eBay: Helping Sellers Protect Their Feedback

Hello and thanks for visiting my blog.

We are all aware that eBay are forever changing things on their site.

Over recent years the changes to their feedback system and policies have seen some sellers throw the towel in and give up.

Some of those changers were:

• Restricting the sale of digital download items, music, eBooks, images etc as they believed these sales could lead to feedback manipulation.

• Removing the ability of a seller to leave Negative feedback for a buyer. Which for many sellers was their protection from buyers being over excited and leaving negative feedback. Or if negative feedback was left some buyers would use threats of returning the negative feedback unless the buyer removed it from seller.

• Adding the DSR (Detailed Seller Rating) feature, where a buyer will rate the seller on 4 key areas: Item description, Communication, Dispatch Time and P&P charges. Scoring from one to five, with five being Top Marks. The sellers DSR is then calculated and their fixed price listings are then placed on the eBay pages according to how good their DSR is. Which basically means if you have a good DSR your items will be well placed, but if you have a poor DSR your listings will be lower in the listings.

eBay’s feedback system is under constant scrutiny, discussion and criticism, with sellers claiming it to be unfair to them. Well I’m pleased to be able to tell you that eBay are concerned about their feedback system being exploited and are now actively working to protect sellers from buyers who misuse or abuse it.

A small minority of buyers have been known to:

• Threaten the seller with negative feedback unless the seller provides goods or services not included in the original listing.
• Purchase many items from the same seller and leave them negative feedback regardless of the buying experience.
• Leave abusive feedback.
• Leave positive feedback but score the seller a low DSR.

When buyers are found to leave a large amount of low DSR’s they are now being sent an email explaining the impact of low DSR scores to the seller and informing them of how feedback should be left. Should they continue to leave low DSR’s, or if they are found to be in competition with the buyer, the feedback left will be removed and the buyers account, and any related selling accounts, will be suspended.

As a seller you are also protected because eBay ensure that a single buyer does not have a disproportionate impact on a seller by causing them to lose their status, such as eBay Top-rated, or preventing them from gaining it.

There are some measures that you can take yourself to help protect your feedback.

If you receive negative or neutral feedback you can ask the buyer to revise it once you have corrected the problem. Drop them an email asking what the problem was, and remember you must always remain polite in your emails and stick to what was stated in your salespage and your returns policy. A genuine buyer with a genuine complaint will reply and tell you exactly what made them leave poor feedback, they’ll also welcome the fact that you want to try and correct it.

You will also find some petty buyers won’t reply to your emails to let you know what was wrong, especially if it was a cheap item. Well did you know…..

…..You can block individual buyers from being allowed to bid on your items. Type Block Bidders into the help pages on eBay and follow the simple guide.

You can also block buyers from buying your items. If you set your buyer requirements to block buyers with unpaid items or policy violation reports recorded against them it’ll help keep some of the unsavoury buyers from your eBay door. Type Buyer Requirements into the help pages on eBay and follow the simple guide.

Don’t be to strict though, we all had to start somewhere and it’s the unsavoury buyers we want to keep away from not the newbies that haven’t gained Feedback yet!!

In the event that you do receive poor feedback you can also send the buyer a Feedback revision request, but please note that for every 1000 feedback scores in any given 12 month period you can only request 5 revisions. So use them sparingly. You must also have resolved the issue with the buyer and explain to the buyer why you are requesting the revision.

While I’m pleased that eBay are now trying to protect sellers I feel that they still have a long way to go before they have levelled the playing field. But at least they are moving in the right direction, remember eBay are treading a very fine line trying to please buyers and sellers alike.

If you are having problems with a buyer pop over to this eBay help page and see what you can do about it. Like eBay say “If sellers don’t tell us about their problems, we won’t be able to prevent a buyer from doing the same thing again”.

For the Uk:
http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/sell/report_problem.html

For the US:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/report_problem.html

For other countries: Copy and Paste the above link into Notepad and replace the extension (.com or .co.uk) with the extension that you use for your usual eBay site.

Visit the page now and Bookmark it, you never know when you may need it.

Remember your Feedback IS your eBay reputation and you need to protect it at all times.

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