Etsy Reviews: 100 Days to Edit, One Public Reply, and a Score That Halves Every Year

A two-star review lands at eleven at night and the reply box is right there under it. Most sellers type something — polite, explanatory, a little wounded — and hit post. It feels like damage control. It is actually the one action in Etsy's entire review system that can never be undone, and it removes the buyer's ability to fix the review for you.

Etsy documents all of this plainly, but the rules are split between buyer-facing and seller-facing Help Center articles, so almost nobody reads both halves. Here is the whole mechanism in one place: the clock, the lock, how your score is actually calculated, and the short list of grounds on which Etsy will take a review down.

Responding publicly ends the buyer's ability to edit — permanently

This is the rule to internalize before any other. Etsy states it twice, in two separate articles, in almost the same words: once you respond to a review the buyer will no longer be able to edit their original review or rating, even if you delete your response. The negative-review page repeats the condition from the other direction — the buyer is able to edit their review within 100 days of the estimated delivery date if you haven't responded to the review.

So the public reply is a one-way door. Etsy's own recommended sequence puts it last, not first: consider whether there is anything you can do to change the buyer's experience to a positive one, communicate with the buyer in Messages, and respond publicly only if you're unable to work out a solution with the buyer privately. Etsy is explicit that responding quickly and showing that you're willing to address the issue may lead a buyer to edit their review — which is a thing that literally cannot happen after you post a reply.

The other constraints on the public response, all from the same page:

• One response per review. You can delete it at any time, but you can't edit it and you can't leave another one.
• You have 100 days to respond, counted from the date the buyer last edited their review — not from the date it was left.
• Buyers can't reply to your reply. The thread ends with you.
• Your response is held to the review policies too. Etsy names three things to keep out of it: tracking numbers, external links, and private information. A response that breaks the rules gets removed.

Etsy's framing of the writing job is the useful part: remember you're writing this reply not just for this one reviewer, but all future visitors to your shop. Address the specific concern and any change you made because of it, and focus on your product and service rather than the reviewer.

The clock: 100 days, and where it starts

Buyers have 100 days to review an order, beginning on the delivery date or estimated delivery date. Which of those two applies depends on something you control:

• With delivery tracking: the delivery date is when the shipping carrier marks the order as Delivered.
• Without tracking: Etsy calculates the estimated delivery date as purchase date + processing time + shipping days. Your processing time is literally an input into when your review window opens — one more reason to set it honestly, as we worked through in the piece on processing times and delivery estimates.
• For digital items: the 100 days begins when the buyer downloads the file. A printable bought in March and downloaded in September starts its review window in September. If you sell instant downloads, that clock is set by the buyer, not by you — see the digital downloads rulebook for the rest of what changes.

Sitting alongside it is a much shorter clock: from the estimated delivery date, a buyer has 100 days to leave a review and 30 days to open a case. The two interact in a way worth knowing. A review can't be left or edited while a case is open on the order — but Etsy is explicit that the 100-day window is not paused by an open case. A case that drags on burns review days nobody gets back.

Orders that can never be reviewed at all

Etsy lists the exclusions, and a couple of them surprise people:

• Canceled orders. If an order or transaction is canceled, Etsy considers it over and voided — there is no review.
• Guest orders that were never claimed. A guest buyer has to connect the order to an Etsy account before they can leave a review or open a case.
• In-person Square sales. Reviews can only be left for items sold through Etsy. If you sell an item in person through Square, the buyer can't leave a review on Etsy.
• Any order with an open case, until that case is closed.

The first one is a genuine tool. A buyer who is unhappy before the item ships, or one whose order you can't fulfill, is a conversation about cancellation — and a canceled order carries no review risk at all.

Your review score is not a plain average

Here is the mechanic almost no seller knows, and it changes how a bad month should feel. Etsy's seller-facing page says your score is a recency-weighted average of all the star ratings you've received. Reviews from the past 12 months are given the most weight, to best reflect your recent item quality and customer service. Then comes the specific rule: while each rating keeps its original star value, the weight it carries in the average calculation decreases by half each year.

Read that arithmetic slowly. A one-star review from 12 months ago is pulling half as hard as it did on the day it landed. At two years it is pulling a quarter. It never disappears and its star value never changes — but its influence decays on a schedule, without you doing anything except continuing to sell. Etsy's buyer-facing article states the same idea in simplified form, calling a shop's rating the average of the reviews received in the past 12 months; the seller-facing page is the one that spells out the decay.

Two practical consequences. First, the fastest legitimate repair for a bad review is volume of recent good ones, because recent ratings carry the heaviest weight in the same calculation. Second, a shop that goes quiet doesn't reset anything — it just stops adding the fresh, heavily weighted ratings that would dilute the old ones.

The three sub-ratings hiding under the star

Buyers don't only leave one number. Etsy's buyer instructions say you can also give a star rating for Item Quality, Shipping, and Seller Customer Service, in addition to the overall rating. That breakdown is more diagnostic than the headline average, because each one points at a different fix: item quality is a product or photo-accuracy problem, shipping is usually a processing-time or carrier-choice problem, and customer service is a response-speed problem. A 4.6 shop with a soft Shipping sub-rating and a perfect Item Quality sub-rating does not have a product problem, and shouldn't spend a month redesigning the product.

What Etsy will and won't remove

The honest summary: Etsy will remove a review only if it determines the review violates Etsy's policies, and reviews that are negative but compliant won't be removed. Etsy Support cannot remove a review at a seller's request. Removals are also final — reviews or comments removed by Etsy employees cannot be reinstated.

Etsy names the violations. A review, or your response to one, breaks the rules if it:

• Contains identifying private information
• Contains obscene, racist, or harassing language or imagery
• Violates Etsy's Anti-Discrimination Policy
• Contains prohibited medical drug claims
• Is solely advertising or spam
• Is only about things outside the seller's control, such as a shipping carrier (mentioned by name), Etsy, or a third party
• Contains threats or extortion
• Includes shilling or otherwise falsely inflates a shop's review score

That sixth line is the one sellers reach for most, and it has a trap in it. A review can be removed if it's solely about the actions of a third party — but a review that mentions a third party alongside a review of the item or service may not qualify for removal. "The carrier lost it, one star" is reportable. "The carrier lost it and the seller was slow to reply, one star" probably isn't.

Etsy is equally clear about the boundary of its own judgment: it isn't in a position to judge the accuracy of a buyer's statement about an item's quality, craftsmanship, materials, description, or your communication, and it can't determine how reasonable a complaint is. It also can't judge whether a buyer received an item even if tracking seems to indicate it was delivered. Reporting a review you simply disagree with is time you won't get back.

One route does stay open after a reply: the buyer. Etsy tells buyers who can no longer edit a review — because the seller responded — that they can ask Etsy to remove the original review. That request has to come from them, not from you.

Where reviews touch search — and where they don't

Reviews do feed ranking, but through a shop-level channel rather than the listing. Your average review rating is one of the inputs to Etsy's customer and market experience score, alongside message response rate, case rate, and on-time shipping — the full breakdown is in our piece on customer service and search ranking, including Etsy's flat statement that not having a Star Seller badge does not impact your search visibility.

What reviews cannot do is get a listing matched to a query in the first place. A five-star shop whose tags don't contain the phrase a shopper typed is not in that result set to be ranked. Etsy also says outright that new listings still show in search with no reviews or ratings yet, provided there are no other listing or shop quality issues — so a brand-new listing isn't waiting on social proof before it can be found. Matching is a text job, and it stays a text job.

The sequence, in order

• A bad review arrives. Do not touch the reply box. Everything else on this list is still possible while that box is empty.
• Message the buyer privately through the order in Shop Manager. Ask open questions if you don't know what went wrong; offer a concrete fix if you do.
• Check the calendar. They can edit the star rating, photo, and written note any number of times inside the 100-day window — counted from delivery, or from download for a digital item.
• Report it only on the listed grounds, and only if the review is solely about something outside your control or breaks one of the other seven rules.
• Respond publicly last, once resolution is off the table — writing for future shoppers rather than for the reviewer, with no tracking numbers, links, or private details.
• Then go earn recent reviews. The score is recency-weighted; new ratings are the heaviest thing you can put on the scale.

Where this fits with the rest of your shop

None of this is text a tool can write for you — a review conversation is yours, and it should sound like a person who cares. What a tool can take off your plate is the other half of the work, so a bad afternoon doesn't also cost you a week of listing prep.

ListingLoom writes the part that decides whether a listing is eligible for a search at all: a title inside Etsy's 140-character limit with the main keyword in the first 40 characters, plus 13 tags of 20 characters or fewer, and a readable description. Do one listing at a time on the free plan, or run up to 25 products in a single submission through the bulk generator on Pro (POD) at $19/mo. Reviews compound slowly and on Etsy's schedule; the text half you can fix tonight.