People have been noticing individual ratings on some Etsy reviews lately. These have been available for some customers to leave for a while, but Etsy seems to be showing them to some shoppers and not to others.
So what are these ratings, where do they come from, and how do they figure into your overall star rating?
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What are the individual ratings on Etsy reviews?
The individual ratings on some Etsy reviews come from customers who leave reviews on iOS devices like an iPhone, and only when they’re using the Buy On Etsy app.
These ratings are optional, and they include a 1 to 5 star rating for the item quality, shipping, and customer service.
When a customer leaves the main star rating, they’ll then see a second page that gives them the option to leave the individual ratings.
They can click on the “I didn’t need customer service” box to skip that one, so that’s why it doesn’t always show up on reviews.
Customers don’t have to leave individual ratings, and they don’t have to fill out all three individual ratings, so it’s an optional thing that isn’t even available for all customers.
This picture from the Etsy review page
says that only the overall star rating is visible to the public, but that’s not right anymore because people have been seeing the ratings in reviews that are being shows to shoppers.
Not every review will have the bars because not every customer leaves the additional ratings, but when they do see them they can have a big impact on future customers.
What do customers see when they see the ratings?
When a customer sees the additional ratings on a review, they’ll see a black bar for each section that the customer filled out.
In the photo above, you can see that there are three reviews, and one customer only left the main star rating, but two other ones left the extra ones.
However, one customer only filled out two of the extra ratings because they skipped the customer service one, and one filled out three.
Etsy will only show the additional ratings that the customer filled out, so you might not see three extra bars on every review that has the extras.
In a way this could be helpful, because if someone gives you a low review but they add that the reason for that was 1-star shipping because of something the post office did, at least it explains that it wasn’t your fault.
On the other hand, if they give you a 5-star overall review but then “mark you down” for something in the individual ones, that can give customers who are looking at reviews before purchasing a mixed message.
Having said that, I think that people are used to seeing this kind of breakdown of review factors now because a lot of platforms use that kind of system, so it’s probably not as big a deal as people might think it is.
Most of the ratings that people are going to leave will fall in line with the main star rating, so if someone leaves you 5 stars, then three additional one-star ratings, that will just look like a mistake to most people who look at the reviews.
Do the individual ratings affect your overall shop star rating?
I checked with Etsy support, and after sending them screenshots of the extra ratings on a review and explaining to them where the additional ratings come from (yes, I’m serious), I asked them whether the additional ratings count toward that overall shop star rating.
After a long back-and-forth where they thought I was complaining about something and I had to clarify that I was just asking about it in general, I did get an answer after they consulted someone else.
The customer service rep said that the three additional ratings that show up sometimes are NOT used to calculate your main star rating for your shop.
The star rating for your shop that shows up at the top of the shop home page is only based on the main rating that people give you, so the extra ones don’t count for that calculation.
The extra ones are only there as additional information for customers who are looking at your reviews.
Do the extra ratings count toward Star Seller?
Since the extra ratings don’t count toward your shop score, they don’t count toward Star Seller either.
This section from the Etsy handbook about Star Seller points out that the ratings average is calculated by ratings divided by the number of reviews, and even though we know that the manual isn’t updated in all cases (note the photo in the section above) it does make sense in this case.
If they used the total number of the additional reviews along with the main rating, it would mess up the averages in a big way.
So if someone leaves a three or four-star review in the extra section, don’t worry about it beyond using it as feedback, it’s not going to mess up your Star Seller rating.
So that’s the story of the individual ratings…Whether they remain visible or not is up to Etsy, because as I write this they seem to be visible to some people but not to others.
I see them on and off, and have for a while, so they might be something that Etsy shows as part of experiments to see how customers react to them, or to see if showing them increases sales.
Since they’re not something that every customer leaves, though, it’s not going to be something that will show up on every review all the time unless Etsy expands the devices that can leave them, and also makes it mandatory to leave all three.
Doing that would probably make people click out of the review and not leave one at all, so we’ll see if that ever happens!
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