More eBay Changes Part XIV

In the mail on Monday, I received the eBay Power Up Pre-Holiday Sales Planner. Excellent! I knew I would find some good content to cover in this blog. It is full of information on how sellers can improve their DSRs and other such nonsense.

On page 2, eBay states that sellers should "remind buyers to give you 5-star ratings on each DSR if they're satisfied with the transaction, or to contact you if they are not satisfied." So, we have to beg for fives? I have already decided that directly asking for fives is a very bad idea.

On page S3, eBay gives us this piece of advice:

We love that you care passionately about your Feedback scores—they're important to your business. But we don't expect you to have 100% positive Feedback with 5-star ratings. In fact, less than 1% of sellers do.

Strive to deliver great listings and customer service. You don't have to be perfect to be great.

Under this statement is a picture of a smiling woman holding a card with a large 99.99% on it. EBay may not expect us to be 100% perfect, but they expect us to be 99.99% perfect. It is quite apparent that a 4.69 rating is considered horrible by the way eBay has it colored red in my seller dashboard.

On page S3 of Power Up, eBay has a section entitled, "How Do You Stack Up?" This section contains the following remarks:

If 4 stars mean "reasonable," is a 4.3 DSR bad? Buyers leave 5-star shipping and handling DSRs 73% of the time. A score of 4 is left 17% of the time. As a result, sellers with a score of 4.6 or higher are above average and get increased visibility in Best Match.

I noticed that eBay did not directly answer the question of whether a 4.3 DSR is bad. Reading between the lines, if only 17% of buyers leave 4-star ratings, I can conclude that a 4.3 is bad, and this is why eBay plans to block sellers who have a 4.3 average DSR.

.................................................

It does appear that my seller dashboard is broken. If my seller dashboard is not broken, then the information that eBay sent me in an email is bogus. I received the email version of Power Up this week. Here is a screen capture of what the message stated are my 30-day DSR ratings:


According to this message, my 30-day DSRs are all at 4.8 and 4.9. If these are my actual 30-day DSRs, then I should have raised search exposure. However, seller dashboard has me at 4.69, 4.49, 4.50, and 4.50 with lowered search exposure. The ratings seen above cannot be my one-year DSRs, either, because those are 4.9, 4.8, 4.8, and 4.8. Why the discrepancy? Why does eBay have so many glitches? Once the new policies take effect, some sellers may be blocked from selling who have good DSRs because of eBay's continual glitches.