Oh the irony. . .

For years I have been reading in the forums as many sellers advised each other to just move out the ship date when cancelling an order to prevent the buyer from leaving negative feedback.  😕  I have seen many many many sellers advise this many many many times over my years on etsy, it is pretty standard advice, sadly.

I, however, have always had a bit of an ethical problem with this advice because regularly the seller asking how to stop the bad reviews is purely focused on maintaining their own perfect 5 star record and not at all concerned with what went wrong, why the buyer is unhappy, why their customer service sucked so bad the buyer asked to cancel.  Not that I think all cancellations are the fault of the seller, many of them are the buyers doing, not reading processing times, not reading descriptions, not providing personalization information needed to complete the order.

I found it really ironic reading the forums today to see a long time seller, that I know has given this advice before, complaining about poor customer service from other shops and not being able to leave feedback during a cancellation because the shop that is failing to ship has pulled this "move the ship date" BS to prevent the review. 😏  Then the ensuing discussion about why cancellations don't factor into the new ODR (order dissatisfaction rate) and how etsy needs better/more accurate reason selections for cancellations. The discussion included some saying "well at least shops like this will be caught out by the new ODR" but in reality they won't because cancellations don't count and moving the shipping date to prevent reviews means no negative reviews to count, and cancellations prevent cases too.  

So while the new ODR is meant to improve customer service, I suspect that it will only increase some sellers bad behaviors and those sellers who pull this ultimate BS move will have no problems while honest sellers who try to work with buyers will end up being the ones punished.  😔

Since cancellations do not count in the ODR and missing shipping dates and being over-due does not count, really the only thing that does count are cases and reviews, which is in no way a complete picture of a shops customer service.