breach its policies, and that is a request to Etsy.

My review count here is lower than on Etsy. Elistit holds the reviews it has synced for the connected shop. If the shop was connected recently, older reviews may not have been pulled. Reconnecting and re-syncing brings the history in line.

Is the number of reviews used for anything else? It informs the shop context the assistant reasons from. It is never shown to buyers, and Elistit does not publish anything on your behalf.