eBay’s Top Rated Seller program has just turned one, but has it made a difference to your business? Are you a Top Rated Seller? Has being (or not being) a Top Rated Seller affected your sales?
According to eBay the number of top Rated sellers on eBay has doubled since the program launched a year ago. Sellers can experience a sales increase of up to 15% when they become Top Rated compared to their non-Top Rated competitors. If you’re a Top Rated Seller then on average there’s a 25% increase in the number of buyers that see you listings and Top Rated Seller’s eBay businesses are growing 2.5 times faster than sellers who aren’t Top Rated Sellers.
The most interesting statistic to me is that the total number of Top Rated sellers has doubled since the inception of the program. This tends to suggest that more sellers are reaching eBay’s seller standards than when the program was introduced. The big question is how sellers are achieving this – Is it by managing buyer expectations or have sellers made real change to the way they do business by lowering (or offering free) postage, communicating more effectively, describing items more fully and despatching goods faster?
Which DSR has been your biggest challenge to manage and what steps have you taken to meet eBay’s standards? More importantly do you think that being a Top Rated Seller makes a difference to sales in your category and have you seen a real increase or decrease in sales since the program was introduced?
28 Responses
Blimey, have we been getting insulted that long haha
I challenge anyone from Richmond who looks at our company account to tell me to my face that my team are not top rated. A few low marks for despatch over 12 months (we are talking less than a handful) no other low DSR’s across communication, P & P and Item description, no disputes, no nothing, 100% FB, £100,000’s of sales.
Thank fully I’m not involved with eBay day to day anymore and I’ve never been happier.
I believe that eBay’s Top Rated Seller program is seriously flawed because it allows rouge buyers power to exert disproportional influence over a sellers business.
There can be very few sellers who haven’t encountered the ‘Difficult Customer’, the sort of customer you would have blocked if sellers were still able to identify them as such by leaving appropriate feedback.
One difficult customer can lose a seller their Top Rated Seller and impact across a seller’s entire product line.
We pack and ship products every day, or the next working day and communicate with buyers at all stages of the transaction. We accept refunds and generally try and run our business efficiently. Yet the very same product packed and shipped to two different customers may well produce different DSRs
One particular product has achieved 100+ sales all of which achieved positive feedback and good DSRs, and then along comes the ‘Difficult Customer’ and moans from start to finish. Now this ‘Difficult Customer’ leaves low DSR’s which is completely at variance with the previous 100 customers and ‘Bang their goes your Top Rated Seller status.
I am more than happy for ebay to keep Top Rated Seller, DSRs and any other nonsense they want to throw into the ring, but please, please introduce a better system for monitoring the abuse.
There are a very small number of rouge buyers, who seem to never receive any post or every item received is faulty, broken or simply they don’t want to pay the stated price.
Buyers consistently leaving negative feedbacks or low DSR’s , or filing item never received claims are spoiling it for everybody . You have to wonder why a buyer with a page full of Negative Feedback left for others would want to continue to buy from ebay.
That’s today’s moan and groan out the way!
In truth I think the TRS was bad news for our business on eBay – we never achieved TRS status, down to just two buyers who complained that our p&p charges were too high – we gave free shipping on everything!!
Our two main competitors did not achieve TRS either, however we were all flooded out of the market by TRS from other categories selling one or two of our products amongst their huge catologue of products rather than being specialists as we were.
Both us and our two main competitors now sell very happily on Amazon and only put up the odd listing on free listing weekends.
Achieving Top Rated status is EASY – Argos do it every month and their feedback is terrible (98.8%). I wonder how they do it?
I’ve been a top rated seller since the beginning. Do I get a peanut?
1) Top Rated Seller’s eBay businesses are growing 2.5 times faster than sellers who aren’t Top Rated Sellers.
2) Sellers can experience a sales increase of up to 15% when they become Top Rated compared to their non-Top Rated competitors.
So if i grow my sales 15% i can grow 2.5x than i was before- AMAZING.
Maybe it works on ebay as margins are so terrible. A small increase in sales you can increase growth by more than double.
Or is it the way TRS is spread out amongst sellers making the statistics a lot of old rubbish.
The fact is TRS is nothing but a price hike, during a period when sterling value was low and the recession hit
@ dave
if a standard seller is growing at 6% per year and a top rated seller is growing at 15%, then they are growing 2.5x faster.
However these figures are absolute nonsense, concidering eBay’s marketplace sales have been down all year.
Look on the upside, a small company called Argos is doing really well with all their negs.
top rated on this id and a few others not top rated on a few others
not being a TRS does not make a blind bit of difference other than less parnoia,
though a friends IT products and parts ebay business went down the pan overnight when he lost TRS
I believe more people are TRS than before because they are bowing to the increasingly stupid buyer demands at fear of poor DSR’s or negs.
How has this business growth been measured? I could grow my sales 500% overnight by selling everything at a huge loss…
I find it very unlikely that this growth is a measure of profits.
I experienced a rise in sales when I became a TRS. Then they reached a plateau and started to drop when more and more sellers began reaching the targets about 3 months after it came in (the second wave: those who upped thier game when they found “they weren’t good enough” at program start?).
Ebay sales have stayed consistant with seasonal trends (I have 7 years data to work with) regardless of whether my id has TRS status or not.
I guess as the program contunues to grow listings will become invisible again and everyone will has the same status as we all did before TRS came into being. Dog chasing it’s tail?
Anyway, I have found the comms DSR the most difficult to keep at 4.9. Becuase I can’t ask buyers who give me low scores what I am doing wrong, I don’t know what I am doing wrong. Not the “transparent” tool ebay were calling it it si?. p&p was also tricky for a while as not everyone was happy to give reasonable scores for free p&p. I have even managed to get a 1 for p&p AFTER the statutory 5 for free p&p came in. Tell me it’s not full of glitches then if a buyer can give a 1 when it’s supposed to be automatic 5 !
Having been both a TRS and non TRS in the last 12 months there has been no difference between sales for both periods. It’s crap and needs scrapping, although what the hell kind of debacle would it be replaced with? There couldn’t possibly be a WORSE system could there?
Its almost become a ritual – We make TRS one month and then miss out on it the next. It hasn’t impacted greatly on sales.
We always miss out on p&p. Obviously we could make it by offering free p&p, but for our products we found free postage didn’t increase sales significantly , a realistic price for goods , with low postage charge worked better. I would rather make a profit than have a TRS rosette.
All we see is TRSs dropping in & out of the program.
TRS’s although given search preference are quite often dearer than competitors.
When I search now I look at the Best match & the BIN listings in between the TSR.
They are usually the better buys.
Chris,
Why do you print this drivel from Richmond.
There are 13 posts above not one is fully positive. Most are negative or derisory.
Ebay just put out a lot of marketing hype. Everyone knows that their sales are going down.
Why do so many ebay sellers actually hate them ?
Top rated seller status is a joke. The only way to earn it is to be a very small seller. Your must sell uniform new-in-the-box items. I am a TRS only because I sell a small number of things. I get extored all the time over my ratings and my status makes me a target. Ebay is a total joke these days. Its also fairly hard to sell anything 🙁
Top rated seller status is far too easy to achieve. If it were to mean anything the qualifications would be much more stringent. The fact that some excellent sellers fail to meet the current qualifications shows the methodology is far too crude, not that the qualification is difficult per se.
After a year of being TRS I would say it has not made any difference to me, however I would me mightily p…. off if I lost it.
I am starting to think if you have TRS your not making the money you should ,your being daft ,soft in the head , not doing it right, and bending over too far for ebay,