As was noted in the Seller release early last week, the new seller dashboard rolled out for all users on eBay UK and beyond yesterday. You can read the announcement here and an email should have found its way to your inbox too.
As the announcement notes: “We promised we’d help you understand how you’ll measure up to our new seller standards before they take effect. So we’ve got some good news. The new seller dashboard preview is now ready. Take a look at your seller dashboard to find out your projected status. You can see how you’re performing against the new standards and any areas that need attention.” As a piece of prose it has a strangely patronising tone. Try reading out loud in a Hannibal Lecter voice.
The revised look and feel is being billed as a handy helper to enable you to monitor and meet the new defect rates that come into force in August. The idea presumably being that you have a few months to “up your game”
Take a look and see what you reckon.
50 Responses
I dont know about anyone else but on looking im worse off than with old rules, despite that its meant to be a fairer system. neutrals counting as well as negs is not good, no removal of defect even if buyer changes feedback..the non-arrival defect(royal mail..ggrrr)..dont even get me started..lol…even trying our hardest sellers are going to struggle with this one
our german and american neutrals and negs
are counted as defects on our uk status
seems a strange way to encourage international trade
the joke is a preview designed to help you get ready for the new standards
confuses and complicates things even more ,un explained defects for out of stock, that no one understands ,knows why ,or
how to correct or remedy
7 defects for “out of stock or sold to someone else”
assume this means, someone who can’t read buys something, we point out it’s collection only and they ask to cancel or we send a cancellation request.
Never in 10 years do I recall having to refund anyone because we have sold something we don’t hold in stock.
The rest of it. yeah whatever.
ebay will need to
install cooling plants to keep their customer services servers and phones cool,
and councillors for the overworked stressed out suicidal cs reps
were happy to try and dance the dance buy ebay keep changing the moves and music so were just going to head bang
eBay has had all the ‘easy growth’. So now reduced to this.
I’m replacing the sales manager with a defects manager. Not.
Cases where customers are simply messaging to find out where their order is (opened cases for items not received) will now go against our performance. So if customers doesn’t check their tracking, parcel is held at depot, left with neighbour, Courier/Delivery person fail to deliver etc; then these cases will count against us. Despite whether we proceed to resolve problem, offer a high level of service and the customer is satisfied with the outcome?
‘Returns for item’s not as described’. Will eBay takes the customers word for this? We have customers who order clothing/footwear which for whatever reason doesn’t fit and need to return. We’ve seen in some cases customers claim the ‘item is not as described’, so again we are penalised?
Negatives which have been removed by eBay (due to customer being wrong/unfair) counting against you?
Neutrals counting against you?
It will also be increasingly more difficult to maintain Top rated seller status for International sites.
The nature of selling internationally means lead times are slightly longer than just to UK. This means inevitably there will be more opened cases for items not received and low detailed seller ratings for shipping time.
We expect that, however too many of these and you lose your Top rated seller status, which can only mean less future sales.
Thinly veiled strategy to further reduce TRS levels.
1/ Neutrals, forever told by customer services that they have no adverse effect, now count the same as a negative
2/ Having been encouraged to push buyers to open cases, allowing eBay to ‘catch’ persistent scammers, we will now be punished for level of cases opened
3/ Out of stock – Never happened to us but figures show different! Assume they are lumping change of mind cancellations in here, punishing seller for buyers choice.
The mass exodus from eBay by buyers and sellers alike will only be further accelerated by yet again misguided and biased changes, we have reduced our exposure using this channel by 65% and can only now plan for further dispersal of the remaining 35% into more reliable and trusted sales partners.
Ill always have the hump being marked down for goods not received. Amazon are just as bad however so not eBay specific
New dashboard tells us quite simply that top rated is probably a pipe dream for a seller selling complicated products like used smartphones. Only about half of our opened cases are based on actual faults rather than suspicion and confusiion on the product. We simply cant have a 3 month return window next christmas anyway with our type of device. One size fits all as ever doesnt work. Would have loved ebay to fire most of their brain storming management with their idle thumbs and just slash fees. Imagine the impact that would make 🙂
I feel as Whirly does – out of my 10 defects, 4 are cancelled transactions, yet I have only ever cancelled a transaction when asked to do so by a buyer. As the criteria clearly state ‘cancelled by seller due to out of stock or sold to someone else’, I wonder if I can get eBay to remove these? There will be eBay messages proving that the buyer asked.
Fortunately, at the moment it looks like I will keep my TRS, but am I really going to see any benefit come August, i.e. is it worth all the headaches and jumping through hoops? One thing is for sure – eBay’s profits will jump due to all the fee discounts they will no longer have to pay.
And surely, there can’t be ANY of the favoured big box or Chinese sellers who have a hope in hell of keeping TRS… unless of course eBay were to ‘assist’ by removing their huge number of defects….
This is a very unfair system, but I would mind far less if eBay applied the same rules for all sellers.
Our feedback is 100% and we’ve been top rated for over 2 years, we just scored 1.35% on the new dashboard.
At the moment we had 0% for the “Returns for INAD”, when the managed returns kicks in, we are bound to go over the 2%, as everyone takes advantage of this.
Top rated sellers will be a rare breed in the Autumn!
Apparently I’m keeping my TRS for now, but I have already written it off longer term. On my other ebay shop I’m not even trying for it. My focus is to sell 50% of my stock through physcial shops and add an extra two online marketplaces. Ebay is not a “seller friendly” place to trade, you can be removed through one silly mistake or even no error at all.
having looked at this i think this has to be some of the most appaling changes ebay has ever made, trs is just something of fiction excluding myself i know some big sellers with feedback of 5k a month who are miles out today and this is accross the board who are trs at the mo!
I am sooooo tired of all this s**t I just want to sell stuff like I do on Amazon.
This shows we are right on the edge with seller standing and I have no idea what else we can do to improve it, apart from maybe give stock away!
Sick of it really am, more time will be focused on Amazon and our own sites more than ever and less on ebay.
Just checked our other account and we will fall well short of TRS status.
Mainly due to ‘opened cases for items not received’ says we have had 49 in the last three months.
I am confused as customers can’t send us a message anymore to ask where their item is, ebay force them to open a case so how can I stop this? Stuuuuuuuuuuuupid!
I think it’s time to create an eBay seller’s union and go on strike by putting our eBay shops on holiday for one day. Maybe the loss of fees will make eBay listen!
I just spoke to a friend who has over 90k feedback and he is way out due to stupid cases. i cant imagine anyone will ever come close unless there are some changes!
Maintaining TRS Status on ebay just gets harder and harder, ive had enough.. im slowly going to shift my stuff to amazon, (1000 listings ended yesterday)
I’ve *only* been selling on eBay for 10 years but somehow don’t know this…probably blinding obvious, but what actually is Transaction ID? I assume it’s not Paypal reference? But you can’t search eBay sales by a transaction ID either? As in… how do I link these defects specifically back to which buyer it relates to? Danny
It’s one rather big bungle when it comes to recording cases opened for INR. Consigns the whole dashboard to the rubbish bin. Ill though out/ unfair/ unreasonable, take your pick!
Then there’s this:
“My buyer returned the item and I’m not opted into Managed Returns. How should I process the refund so it doesn’t count as a defect?
When a buyer returns an item and you have received it back and you are ready to process the refund you should go to the cancel transaction flow and select the reason “Buyer is returning item for a refund.”
Then immediately following you should process the refund. This will ensure that the refund and return is captured correctly.”
This means then that I have to refund the item before it’s received – doesn’t it?
This is from the header proudly announcing the new dashboard preview:
‘The new transaction defect rate measures your overall seller performance on eBay. There are 7 possible defects you can receive on a sale, but we won’t count more than 1 defect on a sale, so your seller level can’t be negatively impacted more than once on a single sale’
It’s quite laughable that eBay are engineering 7 possible defects when 1 will do. Labyrinthine overkill.
Should be simplifying to one properly designed net promoter score question for each transaction scored 1-10 and eBay has all the information needed both to cull sellers and to award discounts. And much more clear water between the best and the worst.
I have got an example of how the new system is bad for customers.
I have been left a negative feedback from a customer who has an item which has broken after 4 weeks use.
She has not contacted me. It is only a cheap item. Normally I would write to them and offer them a replacement and they would usually remove their feedback.
It annoys me when they leave feedback without writing to me so as I still get a defect even if they remove their feedback I can’t be bothered.
One unhappy customer and one unhappy seller.
I have been trying to convince an IT friend that there is money to be made in a system where sellers can log bad buyers.
Sellers can then register on the site and it will automatically block those buyers.
It could be customized by the seller eg: only block where there have been 3+ reports.
I would certainly use it.
I would suggest that anyone like bhavin who will not be assisting buyers once a defect has been registered gives that feedback to eBay.
I did and she seemed concerned. She may just have been well trained!
A word of warning about the Ebay Sendit/DPD service:
We used them now for several weeks and so far they lost 8 items already. The parcels get picked up inside a green bag and none of the parcels gets scanned individually at the point of collection. If something gets lost they simply state: Sorry, we don’t have your parcel, we never scanned anything. Ebay does not respond to complaionts and DPD couldn’t care less either. Useless and we won’t use them again.