In an effort to improve the overall level of customer service on the Etsy marketplace Etsy instituted a new rating system for sellers in late 2019. Called Order Dissatisfaction Rating (ODR), the system monitors each shop’s customer service based on customer reviews and complaints. When a shop dips below Etsy’s acceptable threshold, it’s given a warning and time to improve. If it doesn’t improve, the shop is closed.
“Buyers come to Etsy for special, one-of-a-kind items and a personalized shopping experience with customer service they can depend on,” states this Etsy help article explaining ODR. The article goes on to explain that buyers should get the item they ordered in a timely manner and items should be as described.
Is this new?
The Etsy marketplace is vast, with 2.6 million active sellers. For years Etsy has monitored seller’s shops for customer service satisfaction, sending sellers warnings if their shops aren’t meeting expectations and closing down shops who simply fail to comply. The difference now is the system has been made transparent to sellers for the first time.
See your ODR
Are you an Etsy seller? Click here to see your ODR. (Although ODR is transparent to sellers, the ODR link isn’t in the Etsy Shop Manager dashboard making it somewhat difficult to find.)
How are shops evaluated?
Shops are now evaluated on an ongoing basis based on two factors:
- The number of cases opened against your shop. (Cases are instances in which a customer has filed an official complaint to Etsy about a specific transaction.)
- The number of 1-2 star reviews your products have.
If a customer upgrades their star rating from 1 or 2 stars to 3 stars or higher, the low star rating still counts against the seller, and even if Etsy finds in favor of the seller in a case, the case still counts against the shop. ODR is based on a percentage of reviews and, as many sellers have pointed out, shops with fewer sales could really suffer from just a few low reviews.
Shops must maintain an ODR of less than 1% in order to sell on Etsy. ODR is evaluated on a rolling basis over 90 days of sales and sellers monitor their shop’s ODR percentage at any given time.
What happens if your shop gets a warning?
If a shop’s ODR rating jumps above 1% Etsy’s Customer Trust & Safety team may send the seller a warning that will include a summary of their customer service performance. After a shop receives a warning Etsy will review the shop again within 90 days.
Shops can receive two customer service warnings within two years. If a shop continues to get low reviews or open cases even after these two warnings it will be reviewed for permanent suspension. If a seller has two shops, each shop is evaluated separately. And if you close your shop and open a new one the warning you received for your current shop will apply to the new one. (See more from Etsy here.)
Etsy sellers react
Many Etsy sellers are simply unaware of ODR and are surprised to learn that their customer service performance is being monitored in this way. (Unlike its campaign to get sellers to adopt free shipping or Etsy Ads, Etsy hasn’t done a great job explaining ODR to sellers.)
Other sellers find ODR to be both frightening and outrageous, spurring them to branch out and establish stand-alone ecommerce sites as a safety precaution should they lose their Etsy shop due to a handful of upset customers. Seller BigDogLadysJools notes on the Etsy forums, “ODR is a travesty of justice, unfortunately Etsy doesn’t care that it is, they’d rather neg good long time sellers than get rid of the scammers and counterfeiters that overwhelm Etsy with their crapola. OP, if you haven’t already done so, I’d consider branching out elsewhere.”
How are you feeling about ODR? Has it changed the way you behave as a seller, and has it changed your feelings about Etsy? Tell us in the comments.
I’ve been a seller since 2011 and never knew this – definitely not well publicized. https://www.etsy.com/shop/Laminates
It’s very non transparent and according the the attorney general illegal.
Hmmm…really? Etsy has a pretty robust legal team. Where are you seeing that tracking a customer service rating for sellers is illegal?
why illegal? Can you pls clarify. Shop gets a permanent suspension due to this ODR
Etsy cares only for their bottom line and their shareholders. Etsy used to be a super supportive place for sellers. The original creator designed it to be a warm and welcoming place, but like so many corporate bean counters, they are now cold and impersonal. They are now dictatorial and NON transparent with increasing changes for their own personal growth.
Etsys original vision is truly gone. Perhaps one day they will see their viewership and seller count decrease because of their lack of support for the makers.
This is so wrong.
Some put their grievances in the rating box without realising and without contacting the show owner- eg. missing parcels.
Also some open cases when they haven’t read the description properly and even when they do change it- it doesn’t matter according to the ODR score????
Many sellers wouldn’t even know this existed until it was too late.
Very disappointed
What I want is to opt out of this new imposed advertising before Etsy launçhes it.
Does anyone know if we have any control to do so??
Thanks! Juliet Jewelry Design
If your sales in the last year were less than $10,000 then you can opt-out in mid-April after the program has run for about a month for free.
Does anyone know if we can opt out of Etsys new involuntary advertising?
You can if your shop earned less than $10,000 in the last year.
How do we check our ODR
It looks like Etsy has disabled this feature, at least for now.
I was just banned indefinitely with absolutely no warning for a couple of 1 star reviews (overall 3.8 stars)! Etsy refused to rectify the ban even after I pointed out they gave no warning. How can any business survive with this sort of seller disadvantage?
My dearest Miss Natalie, may I know how’s your shop at ETSY now? Have you settled it with ETSY? Please kindly advise, thank you 😀
This has just happened to me too :|…I received an email only 2 days ago that there was ‘suspicious activity’ on my account and now I am locked out of it. I’ve had my account since 2016, developed all my own patterns and hand making every item in my shop for 12 yrs [@toastie_toots on instagram] always paying my bills on time and this is how they treat you…/:-[
If you clicked the link in the email to see and fix the “suspicious activity” then you actually didn’t get locked out by etsy. It’s a fake email scam to let the scammer gain access to your account. You basically got hacked and closed by scammers. You need to email Etsy’s trust and safty department and explain that your store got hacked.
it had happened to me as well – 2 open cases in 1 day thanks to Etsy – they forced me on “vacation mode” to focus on my open orders. During this forced “vacation mode” buyers messages are converted directly to a case and Etsy bot refunds them. So my shop got permanently suspended. And because of this all other sellers accounts in the household got suspended as well. Etsy support team is not helping. I ended up shipping and delivering merchandise and buyers got a full refund from Etsy simply because once they send me a message the message converts into a case. It is not my fault but i am the victim.
Wow, that is insane! Please update us here in the future if you have any updates, though! I’ve been very excited about opening an Etsy shop, but all the strict rules are scaring me.
Thank you for sharing as I noticed the same response from Etsy and slowed all my shipping times down completely in hopes to avoid getting a suspension. Very unfair to the sellers these ghost customers leaving poor untruthful reviews just because or are they hired help? Nonetheless as a seller I will be forced to take my business elsewhere Etsy is no longer in favor of homemade sellers.