Clarifications on eBay’s new DSR and fees policies continue to leak out, bit by bit, from Richmond. One such today was posted on the Powerseller board * by pink Olly [PS sign in needed] who said:
you need at least 10 DSRs to be left for each of your four DSR ratings in a 30 day period for us to calculate your ‘minimum 30 day DSR’ figure.
In other words, if 10 buyers each month do not rate you on each DSR criterion, eBay will not be able to assess your 30 day DSR score, so you will automatically be ineligible for FVF discounts.
This does not, of course, mean you need to sell ten items a month. Not all buyers leave a score on all four criteria; many buyers do not leave any stars at all. My own accounts vary between one in two buyers leaving stars, and one in five. So the real volume of sales necessary to ensure eBay have enough data to calculate whether you’re a good seller or not may be many times more than ten per month.
This isn’t a particularly surprising development; most of the recent changes have, after all, been designed to reward volume selling. But it’s a shame that eBay are making these clarifications to policies that affect people’s livelihoods not as part of a public announcement, but on closed message boards where they are most unlikely to be seen by the smaller sellers who are the ones most affected. This should have been part of the original fees announcement, so that those affected would have had time to plan properly for the change, instead of finding out about it only after the fact.
(* Bizarrely, the original thread where this was stated, which had been pinned, has been pulled, but Olly has repeated himself on a number of other threads.)
17 Responses
When did Alistair Campbell start working for eBay?
Looks like they are making the rules up as they go along.
You could accept that if the business was small or a new venture, but Ebay is a mature business now and should have mechanisms in place to ensure any changes are handled properly.
According to their year end submission to the SEC they have 15500 Employees worldwide, yet they act as though there are only a few guys sitting around a coffee table coming up with ideas.
The link to the SEC submission if anyones interested is https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1065088/000095013408003741/f36571e10vk.htm
The section surrounding risks going forward make uneasy reading
we dont give a bugger if we dont get a bean in discount and the fees double
ebays that good for us
I sure am glad I didn’t get into the hype and expect a discount.
I’ll really miss the £20 a month 😆
Olly failed to answer my question. True, it wasn’t very well worded (hey, I had postman due to arrive any second, hungry kids needed feeding, Hubbie wanted 1 first class stamp and my Mum was on the phone), but nevertheless it was ignored.
I was going to post it again, but as Olly was getting so prickly I decided to be ignored a second time wouldn’t do my temper any good so I didn’t bother.
Basically my beef was along the lines of the worries of the low volume sellers concerning the volume of feedback left over the 30 day period and it not being enough to generate discounts. Many buyers just don’t leave feedback. It is likely that some sellers will miss out on discounts because some buyers are lazy, or just plain not bothered and don’t leave any.
My question was why should good sellers be penalised because of lazy (for want of a better word) buyers?
It just doesn’t seem right to me. I didn’t actually realise how many buyers don’t leave feedback until I checked my own id’s. I have 1 id where about 70% of buyers haven’t left feedback (they all have theirs incidentally!). I won’t be getting a discount on that ID for sure! Have I done anything different on that id to all my others? Other than leave feedback upon dispatch, no not really.
I suppose it will need 10 for the 4.6 search result advantage/4.2 disadvantage on .com too. I was wondering if 1 rating would do it, and how long it would take for sellers to take advantage of it using a multiple id/alternating month/high-free shipping strategy. Suppose it can still be done with a little volume.
tails wagging the dog
sell first and then worry about feedback, fees, dsrs obama clinton, putin, etc etc etc afterwards
is our ethos
I made a valid point on the board.
What is to stop sellers “buying” ten dsr’s each month, all adding up to 5’s.
Or to buy dsr’s through ebooks in a chain style.
This system seems very open to abuse and manipulation.
A car seller sells 10 cars, buys 20 ebooks off of himself, and criteria is met.
Now I am not condoning this dishonesty, but I think it shows how open to abuse the system really is.
The key that brought this thought was Ollys comment about “manipulating the data” to effect the DSRs.
So the musing followed with the simple answer.
Feedback manipulation just got easier.
And now there is a financial reward for it as well.
I wonder how Ebay are going to police this?
The financial maths I have not done, but is there movement for abuse?
Mark
Simple solution :
IF you sell less than 10 HIGH value items/month, ensure you get 10 DSR scores by selling ‘anything’ at 99p/item upto 10 times in that month 😛
IF you are selling less than 10 LOW value items/month, then you are probably not a powerseller/business seller so the discounts do not apply anyway.
I guess it’s quite simple… it’s called a “volume discount scheme”
If you don’t sell in volume you don’t get a volume discount regardless. That won’t please some people but it’s normal in business that discounts don’t apply to the odd transaction here and there but are given on large or regular orders.
As I’ve said in the post, I’m not surprised that this is the policy; I’m annoyed that it wasn’t made clearer earlier, and that it’s been hidden away in a pulled thread on a closed board. One star for communication, eBay 🙄
He he – and how many stars for “Item as described”? 😛
Described as “only a venue”…
and yet tries to tell me how to run things…
I’m afraid that’s not looking good either 😆
Fairly recently I’ve seen people organize on ebay’s boards, towards 20 people who put up .01 items and instantly exchanged fb/5 stars. Some were posting ids getting to 10, others used real selling account to grossly inflate a sketchy record from past real sales. Can’t list .01 BIN now, but some of them listed .01 auction and just ended it as soon as their fb conspirator bid anyway, which can still be done.
The incentive to do that kid of thing was minimal, but its about to go through the roof.
I really wouldn’t recommend doing that on eBay’s boards: I’ve seen people suspended for feedback manipulation for posting things like “I’ve got a new ID I need to get to ten f/b so I can sell BINs; who’s got something cheap I can buy”.
😯
I used to be a werewolf but I am alright
NOooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww