Some nice news for UK eBay sellers in : as of 24th February, DSR reporting will be more detailed, so sellers should be able to see more easily where they’re being marked down by buyers. Reporting improvements should help sellers identify which listings result in high or low DSRs, and there will be new reports dealing with Buyer Satisfaction Ratings.
The new reports will show DSRs based on buyer location, category, date range, P&P and item numbers; it’s this last which is most surprising, as eBay have consistently said that they do not want to make it possible for sellers to identify the DSR scores left by any individual buyer, for fear of some kind of retaliation by sellers who’ve been marked down. Sellers, of course, have argued that as they can no longer leave anything but positive feedback for buyers, there isn’t much we can do by way of retaliation, so we might as well be given the information and allowed to see where our faults may lie. But it’s not clear yet just what level of information will be visible in practice.
As soon as we see the new dashboard roll, we’ll be taking a more detailed look at exactly what new information sellers are being given, and how it might be used.
8 Responses
“The new reports will show DSRs based on buyer location, category, date range, P&P and item numbers; it’s this last which is most surprising, as eBay have consistently said that they do not want to make it possible for sellers to identify the DSR scores left by any individual buyer”
I doubt whether one will be able to see the DSRs associated with a particular item number. This upcoming enhancement to the Seller Dashboard was discussed some time ago on one of the eBay town hall’s or Griff shows, and it was said then that one would have to select a minimum number of item numbers (say 10), before the average DSRs of this selection would be calculated.
#1 If I’m selling a particular product over a period of time and have multiple auctions / fixed price purchases even a minimum of 10 will give me a great idea of how DSRs for that product or type of product are performing.
And if I sell one offs …..
BBL might get bigger, cos have had a few ‘nice item, excellent service’ comments followed by trashed DSR’s that I was up to now only 50% sure of.
Usually from ‘private’ sellers with crap DSR’s themselves.
#1 – Hugo, thanks for your comment. At the moment we can only speculate based on what eBay have said: the UK newsletter says “item number”… so I guess we’ll have to wait until next month to see exactly how it pans out. UK and US implementations are not necessarily the same.
By removing anonymous DSRs we’ll start seeing them increase. Is eBay going to raise the bar to compensate for the inflation or do they think by increasing the number of people with 4.8+ DSRs they will increase sales site wide? You’ll recall they specifically mentioned 4.8+ sellers as a source of growth in the last quarterly results.
Too little too late for some of us – especially global sellers
we will look out of interest, though I cant see how we can change anything much we have not already changed
we were very sceptical about these ratings but think they are actually quite clever and give a quite good indication of a sellers standards and performance
I’ve heard that some eBayers who buy and sell on eBay leave bad DSRs when they buy an item to keep the averages low.