As someone who runs multiple Etsy print on demand stores, I know just how hard it is to maintain a high rating.

Over trial and error, I have come up with several strategies and learned ways to get a customer to reconsider their bad reviews. This has resulted in all of my stores having a 4.8-5 star average. This comes down to understanding the psychology of why someone would leave a bad review in the first place.

The following reasons are the most prevalent:

• Out of spite.
• To get your attention. Sometimes to try to get a refund or sometimes just to get a response from you.
• Because they don’t think you will help them.

The only one that is hard to get removed is the ‘Spite’ reason, all the others are very easy to get removed. A customer usually leaves a spiteful review if you already tried to help them and they didn’t like your solution or were offended by it.

For the other two reasons, you should follow the following steps to get it removed immediately.

When you get a bad review on your store, make sure you resist the urge to replying to it publicly. Doing so makes it permanent and even the customer can’t remove it.

Then you need to reach out to the customer immediately. I’ve had some customers change their review as soon as I messaged them, before I had even offered a solution. This is because they didn’t think I was going to help them at or that I was even a real person, (reason #3).

Your first message should be to ask for more information about what they are complaining about, ask for pictures and make an attempt to sound like you care. Make sure you apologize in this message as well.

Next you should offer them a refund, or a replacement. Give them the option of either or, not both. Even if you do not have a refund policy you need to do this. If you are using Printful or Printify you can contact their support teams to get the items refunded/returned on your end. Even if Printful/Printify says no you still should do this for the customer.

I’ve also learned that in Printify’s case they always ask for additional pictures even if you send them one. This can sometimes anger the customer if you ask them to keep taking pictures so you can just refuse to Printify and tell them the customer is already upset. They then will ask for a screenshot of the Etsy conversation with the customer and move forward. In almost all cases Printify has refunded me or done the replacement.

After doing this, the customer has always revised their own reviews without me asking. However if for some reason they forget to, you can ask them kindly to consider revising their review.

Now if the customer left a review that was only 1 or 2 stars sometimes it sometimes wont let them change it, you might have to advise them to reach out to Etsy support to get it changed. I had a customer go through this and got their 2 star review changed to a 5 star.

If weeks go by and they still have not changed it, then you can comment on it and detail how you offered the customer a refund/replacement.

After following these steps you will have a much higher star rating on Etsy and will have a solid process for dealing with unhappy customers.