Eight years ago Sue penned what was to become one of the most heavily trafficed posts of all time on Tamebay: “eBay need to get dolphin-friendly sooner“. It’s also one of the posts with the most ever reader comments.
In today’s Seller Release it appears that eBay have finally heeded her words and recognised that sellers, no matter how good, sometimes fall foul of seller standards and it’s not always their fault. Sometimes it can be a rash of totally unreasonable buyers. Sometimes it can be outside circumstances such as sudden illness, floods, fires, burglaries, courier failure and any number of other events that conspire to mess up our otherwise faultless service.
When this happens eBay’s often draconian punishments fall into place with accounts limited, suspended, demoted and punished. The problem with this is that the seller often recognises what went wrong, knows how to correct it, but because they’ve now got a severe listing restriction can’t gain enough sales and good feedback to balance out that resulting from the disaster. A month down the line, another review and they’re kicked off eBay for not having pulled their account back up above standard.
This is all about to change!
eBay is to help delinquent sellers recover
From 20 October 2016, if your seller level falls Below Standard, you’ll find clear, actionable guidance on how to get back on track on your seller standards dashboard. Plus eBay will defer performance-based selling limits, as long as your account is demonstrably improving.
3 Months Grace to recover
eBay will tell you exactly why you’re below standard, give every help to get you back on track and most importantly they will defer any performance-based selling limits or selling restrictions on your account for 3 months.
(NB The 3‐month period doesn’t apply to other performance‐related consequences, such as lower search placement, fund holds and the loss of Anchor and Premium Shop privileges. Other eBay policy violations could result in selling limits or selling restrictions on your account).
Ongoing recovery protection
If, after those 3 months, your status is still Below Standard but you’re showing improvement, (i.e. your defect rate or rate of cases closed without seller resolution (or both) is lower than when you entered Below Standard), eBay will continue to protect your account for another month.
As long you show improvement, eBay will continue protecting your account on a monthly basis.
Why it matters
In the past, especially for those sellers who’s seller performance is measured on a year long look back period (rather than 3 months), once you slipped below standard it was nigh on impossible to recover. With this new protection it appears Devin Wenig and his new team have listened to sellers over the past year and finally put in place a plan to help fantastic sellers who have one bad blip to recover.
The only complaint about this new policy is why have we had to wait eight years for someone to listen and act? At long last eBay have some Dolphin friendly seller standard policies and it’s long overdue.
photo credit: Roby Ferrari
2 Responses
Its not hard to stay above standard or TRS on eBay under the current system if you sell over a 1000 sales a month to dilute any issues.
The things you need to do to keep above standard are allow your self to be scammed on a daily basis and never allow a case to be escalated you must give in first refund and take the hit. Even when you know 100% you are right remember the seller is always wrong even when right dont risk it.
TRS is even easier to keep its all down to avoiding slow dispatch (delivery) defects you need to post out every day have 3 day dispatch on your listings and forfeit your 10% discount on fees by doing this your TRS will be as safe as houses.
By doing these sugestions your dashboard will say
01 Jun, 2016 – 31 Aug, 2016
Congratulations, you have no defects for this evaluation period in the UK and Ireland.
Congratulations, you have no defects for this evaluation period in the US.
Congratulations, you have no defects for this evaluation period in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Congratulations, you have no defects for this evaluation period globally.
Good Luck
At the start of this year I changed all my listings to ‘3 Day plus 8 Other Courier’ due to buyers being misled by Ebay into thinking that 2nd Class by Royal Mail is a certain 2 day delivery.. with all the aggravation that entails as you will already know.
Last Thursday… I get an order.. posted out either Thurs or Fri.
On the Saturday I get an irate message from buyer that it is taking a “very very long time”… yes.. double ‘very’.
Monday I get a Neg feedback buyer stating that “Very very slow for a letter. Avoid this seller”. Obviously loves his superlatives.
It took an inordinate length of time – (and this was luckily by phone to Irish CS), being put on hold while they spoke to someone else – for them to decide to determine that they would remove it.. as if they were doing me a special favour!
The point I’m making is that without laying the blame at the staff, they are obviously working under a framework of policies that even when a buyer is obviously ‘out of order’ you STILL have to practically plead for leniency regarding your account…