eBay.com have put out another announcement about the ongoing problems with detailed seller ratings. As many users have already found out, the seller dashboard has been made unavailable while DSR scores are recalculated. “Trust factors” in best match ordering (DRSs, buyer satisfaction ratings and postage costs) have also been disabled for the time being. PowerSeller discounts and best match standings will not be calculated until the recalculation of DSRs is complete.
This statement is somewhat at odds with comments made on Friday by eBay staff, who said that the display of the DSRs themselves and not the actual scores were affected. It seems that whatever is broken is rather more serious than was first thought.
In an apparently-related problem, feedback scores are also not updating as buyers leave feedback. This one we can live with. But there is already mistrust, suspicion and conspiracy theory around the DSRs amongst many sellers, and having the feature so completely broken is only going to make that worse.
21 Responses
I also noted that my feedback score remains unchanged even though I continuously received new positive feedbacks from my buyers. This happened after ebay disabled the dashboard. Do you have the same experience?
Unfortunately, ebay never commits when they can fix this problem? If the seller can no longer leaves retaliatory feedback to their buyers, I cannot understand why ebay still makes DSR score anonymously. It seems their system is now lack of trust from seller when the numbers went wrong. Sad!
Derek, as in the post, many sellers are having the same problem with their total feedback score not updating. eBay don’t often estimate a fix time, because when they do – like on Friday – that’s wrong anyway. I think not giving a definite time is fair enough – if I have to fix something on TameBay, I can’t tell you how long it will take me because if I knew exactly what was wrong and therefore what I needed to fix, it would be fixed already 😀
I’d like to know why they are allowing the bullies on the ebay message board to continue harassing people that come on to complain about the changes. Dozens of members have been reported for posts and suspended and the posts that have nothing to do with breaking policy and when the bullies are reported, nothing happens to them.
It’s not a glitch. “It’s a SMART move on eBay’s part, by fine-tuning their system, eBay is slowly discouraging the mountains of “hobby” sellers who list one lousy, two-buck item once in a blue moon just for kicks…
… and making it MUCH easier for serious professionals who want to use eBay to build a solid, full-time business.”
Read all about it here
Henrietta, I’m sure even the most ardent conspiracy theorists would be able to distinguish between changes designed to improve the site (even if misguided in some opinions), and things that have gone wrong.
Well of course the display is the part that’s broken. Who are they kidding. No seller who got served the screen like what I had deserved it. Whatever is happening is happening after the data is introduced into the dashboard. Or else sites like sellerdome and dsrwatch would of also showed a change. It would have to be something manually introduced and only on the 30 day. Because then why did it not domino into the 12 month chart.
Has anyone noticed that ebays average didn’t change a single fraction!
Hey Sue, I wrote to ebay and they gave me a courtesy credit. Now that I have it on my account I figure I’ll go blab so everyone else can get theirs!
HUGS and KISSES
I dont give a bugger about DSRs, ebay could charge double they do now ,and never have another DSR visible,
buyers are what interest me
if that they buy and I profit is my only concern
Hey Sue,
Thanks for your clear explanation! My concern is all about the reliability of ebay platform for selling high volume there. With all the recent and frequent changes, it’s not surprising to see new bugs found, which might have significant impact on their customers – ebay sellers in this case.
If I cannot rely the accuracy of information provided by ebay, there must be more transparency from them. I’m really not comfortable to see some unreliable info without hard data support. If they can tell us more details about the DSRs, I don’t think they will end up with losing confidence from good sellers. No more conspiracy theories will be floating around.
Dashboard is back, and mine is fixed, no red marks on 30 day anymore.
Yes all back as was, lets hope that is an end to it
From Derek in #9:
If I cannot rely the accuracy of information provided by ebay, there must be more transparency from them.
IMO, this is where eBay are going wrong with the DSRs. Going back to January 2007, the reason DSRs were anonymous in the first place was that sellers threatened retaliatory negative feedback against anyone who left them less that four 5s. Now that retaliatory negs are no longer possible, it would benefit both eBay and sellers to have more information about scores that are left.
For example: if an average score drops now, sellers have no way to tell if there is a general trend downwards (which needs sorting out) or if one disgruntled buyer has left them a very low score (which is unfortunate but inevitable, and probably no cause for alarm). If you’re using Royal Mail and a courier, you’ve no way to compare the P&P DSRs left by recipients of the two different services. I’d even rather like to know if Friday night buyers mark down sellers who don’t dispatch until Monday.
At Live, Dinesh promised “more granularity” in DSRs, by which I assume he meant that some of this information is going to become available at some point. This needs to happen sooner rather than later (i.e. before Xmas madness starts). It will also assist eBay because sellers who think DSR scores are transparent, are less likely to come up with conspiracy theories about eBay’s alleged manipulation of the numbers.
I’m not so sure transparent DSRs are a good thing. I can’t speak for anyone else but if I left a seller positive feedback but for some reason felt the need to leave a 3 or 4 in one or more categories I really don’t want to have to explain myself to anyone (much less the seller). I’m just speculating but I think the net effect would be a higher average site-wide DSR score which means you have even less leeway with your search ranking, discounts, suspensions, etc when something goes wrong.
Also a company like eBay needs its fringe groups and conspiracy theorists. I think this is pretty well covered in an episode of South Park.
Thanks Sue! I absolutely agree with you. Transparency is beneficial to all parties – buyers, sellers and the “middle man” ebay. The new CEO, JD, when he was just on board earlier this year, told us the purpose of having a dashboard for sellers was to let them see how they perform at ebay. He alleged that we will have the same info as seen by ebay internal staff. Up until now, this is not true, I believe. The dashboard is just a little gadget to make you mad when you are disadvantaged without clear reasons, rather than giving you valuable info to improve customer service.
Anyway, nothing is expected to be perfect at the first place. Instead of putting effort in face-lifting the “My ebay”, I hope ebay will improve the seller dashboard at their full speed and with higher priority. This will definitely let sellers to deliver better customer service and meeting ebay’s major initative – “improving buyer experience” – at the end!
For example, I’ve had people accuse me of being associated with eBay and also had others tell me that some problem with my site might have been caused by eBay “interfering with the internet.” In both cases eBay is the one that benefited.
Ebay’s method of calculating DSR’s in it’s current roll-on roll-off format will always be called into question for accuracy. Unless ebay change this the conspiracy theries of manipulation by them will still run and run.
We have no way of knowing if the DSR’s were ever correct or whether they will be in the future. In this climate, how are ebay and it’s customers ever going to trust eachother?
Ebay doesn’t like that it’s customers doubt them and ebay customers can’t trust a single thing ebay say.
Where do we go from here?
someone told me today , that some big sellers have noted that the DSR “glitch” only appeared after one major seller highlighted what he thought was proven fraud on his ratings…
the conspiracy theory seems to hinge on this and that ” there is no glitch , just a smoke screen after this first seller rumbled the fraud ”
now I think this is a little far fetched myself , but some sellers are seriously muting this and if nothing else it shows what big big sellers think of ebay , thats the sad part….
what is also far fetched though is how this could happen with code and algorithms so simple , a child could have written it…
they removed the datestamp on the PS discount chart and then the main Dashboard page 30 days, its now 2 days lagging. It used to be real time. Did they fix it or just fix us . lol. oh well at least I’m not red anymore
As at Tuesday 12th August, sellers on the ps board are still reporting innaccurate and lowering scores.
There are also reports of an improvement in sales during the period where best match etc was suspended in relation to the DSR console being removed for fixing. These sellers report that they should not have been disadvantaged by the matrix when it was in place, so how come a sharp rise when “off” and a fall when “on”?
Ebay’s handling of this situation is laughable. No UK anouncements, no further input from pinks.
Ebay, your customers need you to treat this seriously, not stick your head in the sand and hope it will all go away.
I can confirm eBay Power Seller Support are insisting the figures are correct although they are clearly wrong.
A number of other Power sellers are also reporting incorrect figures since Friday. Problem was claimed to be corrected on Monday yet the figures returned on Monday were identical to Fridays figures and different from Thursdays figures when they were working.
How can a company have hidden figures that are not independently checked yet these figures have a direct impact financially?.
@ 20
Unfortunately that is how eBay works. I mentioned this on another thread but it once took PayPal about 9 months to return money they took from me due to a glitch. But they insisted the issue was fixed and that I had all my money back. When it was finally corrected they made an announcement saying the issue only affected a handful of users and they had only then discovered the it.