topic Re: Seller Rating System is a Joke in Selling

Seller Rating System is a Joke

knewdoors — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 11:41:09 GMT

Seriously E-bay what a RIGGED set up re: Seller Ratings..How on earth are sellers supposed to be responsible for late items..when we put our customers purchased items in the post ASAP and yet Australia Post is slow or is delayed because Phil or Phillipa the postperson decides to take a break or is on the go-slow or like most Aussie cities the roads are clogged with too many vehicles.....or on International deliveries the mail on a plane is delayed due to circumstances way out of our control..so the seller takes the hit in the delay... SERIOUSLY E-Bay???...this whole show is RIGGED...what a joke...

Re: Seller Rating System is a Joke

davewil1964 — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 12:13:33 GMT

You obviously are approaching the limit for late delivery defects.

You presumably don't send with trackable postage.

You are therefore assuming eBay will take your word for when you posted rather than the buyers' answers to the question of 'did it arrive by x'.

if you are posting untracked you are always at the mercy of buyer perception.

Either push your handling time out or use tracked postage.

Simple.

A lot simpler than posting a missive to eBay on the boards, as you well know. eBay neither read nor respond to board posts.

Re: Seller Rating System is a Joke

lowanacrafts — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 12:27:29 GMT

I have my handling days at 5. Customers are pleased when the parcel arrives early. Not sure what you have.
One reason for this , I live in the country and can't post every day.

Re: Seller Rating System is a Joke

countessalmirena — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 15:56:07 GMT

@knewdoors, it's an unfortunate truth that sellers are punished for the vagaries of the delivery time, rather than for the postage time.

Of course, the postage time rating should be very clear - when buyers are asked to give feedback - that it's NOT how long the parcel took to get to the buyer... However, as has been said in this thread, there are a couple of things that you can do to avoid defects associated with postage time.

Extend your handling time. I've checked a few of your items, and at the moment, the buyer would see ❝Will usually send within same business day if paid before 14:00 AEST (excludes weekends and holidays).---❞ and an Estimated Delivery Time based on that. Add a few days to that handling time, so that the EDT has some padding for the inevitable delays and blowouts of Australia-wide delivery, and buyers will be pleasantly surprised when they receive their items sooner. (Buyers see the word "fast" in the FAST 'N FREE logo, and they expect it to be fast. Not meeting that expectation is going to annoy some buyers on the basis of their expectation.)
Fix up your postage options. At the moment, you have some listings where an international buyer would see FREE POSTAGE in the postage options, even though you try to cover yourself by stating in the listing description that free postage is for Australian customers. Having that sort of caveat in the DESCRIPTION does not protect you. (If you are not sure about how to set up postage correctly, post here and someone will advise.)
For items from a certain value and higher, you should not risk untracked postage. It's all very well to say that postage is free, and to think that buyers will therefore not expect the more costly (tracked) postage, but you are the one at risk if there's no tracking... Not only are you at risk for late postage dings, but also for claims of the item not arriving.

Re: Seller Rating System is a Joke

wide-world-of-stamps — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 21:44:53 GMT

Our situation exactly.

5 day handling and a note in our description that we don't post every day.

We used to have 3 days, and had a few problems.

Now we get things like "super fast delivery".

Re: Seller Rating System is a Joke

jellybirddesigns — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 00:41:56 GMT

Even if you post within 1 business day, push out your handling time to 5 or more days as the others have suggested.

I did this years ago and it has probably saved me countless hassles.

If you look at my feedback, I get a lot of positive comments about "quick" postage.

Re: Seller Rating System is a Joke

homeopathmichele57 — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 03:18:08 GMT

I used tracked postage. i live in a regional area of Qld. Iwas getting feedback from e.g. Perth about late postage (a very anxious buyer who was depending onthe AP app which I find quite unreliable - or it was a few months ago.

I contacted ebay to explain & they put things right very quickly to my surprise.

Re: Seller Rating System is a Joke

waddingtonfirstaid — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 03:33:35 GMT

Agree 100% with knewdoors and what you have to say here starting this threat. What a lot of sellers don't realize until it affects them directly is that time is of the essence now and delivery is the biggest part of it all. If you allow more than one day to process an order then you're seriously uncompetative because others in the game, let's say Amazon for starters, as well as your fellow eBay sellers striving to maintain a good rating, utterly depend on a delivery system which is also FAST! People want their food fast before it gets cold and you'all heard of Ubereats surely. Well, the same thing appies to all deliveries now. People expect it fast. You can no longer think orders can be bunched together and sent once or twice a week because those days are gone. If you want to have a good rating with eBay and all the bells and whistles involved in its algorithms, to set conditions so your product will come up in a search result, closer to the tope as possible even, then you MUST maintain a fast turn around and FAST delivery service which is 100% reliable.

My youngest son is completing a Business Finance and Marketing degree, I could go on and on about this, especially the inner workings of Facebook, let alone eBay.

The eBay seller rating system can affect sellers very badly due to no fault of their own and it should be dealt with by eBay because it currently stands as another dysfunction which drives sellers into closing.

Re: Seller Rating System is a Joke

countessalmirena — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 03:50:34 GMT

@waddingtonfirstaid wrote:
If you want to have a good rating with eBay and all the bells and whistles involved in its algorithms, to set conditions so your product will come up in a search result, closer to the tope as possible even, then you MUST maintain a fast turn around and FAST delivery service which is 100% reliable.

As a buyer only, I don't expect a fast turnaround. What I do expect is a reasonable turnaround... which isn't the same thing.

If eBay did not penalise sellers for delivery times, I'd be endorsing what you say. There's certainly been an increase in businesslike despatch from many sellers since the earlier days of eBay! However, eBay did and do and almost certainly will continue to do so... that is, penalise sellers for delivery times. That means that sellers have got to protect their standing as sellers because late defects have a serious impact on eBay.

That also means that it's better for some sellers - particularly sellers who are in areas where deliveries may be prone to bottlenecks and delays, or sellers who sell more frequently than some others to buyers who are in slow delivery areas, or sellers who are, for whatever reason, unable to post every day - to pad out the EDD to something more realistic than eBay's "Once upon a time" version.

The OP appears to be a seller who is in that situation.

Better by far to avoid the postage defects than try to race to the top in a FAST 'N FREE battle.

Re: Seller Rating System is a Joke

collect247 — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 04:04:08 GMT

It should be the same for sellers as it is for buyers lol.

A buyer gets up to 8 days before they're punished for not paying so why can't a seller get those same 8 days minimum across the board to post an item?

Buyers take their sweet time to pay but sellers must deliver or else.

100% agree with the OP.

Re: Seller Rating System is a Joke

collect247 — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 04:07:59 GMT

Get rid of the whole rating system altogether there are online sites that state that it could take up to 28 days for delivery lol so if you get it in between now and then who cares because they don't have a rating system.

And all of those sites are still selling like hotcakes.

Re: Seller Rating System is a Joke

digital*ghost — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 04:14:40 GMT

@knewdoors wrote:
this whole show is RIGGED...what a joke...

Like most sellers, I take exception to "didn't arrive by the ETA" = "seller didn't post on time", which is the wording eBay uses on the seller standards page (that is, they literally say "orders that weren't sent on time" in the stats when a buyer says "no" to the "did it arrive by..." question, which everyone knows is not the only way an order will arrive after eBay's ETAs, so it feels like a biased assumption / accusation and conviction with little regard to anything.

It's rigged, for sure, but IMHO it's towards the goal of getting as many sellers as possible to use tracked postage, and the stick method is the only way eBay know how to acheive these kinds of goals (I'm not saying that makes it right, as I not only dislike most of eBay's methods, but I'm directly opposed to them; also my business would be affected significantly - in a negative way - were I forced to use tracked postage on all my orders, so I resent all the ways I have to tailor my business practices around avoiding whacks from eBay's stick(s). I'd much rather have a 1-day handling time and let people know I post quickly, than give the impression I'm a bit slow to post in order to avoid eBay constantly rapping my knuckles and muttering "bad seller, bad seller", particularly for things that are not within my control).

As much as I dislike a lot of eBay's policies, and a lot of how they implement them, I also see the advantage to them in trying to corral as many sellers as possible into providing consistent service standards, and / or trying to create realistic customer expectations (which is not to say I comply with all of them, because I don't ). I just wish they found a better way to do it.

Re: Seller Rating System is a Joke

purplemon18 — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 10:14:49 GMT

That's it in a nutshell. The only thing I would add is that a lot of the policies ebay have implemented over the last few years seem to be largely influenced by what appears to be ebay's fear of amazon. I am not even sure what ebay is so worried about, sure there are a lot of similarities between ebay and amazon, but there are also a lot of differences. If I were the CEO of ebay, I would double down on promoting and expanding the differences.

Re: Seller Rating System is a Joke

springyzone — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 22:01:02 GMT

@digital*ghost wrote:
@knewdoors wrote:
this whole show is RIGGED...what a joke...

As much as I dislike a lot of eBay's policies, and a lot of how they implement them, I also see the advantage to them in trying to corral as many sellers as possible into providing consistent service standards, and / or trying to create realistic customer expectations (which is not to say I comply with all of them, because I don't ). I just wish they found a better way to do it.

I have to agree with digital ghost.

I don't think the whole system is rigged as such, but I do understand that sometimes the ebay way of wording things or the ebay rulings can be pretty harsh on sellers. Even unfair at times.

But on the whole, the policies have worked and ebay has achieved some of what it wanted to achieve. Over the last few years, ebay has made sellers focus on delivery and delivery times and that was something that was certainly missing in the early ebay days.

I do think delivering 'consistent service standards' was something that, like it or not, they did need to concentrate on.

The economy seems to be slowing & from what I am hearing, may be the worst it has been in the last 7 years, so to retain business (or maybe even gain some new customers) ebay will need to seem consistent, reliable, competitive.

I don't think ebay will let up on its policies as such though it often seems to tweak things. All a seller can do is work within the policies and try to develop strategies within them that work for them, whether that means having a slightly longer handling time, sending with tracking or whatever.

Re: Seller Rating System is a Joke

nickypoo31 — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 04:39:35 GMT

Agreed, I recently purchased a surveylance system off a seller masquerading as an Australia seller which was actually shipping from Australia but was registered in china. I had a faulty camera after a few months and it was within the specified warranty period and contacted the seller, was told that i could wait for 14 days for a camera to arrive or buy two new cameras at a discounted rate. I asked how it was possible to buy two new cameras but not get a replacement and the mindless circling began to frustrate me into submission, After contacting ebay and asking them to intervene and getting no direction from ebay on the sellers clear refusal to honor the warranty I ended up leaving negative feedback on the purchase. to my disgust I found out the feedback was removed, I was not notified and worse still after discussion with ebay they would not give me the specific reason. So i asked them if they took bribes and they said they don't and it is punishable by imprisonment with a smiley face at the end of the comment. I have been a customer on ebay for 16 + years now. I have never been more infuriated with the system until I got burned. If you look up reviews for sannce mall on trust pilot you will see hundreds of bad reviews from disatisfied customers of this company. it seems I am not the only one. I have decided to leave ebay and not use it any more as I feel they have sold out their loyal customers in the interest of making commission and the rigged feedback system is the final straw for me.