E-Bay feedback

[sofadoc]

While looking at an item for sale on E-Bay, I read this disclaimer at the bottom of a seller's page:


•***Attention....all prospective buyers.***
Now that eBay in their infinite wisdom, has altered the feedback rating system & made it basically useless as a barometer to determine the reliability of both buyers & sellers....I ask the following:

....FEEDBACK: now that the feedback system is nothing more than a popularity contest ( for those unaware of the change....sellers can no longer leave neutral or negative feedback. For buyers who opt not to pay for / complete transactions....no comment or reference can be made.) 
I will continue to respond to feedback from buyers....I will not initiate feedback.
The new DSR system....those cute little stars that mean absolutely nothing to the buyers but can weigh heavy on the expenses sellers incur....I ask this:
Please leave a five star rating in all categories....if you feel this is not deserved - leave NOTHING....ignore the rating system.  By complying to this request expenses will be decreased....a savings that will be passed on to future buyers.
Please note, this is a REQUEST.  Cooperation in this matter will be greatly appreciated


Sounds like E-Bay is more interested in making money off of dissatisfied customers than protecting them.

[gene]

http://pages.ebay.com/services/forum/feedback.html

http://pages.ebay.com/services/forum/sellerprotection.html


I think ebay is interested in making money.

My impression is that the changes are more about getting rid of sellers who regularly rip folks off and then simply respond to the customers' complaint by saying the customer did something wrong.

If the DSR system, those cute little stars, force sellers to lower their shipping costs, as a buyer I'm all for that. But then, as a seller, I think that stinks.

gene

[Steve at Silverstone Fabrics]

eBay.........they are in the process of becoming "Amazon Lite"

In my opinion, they do not want people who go around to yard sales and swap meets to tarnish the image they have of themselves and so all of the recent policy changes are geared to "helping the small to medium sellers" to decide not to sell on eBay.

Until  2 years ago the best way to find upholstery fabric on eBay was to have "upholstery fabric" be part of what you put into the eBay search bar.........being a seller of upholstery fabric, I always included "upholstery fabric" in my items title.

In October of 2011, I was thrilled when we hit 1,800 listings. That milestone meant we had 5% (at that time there were about 35,000  listings) of all the upholstery fabric listed on eBay.

In Novemeber, our sales dropped out of sight...........after several days, we discovered that eBay had installed "Best Match" and they allowed other sellers of non-upholstery fabric to declare that: quilting squares, bridal fabric, outdoor fabric, Apparel & fashion, crafts......etc........was UPHOLSTERY FABRIC. I just checked eBay and when I searched for upholstery fabric......it brought up 61,000 items. Including item number: 360195673370 ........52 Blue 4" x 4" quilt squares.  FYI: If you search for "upholstery fabric" (you must put the words in quotation marks) you can drop the number of listings in the search  from 61,000 to 21,000. That means that my customers have to sort through 40,000 items that are NOT upholstery fabric.

Let's talk about free shipping. Sellers are "encouraged" to include free shipping and 1 day handling......if you do not, you do not get any seller discounts.........one more thing, I paid UPS $1,345.25 last week. Shipping is NOT free. FYI: The final value fee we pay to eBay includes the extra shipping charge we add to the items price.

Until 2 years ago, we could leave negative feedback for a**hole buyers but not any longer, we can only leave #1. no feedback #2 positive feed back. We learned that you can not leave "positive negative" feedback either. I thought writing that a buyer was the "biggest Prima Donna west of the Mississippi" was a compliment.

We have received 5 negative feedbacks since 2007.......the average price of the product purchased was under $40. Three of the negative feedbacks came AFTER they were given a 100% refund.

The change  that is going to change eBay forever is listing restrictions and item value restrictions.

Right now, if you had never listed on eBay and you decided to give it a "whirl", you would be told that list 50 items but but could not exceed $300 in sales in a month.......I am pretty sure this was the restrictions that were placed on one of my smaller sites (we were able to have the limits raised because we linked it to our larger existing store).

My largest site has almost 2,000 items. We are gold power sellers*. Our feedback rating is 99.9% and we were issued both listing limits and value limits. *We lost our gold power seller status last month  when we did not download 10 tracking numbers for nails we sold......we will be returning to the gold power sell level next month.

If you go to the eBay forum pages and search "listing limits" , you will read about small and medium sized sellers leaving eBay. eBay "helped" them make the decision to move on.

When you try and contact customer service, you feel like Dorothy knocking on the door of Emerald City.........."How dare you to question the great and powerful eBay!"

If you look around other sites, you will see the migration from eBay to sites like Esty.

What am I going to do? We are studying how to live within the restrictions and we are expanding silverstonefabrics.com.......just in case.

Steve