@TraciKing – The only thing I can think of is that Star Sellers aren’t subject to Etsy holding their money back, as they’ve been doing with some (many?) other sellers. I’ve seen this in Etsy’s House Rules, but can’t find that page right now … so I’m assuming it’s still a thing.

I lost my Star Seller for a few months last Summer. I’d taken too long to reply to ONE message. I suppose I could have marked it as spam but it really wasn’t. It was the promoter of a local show asking if I was interested in getting a booth … and I simply took too long to think about it. My bad. What REALLY sucked is that when I *should* have gotten my Star Seller badge back for messages, I missed out for yet another month because I hadn’t sold $300 in the previous 3 months (I am 150% convinced that I was in Etsy’s Longest Test Ever … which did something to stunt my sales between March and mid-November).