On the 18th of June, eBay Germany announced that if buyers leave low Detailed Seller Ratings (DSRs) due to the Deutsche Post strikes in June that they will be discounted in the calculation of the seller status.
eBay Germany are also working for automatic removal of DSRs if the strikes continue into July. We’ve seen no such announcement for UK (and other country’s) sellers shipping into Germany.
We’ve heard from a number of UK sellers who are starting to be seriously affected by the German postal strikes – to the extent that they may have their seller status overseas demoted. Seller status and Top Rated status are calculated regionally, so if you’re suffering from postal delays in Germany it will affect your status for eBay sites in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Thankfully it shouldn’t affect your UK, Irish, USA or Global (eBay Belgium, France, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Australia and Canada) sales.
Sadly there’s very little advice we can offer, apart from where possible stop sending items to Germany through the post (i.e. don’t use Royal Mail where you item will end up with Deutsche Post) and ship via a courier instead.
How has your seller status in Germany been affected – do you have customers complaining or leaving low DSRs or are you relatively defect free?
Edited to add: eBay have now announced protection for UK sellers
5 Responses
Thanks for the posting. I am severely effected by this as I list internationally. All the buyer defects are showing on my global rating. It’s rather frightening. And to compound matters, when I called Ebay, the customer service assistant although friendly, and clearly with me was unable to do anything.
Ebay have announced an amnesty on ebay.de for Jun onwards, but I can show this started way before, sometime mid May.
I am also unsure what they will interpret as a causational defect. For sure, case opened, but what about a refund done outside the process. I did one yesterday, didn’t cancel but it still showed up as a defect.
Common sense just ssays a general amnesty, but the trouble is …. this is Ebay.
We blocked germany a long time ago due to german buyers ethos of leaving 3 as a normal dsr score
“Thankfully it shouldn’t affect your UK, Irish, USA or Global”
Pretty sure it will effect your global dashboard. Last time I checked Germany was part of the globe 🙂
The global rating never used to count Germany, but it does now.
The strike itself has ended, so now it will just be the fall out.
It’s really about whether Ebay live up to their word. Am I the only one who feels a little uneasy?