In Spring 2018’s business seller news, eBay announced more visibility of your buyers’ after-sale requests in Seller Hub would be coming as well as how your performance compares to other seller standards on eBay.
This summer, they’ll enable you to proactively manage claims and returns, and improve non-performing sales. By providing transactional information and guidance to modify listings, business practices and postage, you should be able to better meet buyer expectations and sell more.
What will happen in July?
From July 2018 there will be new seller metrics and benchmark tools in Seller Hub’s performance tab. You’ll be able to clearly see how often you receive “item not as described” and “item not received” after-sale requests.
eBay will also publish your first seller standards assessment that shows how you compare against your peers.
What will happen later in the year?
Later this year, for sellers with a very high number of SNAD claims in a category when compared to their peers, eBay may add an additional 4% surcharge on final value fees in that category. That’s not 4% of fees but an additional 4% of the final value as an additional charge.
Also later this year, for sellers with a very high number of INR claims for a particular postage destination when compared to their peers, eBay may extend the estimated delivery time for that postage destination.
How eBay calculate peer comparisons
Peer comparisons are based on profile groups, taking into consideration the site, category, sales volume in the same assessment lookback period, average selling price, returns policies, item condition, postage services and estimated delivery date.
We understand that the look-back period for SNAD and INR will be 12 months so a single bad week shouldn’t kill your business.
A logical introduction will be blocking sellers using eBay Postage to print labels from selecting a service slower than that promised in the listing, although you will be able to upgrade the buyer to a faster service.
Tamebay Comment
As an ex eBay seller I lived through any number of eBay pronouncements of this sort and, whether it be feedback percentages, detailed seller ratings or On-Time Deliveries, they have always caused a certain amount of trepidation and outright fear for sellers so we want to reassure you a little.
eBay are not after you if you’re a good seller. They are after those who are doing a poor job on eBay. We’ve seen people begging eBay to change the level of metrics in the past, believing it will keep them safe. In reality what would happen if eBay changed the way they measure performance is that they would also change the standard to try and catch the same people.
Those with long memories will remember the ‘dolphins’ caught in the net of a single neutral or negative feedback limiting a seller account. Those day’s are thankfully in the dim and distant past and these days eBay are likely to look at many month’s worth of data before applying sanctions to catch under-performing sellers and not trap those doing a generally good job. Plus you’ll have your reports and peer comparisons to know how you’re performing well before any potential sanctions are introduced.
9 Responses
here we go again
100% of our returns are item not as described
so the buyer ensures they get free return postage
Out of the last 30 odd returns only 1 buyer was gracious enough today admit to a mistake in buying, paying for the return postage themselves. All other 29 claimed the item was not as described, one even claiming it was covered in green pond slime.
Only on eBay,,,,, you couldn’t make it up
When will eBay wake up and see that metrics set by Tesco and Args and the like are not really achievable for small business unless they want to slowly go under.
The big companies buy items for around a 3rd of the price small companies pay. So can pitch their prices just a bit lower on the market place then offer everything free and fast shipping.
They may look at offering we pay you to return. Lifetime returns as unwanted and even keep the item for free if you don’t like it and eBay will just say wow that’s how everyone should be. Well with the news they are closing down Tesco direct maybe Tesco on ebay will follow and ebay will wonder what on earth they did jumping into bed too far with them.
Its a sad state of affairs when eBay are trying to hang onto the coat tails of Amazon but stupidly start telling “SELF EMPLOYED PEOPLE” when to post an item, what service to use, and of course how long after the legal law requirement they have to accept unwanted returns. Just to get a tiny bit of discount back off fees. Just like the huge companies do to boost their profits even further.
It seems they only want big business on their site.
The new returns label will generate Ebay more profits, they want Q2 Q3 and Q3 look good, so drain more money from the sellers.
edit – they want Q2 Q3 AND Q4 profits to look good. I read on another forum where a poster said ” What next, will Ebay charge us to edit an item description ? “
My items have been marked down for not as described, but they are described as best I could. A miniature spoon is a spoon.
So here goes the 1000 eBay “millionaires” into the sea. Most of them do tiny profit margin and I imagine if they’ll have to pay for returns (overcharged return labels btw!) for most of the time… hmmm… they’ll potentially leave eBay creating dent in eBay profits anyway.