eBay: A glimmer of Hope for Feedback 32 comments
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Things are tough in eBayland right now
For the last two weeks, I've been talking to literally hundreds of large eBay sellers to check in, see how their sales are doing, discuss strategy and share ideas+best practices around big change like FP30. This is an annual process we go through at ChannelAdvisor to make sure everyone is ready for the holiday selling season.
The overall mood isn't very positive as you can imagine and the one thing that keeps coming back up (as it should) is that eBay (EBAY) has built many of the recent programs (FVF discounts, best match, etc.) on the wobbly DSR system that leaves sellers scratching their heads and unable to make improvements. For the record, I think the DSR intent is good - clean up the marketplace, reward great sellers, get rid of bad sellers. I am 100% on-board with that program. What's painful is that the current DSR system is missing the mark in many ways and causing large great merchants to either jump through too many hoops or leave all together. In fact, the calls are frequently met with what can best be called apathy. "Well it doesn't matter, my DSRs will keep me from doing X, Y and Z"
Dear customer, your overall grade is a 'C'
One seller used an analogy that really hit home for me - todays DSRs are like going to school and all you get is a report card with a single 'C' on it. You really want to make A's, but you can't see the individual test grades or even the subjects you are doing poorly in, just that your overall grade is a C. The end result after dealing with this system for 9+ months without any improvement/visibility from eBay is that you resolve yourself to the C, give up because you can't possibly guess how to get to a B, much less an A and ultimately diversify to more transparent channels where you can control your own destiny, or even if you are partnered with a marketplace, you are given transparency and can improve any processes needed to have a better consumer experience. It seems obvious, but transparency (e.g. knowing which customer/product had a problem) is good for everyone in a healthy marketplace.
Here's a perfect real-world example. I was talking to one customer (top 100 eBay seller by GMV) and instead of questions about FP30 or how to grow their business this holiday, they wanted to brainstorm some ideas of how to deal with having a 'lowered' search standing. To their credit, eBay implemented a snazzy dashboard that provides the 'your grade is a C' level of transparency but it stops there.
This seller noticed their search standing is 'lowered' because of a sudden dip in sales, checked the dashboard and saw why and then had to call their TSAM to get more information. It turned out that there's a rule (I vaguely remember this one, but can't find on the site - I think it was called buyer satisfaction level or something?) that is part of the umbrella Seller Non Performance policy (SNP in ebay-speak) that in addition to maintaining the 4.3 on all DSRs, if you get too many 1 DSR scores your search standing will be lowered. This doesn't show up in the dashboard and you have to be told it's going on when your search standing is lowered.
This seller has 4.6+ on all DSRs, yet eBay refuses to give the seller any more information than 'you are receiving 1's'. The seller would love to know answers to basic questions like: "Which of my products have this issue?", "Is this geographically specific - e.g. non-domestic?", "Is there a correlation between low feedback buyers and 1's - can I block them?", "Why are customers leaving me 1's, leaving me positive overall-feedback,not contacting me, yet clearly are not happy?", etc. The seller has given up and has accelerated their move from eBay because eBay's message is pretty loud and clear here: "You are making 1's and we want you off the site."
Another seller has free shipping and can't crack 4.7, another seller can't break 4.5 because half their business is non-domestic, I could go on and on with stories like this. I would say out of the top 1000 eBay customers, probably a solid 80-90% suffer from a major DSR-related issue.
First, the good news
There is a glimmer of hope. Lorrie Norrington announced at eBay live that eBay would bring back a system to replace the mutual feedback withdrawal (MFW in eBay-speak) by the holiday sellling season.
MFW was a decent system for customer-service focused sellers because it allowed sellers to say to buyers that left a negative : "Hey you had a bad experience, I want to make that right.", then execute on that and be rewarded with the effective expunging of the negative should the buyer choose to do so. In May 08, eBay's Trust and Safety dept canceled MFW because it was allegedly being abused by bad sellers to extort feedback from buyers, etc.
eBay has been quiet as we waited and Tuesday via a developer blog post announced that it will launch what is now called Feedback Revision (FR anyone?).
- AU will be the first market to launch on October 13 (Let those noisy Aussies work out the bugs - :0 ). The AU site has the best information on the new process and has a good help file here. Tamebay has a good summary here.
- US will launch on October 20. Of course none of this good stuff will be available via the API so high vollume sellers will have to MANUALLY manage this process (weeeee!) if they can get their myebay to load, etc.
- No word on the UK or rest of EU that I can find.
It remains to be seen how well this new process will work, but the important thing here is eBay listened to one area of concern and has reacted relatively quickly which is a positive.
Scot's Top 5 DSR reforms needed ASAP
Since eBay is in the mode of improving things, I wanted to share with everyone the top 5 (yes there are more, but let's get them to focus on the top 5 first!) major DSR issues that need fixing ASAP.
- Transparency is better for everyone - Give sellers some ability to slice and dice their DSR ratings by product, by geo, etc. Many sellers sell 10k+ products into 5+ geographies. Give them the tools to delight buyers vs. make it impossible to delight customers. This is a no brainer - kick bad sellers off, keep good sellers and give them the tools+data they need to deliver a world-class customer service experience. eBay is only hurting itself here and DSRs are actually hurting the buyer experience.
- FYI - eBay's TnS dept refuses to provide this transparency arguing that sellers would use it to retaliate against buyers vs. improve the buyer experience. This is easy - provide the data and if any seller retaliates, kick them off eBay and keep the sellers that use the data the 'right' way. The current policy basically says to me: "We have evil retaliatory sellers we are going to keep on the site, but take some of the tools they use for evil away." This mindset makes absolutely no sense to me.
- Back to my report card analogy - Imagine this: "the School is afraid that sharing grades with students will cause teacher retaliation. Students will suddenly want to know why they made a D on a test, why their essay was off the mark, etc." Seems silly right, well ecommerce and retailing in general is a learning experience - what products do buyers like, what do they hate, what policies, etc.
- Where else can the adverb 'Very' put you out of business? - the wording around 4 stars is painfully bad (Accurate/Satisfied/Quickly/Reasonable) vs. the 5's which are currently (Very accurate, Very satisfied, Very quickly, Very reasonable). I understand the bell curve, but telling Buyers a 4 is reasonable/5 VERY reasonable and then holding sellers to a 4.3 is feels unfair and is the single largest source of seller angst around DSRs with sellers of any size.
- Fix International DSRs - While eBay claims that international DSRs account for only a .02 difference in DSRS, I've seen sellers with 20-30% non-domestic sales and those transactions impact them by .2-.5 (yes a whole half a star!) in both S+H cost and time. The problem is international buyers love a great deal, but when they see their customs bill they get cheesed off and ding the seller. The kinds of sellers we want in the market aren't going to violate customs rules (which eBay is effectively encouraging with DSRs), so you have the unintended consequence of punishing the exact honest-A+++ sellers you want to keep.
- Easy fixes abound on this one - either give immunity around non-domestic transactions on these two DSRs or give some kind of inflater or even better, educate buyers that the item they are buying will be subject to customs, do they understand this? Even better - implement software for including customs calcs in the whole transaction so we avoid the train wreck all together- wouldn't that be awesome? Again - transparency is the way to go in all ecommerce transactions. Is it a great buyer experience to order a $200 diamond ring and then to have to learn your customs are $75?
- Get rid of the shipping time DSR and measure this with software - eBay knows when the buyer clicks the 'pay now' button and when an item ships, so make this a software measurement and set a bar and hold sellers to it, vs. a survey. Of course as a buyer, I always want things to a) ship faster and b) ship cheaper - duh!? This is like a survey from the IRS - were your taxes too high Mr. Tax payer? This is probably too radical for eBay to consider, but they really should. It's time for some radical behavior. To quote Tina Fey: "Let's get all Mavericky in here!"
- Nuke UPIs - I'm convinced that the UPI process is just so broken that it needs to go away totally. If eBay won't take that step, at least stop buyers from the ability to leave negatives or worse postives+1 DSRs. (Also probably too Mavericky)
Call to action
For you sellers out there with a TSAM or access to eBay management, we need to work together for the longevity of the eBay ecosystem on these 5 fixes or I fear that eBay will continue to lump more and more programs on top of a wobbly DSR foundation and if you've ever played Jenga, you know how that plays out. Right now these DSR flaws make the eBay Jenga tower feel like it has one little crooked block and is 20 stories high and the wind is blowing at 20mph.
Disclosure: Author is long eBay and Google.
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Too late for that, the dogs have left the building.
Dog Gone!!
Not so in all cases. If the seller uses a different tool for printing the label than PayPal, or hand writes the label, how will eBay know when the item ships? Ebay would have no record of the Priority DC (or UPS label), so would have no way to know when shipped, as far as I can see. Your assumption may apply in some cases, but not all. IMHO
I admire your efforts, Scott, but until eBay cares enough about sellers to do some of these things on it's own, things will not change, IMHO. They created this mess, and now it's either fix it, or forget it.
The incentives offered by eBay’s new fee structure favor only the corporation, not the sellers, who make it possible for eBay to keep the lights on. I for one am trying my best to close out my current inventory on eBay and other sites, with a complete migration to other venues by the end of the year. It is simply not worth the effort to try and eek out a living when you must constantly be jumping through hoops. EBay was a great venue when they were providing a platform for independent business people to provide their services. When they started dictating how individual businesses were going to conduct business, by taking away half of our payment options, they stepped over the line in my opinion. I am done with them. I used to own stock in the company. I sold it a while back when I saw the changes that they were making and realized that they were running the company into the ground. Think George W. Bush's rational for the "big picture" of things and you will get a glimpse of what appears to be eBay's current mindset. Sad really!
It was a great company at one time. Those days are now gone!
Perhaps buyer DSRs are in order. Take for example the buyer who pleaded for immediate shipment and then canceled her Paypal eCheck as soon as she was assured the item she so deparately needed was in the mail. I got what I deserved for trusting a buyer with 100% positive feedback - but then again isn't that what they all have. Then there is the buyer who won an auction June 7th. He still emails every couple of weeks to tell me I need to have more patience as he will pay when the it is more convenient for him. He never noticed that I relisted the item and it sold for $28.00 - but that doesn't really matter as the second buyer never paid either.
I could drone on and on and on with similar instances but the point is that I cannot warn any other sellers about these buyers. This just alows this type of activity to grow and flourish. I can't even alert other sellers to the NPB who threated to kill me and my family because I filed for a refund of my FVF.
This is why I left eBay despite over 10,000 100% positive feedbacks and 4.9 DSR across the board. Also, despite by Elevated Status the searches I looked at always seemd to show my listings below others with poorer scores.
I have been with the bay for over 10 years with 7 of them making a fulltime living and now am also phasing out my eBay Store. Join us on a responsive auction site that has most of the refugees selling there!
But each year as the changes and fee hikes got more and more often, I lost that enthusiasm, It became work ... Not just work but one of those dirty jobs people HATE, I began to cringe as I checked the announcement page because each day it was always SOMETHING negative and ebay tried to spin it as a positive, what was fun and exciting is now one of the most dreaded things I do in a day.
If there were another site which contained the traffic I would leave ebay and never look back no matter how they begged or grovelled.
I'm left with saying "Oh well, I can't do good even when I do good. I give up."
So I will have to refund my hard earned money to get a 5 stars or a Positive feedback? Anyone who wants to be happy again DON'T SELL ON EBAY!!! The customer base is as my good friend says ( very very successful business owner) Bottom of the barrel customers. I CAN"T WAIT UNTIL THEY FALL!!!
I saw what was coming months ago and sold my Ebay stock at a profit (the only positive thing I've gotten out of this) and now their share price is down in the sewer. Hah.. I hope it goes down to nothing and is not that far from it. Oh, I am a 10+ year seller with excellent ratings and feedback and now only list an occasional few items til I get rid of them. Oh, and I NEVER leave feedback anymore for anyone.
As for the PayPal and credit card only payments requirement due to become effective this month.. how can this be legal?? They tried it in Australia and had to rescind it because the commissioner blasted it as being unfair practice. Isn't it unfair practice here too?? I read on the announcement board about a month ago that since it didn't fare well in Australia, Ebay was not going to implement it here in the U.S. but WOULD require that PayPal had to be offered as a payment option (still unfair as they are still basically forcing payment thru their payment monopoly down our throats) regardless of whether the seller wants to offer it or not. Now they've apparently decided after all to see how far they can get away with requiring PayPal and credit card only payments here in the U.S. What a load of B.S. Ebay has become.
One final mention. The new fixed price listing bonanza that is supposed to be the latest and greatest for all of you sellers....I was going to list one high end doll as a fixed price listing. When I came to the end of the listing, the final value fee they were going to take if it sold was almost $20.. compared to the auction style listing final value fee of about $8. The final value fees do not include listing or PayPal fees. Some bargain..!!!!!
In its heyday Ebay used to tout three things: 1) That a winning bid is a CONTRACT between buyer and seller that BOTH had to honor. 2) Whenever there was an issue or a challenge, Ebay would say we are only a venue and have no control over the transaction between buyer and seller. 3) That the Ebay site was a level playing field between buyers and sellers and between Mom/Pop small sellers and behemoth corporate sellers. All played by the same rules.
Now: A winning bid is a contract that ONLY THE SELLER has to honor. The buyers can demand [and get] any number of concessions from the seller by threatening to leave bad DSRs...all they have to do is call the seller so there is no MY MESSAGES or email record. Ebay will do nothing. Also we sellers get to LIE about the buyers all we can leave is POSITIVE FEEDBACK even if they are unreasonable, even if they ignore payment terms and pay 30 days later when the auction states payment due in 10 days. What's the point of leaving coddling feedback? We sellers dont even know from other sellers when the bidder never pays but leaves negative feedback!
The we are only a venue thing HA! Ebay now controls HOW something is listed, HOW it can be paid for, WHERE the items show up in search, HOW MANY items can be listed [regardless of how many are paid for to be listed}, and that buyers can only rate sellers.
Think of it this way...WHAT LANDLORD of a bricks and mortar retailer tells a retailer what credit cards to accept, what items to sell, that you have to coddle buyers regardless of how they act ion your store or how they treat your inventory. And tells the retailer how much they can charge for shipping and handling. How long before that bricks and mortar retailer moves to a more resonable siteor goes out of business.
In essence, this is what Ebay is doing as a landlord to sellers with these changes.
An example of the land mine field Ebay is throwing at sellers?
1) As of this month sellers are ONLY allowed to accept Paypal.
2) Paypal rules/regs require that you accept ALL FORMS OF PAYMENT through Paypal
3) Echecks are a form of payment Paypal requires.
4) Paypal requires a seller to HOLD SHIPMENT until PAYPAL SAYS the echeck has cleared
5) Ebay has a "Shipping Time" DSR with no parameters set for buyers to rate sellers
6) When you HOLD SHIPMENT buyers will lower your DSR on shipping time
7) DSRs are rated on a 1-5 system, whole numbers only
8) 4 is "Ships Fast" 5 is "Ships very fast"
9) According to Ebay rules, ANY DSR under 4.3 will cause you to no be able to list for 30 days
10) So all you need is to follow the rules, hold shipment until cleared by Paypal and get a couple of 3's on DSRs on shipping time and you won't be able to list for 30 days.
11) Even if you manage to avoid being thrown off the site for 30 days thing, your future listings will be buried in BEST MATCH because your DSR's will be under the Ebay average...which is boosted by all the heavy hitters such as BUY.COM that Ebay is wooing.
Untenable Catch 22 for Sellers...Sorta makes you want to stay with Ebay and sell doesn't it?
It is no longer a level playing field: a) Buyers can leave negative and neutral feedback for sellers but sellers cannot inform other sellers by feedback when a buyer cheats them or doesn't honor their committment to the ebay contract when making the purchase. Buyers can leave subjective and anonymous DSRs about sellers with impunity sometimes causing sellers to NOT BE ABLE TO LIST FOR 30 DAYS and the buyers can just MAKE UP A REASON to do so. [Ebay gives buyers no parameters [or ultra weak ones] for what the DSR levels mean and how to rate sellers. Getting slammed unfairly by buyers can also make listings unfindable by other buyers through BEST MATCH EVEN THOUGH sellers PAY THE SAME FEES to list their items. b) Small sellers now have different rules and fees from corporate sellersso the corporate sellers can undercut the Mom and Pops because their fee structure is enhanced.
So the Mom & Pops sellers can no longer compete and are getting slammed by unscrupulous buyers in DSRs so they are leavingtaking with them the unique cutesy items that made Ebay a fun place to shop for buyers. Without the unique cutesy items, the good buyers are leaving too.
Sellers will leave and wont buy either. As they go and the Ebay broken and draconian search engine keeps the buyers left from finding their unique treasuresI hope the new management can sleep at night with their handiwork.
And yet Ebay, who cannot field a decent customer service department that CARES that could rid the site of bad sellers AND buyers, spends tons of money changing ITEM pages and MY EBAY 4-5 times a year WHEN IT DOES NOT NEED TO BE CHANGED. And I betcha the 1000 layoffs announced this morning are in Customer Service! BTW when is the last time Amazon changed its pages? Putting lipstick on a pig with these superficial changes doesnt change the fact that its a pig.
You think LAST YEARS Ebay Live, which used to be a cult-like positive cheerleading event, was a disasterwait until THIS YEAR! Ebay may have to PAY sellers to show up to a venue that people were once treating like a Yankees/Red Sox World Series event.
And with all of the above enhancements sellers are asked to pay fee increases up to 43% and are now required to use Paypal only thus eliminating the 20% of buyers who ONLY pay by money order or check. Oh! and as punishment for Ebays not accepting Google Checkout, EBAYS searches have been lowered in GOOGLES BEST MATCH further hurting sellers AND buyers! Hah!
Ebay will implode.