and they ask you to do that short survey... they are not asking whether the person really DID give you good helpful service, nor how fast they served you... they are asking how you FEEL. That is the extremely important thing to understand. The system has nothing to do with "facts"... that postage DSR is not designed to rank sellers based on their actual posting time. It is intended to find out what the buyers feel the service was like. Because at the end of the day, and in a overall global sense it's all about buyers and how they feel, and making buyers feel good is what makes success in retail sales. Therefore, the challenge for many sellers is to work out how to improve the customer's perception of the transaction. If you can do that, then you don't need to improve your service levels.

All of that is precicesly why I don't have a problem with the DSR system in and of itself, but have a HUGE problem with it being treated as tangible evidence of bad service. I just don't understand why DSRs - a general overview of buyer perception - became what it has, and with no accountability for those that can drastically affect a business based on perception and not facts.

That being said, I agree with your main point, that is sellers have the majority influence over/responsibility for how a transaction is perceived and (then) ultimately evaluated.