eBay rankings inconsistent with DSRs

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I’m guessing that there are very few sellers who have never had a low DSR score from a buyer. It’s a fact of trading on eBay (or any other platform) that sooner or later you’ll meet a customer who no matter how hard you try and how good your service is you simply won’t be able to please them.

What we all want from our buyers however is five star DSR scores. Five is good, it’s better than four. Five is many times better than a three. A two or a one is a disaster. That’s what we sellers are conditioned to think and that’s the message that eBay are hammering home to buyers.

Why then when eBay do a survey on their newsletter (which was sent to a buyer) do they ask buyers to rank them with a one being superb and a five or six being really bad? Surely eBay should be consistent with low scores being bad and high scores being good? It wouldn’t be a surprise to find some buyers think they should score a superb seller with ones across the board if they’ve just scored eBay themselves as superb with ones.

12 Responses

  1. I would be interested in how eBay’s own employees are ranked in their quarterly/annual reviews? : )

  2. Unfortunately this example is typical of the inconsistency rife within EBay.

    The lack of stability in policies and policing of policies is such that I (and I suspect others as well) are relying less and less on eBay for income and activity exploring other channels.

  3. Is this a deliberate policy or is it simply a mistake?

    Agree that this does nothing to reinforce the idea in buyers that high is good and low is bad. And what about new buyers? How confused are they going to be?

    The cynic would say that eBay have a deliberate policy of playing subversive mind games with buyers aimed at confusing buyers when they score DSR’s. After all eBay win financially when DSR ratings of 1 or 2 are scored.

    Or it may simply be a ruse by the eBay marketing team to justify their work by attempting to obtain “very relevant” scores for their emails. What better way of doing this than take advantage of the idea embedded in buyers minds that high is good and low is bad.

    It is an abusive practice generally in any survey and no wonder buyers get muddled when in comes to scoring DSR’s.

    You would think the eBay management would stamp out on such practices and attempts, if they are genuine, by their employees to manipulate surveys.

    As an aside a comment on “Your feedback will help us keep you better informed in the future” – one rule for eBay and another for its fee paying customers who have to suffer anonymous survey scoring (DSR’s) which do little to inform.

  4. One of my gripes is, following a conversation with an ebay Customer service rep, was his total lack of interest in what we were talking about….

    He actually said ‘they would not adjust DSRs for us & this was because if you do for one, you have to do for others.

    Of interest, (someone please clarify) he stated that the dates DSRs were left, were NOT the same dates the feedback was left, ie: feedback may be dated say 1/2/2011, when the DSR left for the same item on the same date, actually appears on a different date..

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