eBay have just officially announced a for any seller falling foul of the for the first time.
Rather than face an immediate site suspension they will be informed that they’re in breach of the policy and given a month to bring their account back into good standing. This is great news and hopefully will keep the dolphins out of the eBay nets. It also means that one upset customer can no longer threaten your eBay business – by the end of the 1 month warning period their feedback will have dropped out of the 30 day feedback and DSRs used in the SNP calculation.
If a seller breaches the policy for a second time within a six month period then they will still face an instant selling restriction or suspension.
eBay have also expanded the Seller Dashboard to include a new to enable sellers to track their performance. This includes negative feedback, neutral feedback, low DSR scores (1 or 2 star ratings) and any buyer protection claims closed in favour of the buyer.
BDR is important not only for SNP but also can affect your standing in search – sellers with low BDR will be disadvantaged under the new Best Match search results. Sellers will be considered in breach of SNP if their BDR drops to “poor” or “unacceptable”.
The only part of BDR that is hidden from sellers are the DSR ratings, sellers should be aware of any other factors that could affect their standing. If eBay would change from anonymous ratings and enable sellers to see where they’re falling down it would be a valuable tool to assist seller increase customer satisfaction.
By keeping DSRs anonymous sellers have no clear understanding which transactions or which buyers are marking them down and sellers are unable to target specific areas or product lines for improvement.
Overall it’s a welcome change though – removing the fear and uncertainty sellers have felt with the knowledge just one or two buyers could earn them an instant 30 day suspension is great news.
21 Responses
Fantastic. Cheers for posting Chris.
Off for a cuppa, can finally relax just a little bit.
It’s a good example of how eBay evolves policy and practice over time and based on experience. This should go a long way to allay a lot of people’s concerns.
its a good example of how it should not have been done, and how ,if thought thru properly ,this correction need not have been made, lots of sellers would not have had the needless stress ,
in fact its a good example of gross stupidity
Lost our second dolphin this afternoon.. got it back on after a 30 day suspension, sold a few items, just building buyer confidence again after a month without trading, then one neg and it was off again…despite meeting all the DSRs… total waste of all our work for the last 30 days…
I guess it possibly went instantly because of the initial SNP breach, or perhaps because the policy hasn’t swung in yet.. agree with #1 whirly – breathing easier now on our other ids…. but not happy…
As for the buyer satisfaction rating – on one of our ideas it was flagged as “needs work” – a total joke – almost 98.5% positive, also meeting every target DSR for discount but one at the moment – which is 4.5 and not 4.6. Again I refer to satisfaction ratings outside of ebay:-
Services 79%
Retail(none food – similar to ebay) 77%
Automotive 76%
Finance 75%
Retail(food) 74%
Local Government 64%
from http://www.ukcsi.com
My average on ebay 98.5-99.7%. Talking to ebay account manager now… getting totally stonewalled as usual.
Phew!!!
That makes my situation a lot less stressful
Talking of Dolphins
https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/7513371.stm
I think Ebay is finally waking up to the glaring fact that they are NO LONGER the monopoly they used to be and in telling sellers to “shape up or ship out” they really didn’t expect the sellers to simply “ship out”! Ebay, you fool, everyone has a breaking point and you reached it with small sellers and a lot of powersellers too. Its going to take more than this…MUCH more then this to make sellers feel safe in listing their wares on your site. Its fun to think I was right from the beginning…when their revenue starts to sink then the new wacky policies will go right out the window because Ebay could care less about their sellers or in giving a buyer an “enhanced experience” – MONEY is the only law they know and adhere to 😉
Must have cost Ebay UK hundreds of thousands if not millions of lost revenue, senior level management must take the rap for this
MUCH too little and WAY to late. The only way people MIGHT come back is if they totally scrap all the new policies and start from scratch.
Think before you make these foolish mistakes, so you don’t have to go back and change them all, afterwards. What a bunch of unnecessary stress you are putting people through, just to buy your own company back.
I think you are done Ebay and Paypal, with the counterfeiting scheme, isn’t far behind you.
https://tinyurl.com/5pnasn
Excellent, this definitely lifts some of the stress.
Agree with Dan Wilson, great to see that they’re willing to revise policy when they’ve come to the conclusion that they’ve made a mistake.
Hopefully Shoal of dolphins can make some progress, it’d be great to see a reversal on a real world example like that. It’d make for a happier ending if some seller who was hurt by the initial policy came here to tell us eBay fixed everything up for them.
DSRs will never not be anonymous. If they took away the anonymity many people would begin rating their sellers higher. It is the same reason the professor walks out of the room during evaluations. People will even behave in the same manor towards an inanimate object such as a computer. I’ve heard of a study showing this effect.
I can understand why ebay want to keep the DSRs anonymous but they could give a breakdown of how many transactions receive what stars in each category. Sellers should know if they have had a rating that could count towards SNP. It would also give sellers better guidance when stars drop e.g. Was it a 1 or 2 on an odd occasion or is a particular area generally a little below par?
It’s still an awful policy, 30 days isn’t long enough, it’s weighted against the small seller and should be changed back to 90 days. Warning or no warning the timescale is too short.
Alternatively change it to 30 days or x amount of transactions where x = a figure that means 1 neg and neut don’t put someone’s account in peril.
DSR’s and feedback are opinion based, using them as sanctions is always going to catch dolphins.
Listing violators, fake goods sellers, those who don’t deliver, they are the people who should be suspended, not a mom and pop seller who get a neg because they don’t leave feedback first or who charge a pound over the price of a stamp.
Any chance of a human getting involved in this process?
excuse me, but wasnt this basically the rule before they changed it last time?
apart from the 90 day is now 30 days thing?
All all this seller control stuff, and that is just what it is, is far far too complicated.
The anonymous DSR’S can still stuff you!
Get a few malicious 1 star / 2 stars and you could still be out without ever knowing who or why!!!!
Smoke and mirrors?
No, every change re SNP is just a bigger black hole.
John
In full support of a better eBay.
I don’t see how anybody is “sleeping easier” over this policy.
Now when it says “Needs Work” people are going to be in fear that it will lower to poor because somebody left a 1.
Also this announcement saying Neutrals are not included in the calculation while auctionbytes “confirmed” with an eBay spokesperson that they are not. Perhaps they won’t count on the eBay US site but they count on the eBay UK site.
It’s ridiculous because buyers have no fear of receiving retaliatory feedback, so eBay’s argument that buyers are leaving neutrals to avoid retaliatory feedback no longer holds any water.
The problem is that they took away MFW. In the past sellers would leave a buyer a negative and try to get them to withdraw using MFW. That loophole is gone, so why get rid of MFW?
A buyer doesn’t have to fear a negative so they aren’t going to withdraw unless you go out of your way to make the buyer happy.
Typical negative ebay.
“eBay have also expanded the Seller Dashboard to include a new Buyer Satisfaction Rating (BDR)”
Why is Buyer Satisfaction Rating BDR and not BSR? Because actually it is Buyer Dis-satisfaction Rating.
Glass half empty merchants.
One of my ID’s got totally wiped off automatically last friday morning. In the last 30days I only had 2 neutrals and 1 negative and all 3 were off complete morons that I could do nothing about.
By sunday, one of the neutrals was over 30 days old leaving me with just 1 neutral and 1 neg in the last 30days. In this scenario my account would not have been wiped.
I had no open disputes or any paypal problems.
When I spoke to my account manager (the most arrogrant useless idiot I have ever come across on ebay) he tells me they use another calculation to work out SNP but refuses to tell me what it involves. If I don’t know what criteria they are basing an SNP calculation on, then how do I know how close I am to suspension!!
A few days before my suspension, our DSR powerseller discount was calculated. We hit every target apart from P&P costs which just missed out with a 4.5 score.
On our DSR’s ebay are classing us as one of their best sellers in the top 10% yet due to 3 unfair feedback, they turn round and say sorry we have wiped your account because you are rubbish.
This has got to be one of the most contradicting policies ebay have ever dreamt up!! It’s a complete mess and an utter disgrace to treat people like this
I’m now on Ebid.com. Listed a couple of things tonight and will be listing more over the next day or two. It’s too early in the game to tell if sell-thru is what it needs to be..but it can be a LOT lower than Ebay because the fees are a lot lower..or even free if you don’t opt for premium services. But I can say this much…there IS traffic there, and I do see things selling. I’m noticing some items similar to what I sell on Ebay are actually getting more hits than a similar item on Ebay would!
Ebid seems to be more centered on the collectible markets-a market that Ebay has basically told to go to hell. But you’ll find a lot of collectable stuff at Ebid. Thankfully, Ebid will not allow a seller to list items with identical descriptions, so that eliminates big sellers flooding the site with hundreds of identical items which squeeze everybody else’s items into oblivion in the search results pages. For sellers of collectable items, that’s GREAT. Also, Ebid places a lot of importance on good customer service by requiring sellers to answer emails within 24 hours, or the item is subject to removal. This also caters to the smaller sellers who typically have better customer service habits than the big guys who rarely pay bidders any attention until you hit the “buy now” button.
The site is well-run, and is the most highly-polished of any of the FeePay alternatives.
I also forgot to mention- Ebid’s refusal to accept items with identical descriptions from the same seller also makes it impossible for the company to “Pad” its listing numbers, the way Ebay has been doing lately to give its stockholders the impression that listings haven’t been affected by the recent moronic policy changes. 😯