A glimmer of hope for feedback, yet DSRs are still a shaky Jenga tower

Things are tough in eBayland right now
For the last two weeks, I've been talking to literally hundreds of large eBay sellers to check in, see how their sales are doing, discuss strategy and share ideas+best practices around big change like FP30.  This is an annual process we go through at ChannelAdvisor to make sure everyone is ready for the holiday selling season. 

The overall mood isn't very positive as you can imagine and the one thing that keeps coming back up (as it should) is that eBay has built many of the recent programs (FVF discounts, best match, etc.) on the wobbly DSR system that leaves sellers scratching their heads and unable to make improvements.  For the record, I think the DSR intent is good - clean up the marketplace, reward great sellers, get rid of bad sellers.  I am 100% on-board with that program.  What's painful is that the current DSR system is missing the mark in many ways and causing large great merchants to either jump through too many hoops or leave all together.  In fact, the calls are frequently met with what can best be called apathy.  "Well it doesn't matter, my DSRs will keep me from doing X, Y and Z"

Dear customer, your overall grade is a 'C'
One seller used an analogy that really hit home for me - todays DSRs are like going to school and all you get is a report card with a single 'C' on it. You really want to make A's, but you can't see the individual test grades or even the subjects you are doing poorly in, just that your overall grade is a C.  The end result after dealing with this system for 9+ months without any improvement/visibility from eBay is that you resolve yourself to the C, give up because you can't possibly guess how to get to a B, much less an A and ultimately diversify to more transparent channels where you can control your own destiny, or even if you are partnered with a marketplace, you are given transparency and can improve any processes needed to have a better consumer experience.  It seems obvious, but transparency (e.g. knowing which customer/product had a problem) is good for everyone in a healthy marketplace.

Here's a perfect real-world example.  I was talking to one customer (top 100 eBay seller by GMV) and instead of questions about FP30 or how to grow their business this holiday, they wanted to brainstorm some ideas of how to deal with having a 'lowered' search standing.  To their credit, eBay implemented a snazzy dashboard that provides the 'your grade is a C' level of transparency but it stops there.

This seller noticed their search standing is 'lowered' because of a sudden dip in sales, checked the dashboard and saw why and then had to call their TSAM to get more information. It turned out that there's a rule (I vaguely remember this one, but can't find on the site - I think it was called buyer satisfaction level or something?) that is part of the umbrella Seller Non Performance policy (SNP in ebay-speak) that in addition to maintaining the 4.3 on all DSRs, if you get too many 1 DSR scores your search standing will be lowered.  This doesn't show up in the dashboard and you have to be told it's going on when your search standing is lowered. 

This seller has 4.6+ on all DSRs, yet eBay refuses to give the seller any more information than 'you are receiving 1's'.  The seller would love to know answers to basic questions like: "Which of my products have this issue?", "Is this geographically specific - e.g. non-domestic?", "Is there a correlation between low feedback buyers and 1's - can I block them?", "Why are customers leaving me 1's, leaving me positive overall-feedback,not contacting me, yet clearly are not happy?", etc.  The seller has given up and has accelerated their move from eBay because eBay's message is pretty loud and clear here: "You are making 1's and we want you off the site."

Another seller has free shipping and can't crack 4.7, another seller can't break 4.5 because half their business is non-domestic, I could go on and on with stories like this.  I would say out of the top 1000 eBay customers, probably a solid 80-90% suffer from a major DSR-related issue.

First, the good news

There is a glimmer of hope.  Lorrie Norrington announced at eBay live that eBay would bring back a system to replace the mutual feedback withdrawal  (MFW in eBay-speak) by the holiday sellling  season.

MFW was a decent system for customer-service focused sellers because it allowed sellers to say to buyers that left a negative : "Hey you had a bad experience, I want to make that right.", then execute on that and be rewarded with the effective expunging of the negative should the buyer choose to do so.  In May 08, eBay's Trust and Safety dept canceled MFW because it was allegedly being abused by bad sellers to extort feedback from buyers, etc.

eBay has been quiet as we waited and today via a developer blog post announced that it will launch what is now called Feedback Revision (FR anyone?).

• AU will be the first market to launch on October 13 (Let those noisy Aussies work out the bugs - :0 ).  The AU site has the best information on the new process and has a good help file here.  Tamebay has a good summary here.
• US will launch on October 20.  Of course none of this good stuff will be available via the API so high vollume sellers will have to MANUALLY manage this process (weeeee!) if they can get their myebay to load, etc.
• No word on the UK or rest of EU that I can find.

It remains to be seen how well this new process will work, but the important thing here is eBay listened to one area of concern and has reacted relatively quickly which is a positive.

Scot's Top 5 DSR reforms needed ASAP

Since eBay is in the mode of improving things, I wanted to share with everyone the top 5 (yes there are more, but let's get them to focus on the top 5 first!) major DSR issues that need fixing ASAP. 

1. Transparency is better for everyone - Give sellers some ability to slice and dice their DSR ratings by product, by geo, etc.  Many sellers sell 10k+ products into 5+ geographies. Give them the tools to delight buyers vs. make it impossible to delight customers.  This is a no brainer - kick bad sellers off, keep good sellers and give them the tools+data they need to deliver a world-class customer service experience.  eBay is only hurting itself here and DSRs are actually hurting the buyer experience.
   
   • FYI - eBay's TnS dept refuses to provide this transparency arguing that sellers would use it to retaliate against buyers vs. improve the buyer experience.  This is easy - provide the data and if any seller retaliates, kick them off eBay and keep the sellers that use the data the 'right' way.  The current policy basically says to me: "We have evil retaliatory sellers we are going to keep on the site, but take some of the tools they use for evil away." This mindset makes absolutely no sense to me.
   • Back to my report card analogy - Imagine this: "the School is  afraid that sharing grades with students will cause teacher retaliation. Students will suddenly want to know why they made a D on a test, why their essay was off the mark, etc."   Seems silly right, well ecommerce and retailing in general is a learning experience - what products do buyers like, what do they hate, what policies, etc. 
2. Where else can the adverb 'Very' put you out of business? - the wording around 4 stars is painfully bad (Accurate/Satisfied/Quickly/Reasonable) vs. the 5's which are currently (Very accurate, Very satisfied, Very quickly, Very reasonable).  I understand the bell curve, but telling Buyers a 4 is reasonable/5 VERY reasonable and then holding sellers to a 4.3 is feels unfair and is the single largest source of seller angst around DSRs with sellers of any size.
3. Fix International DSRs - While eBay claims that international DSRs account for only a .02 difference in DSRS, I've seen sellers with 20-30% non-domestic sales and those transactions impact them by .2-.5 (yes a whole half a star!) in both S+H cost and time.  The problem is international buyers love a great deal, but when they see their customs bill they get cheesed off and ding the seller. The kinds of sellers we want in the market aren't going to violate customs rules (which eBay is effectively encouraging with DSRs), so you have the unintended consequence of punishing the exact honest-A+++ sellers you want to keep.
   • Easy fixes abound on this one - either give immunity around non-domestic transactions on these two DSRs or give some kind of inflater or even better, educate buyers that the item they are buying will be subject to customs, do they understand this?  Even better - implement software for including customs calcs in the whole transaction so we avoid the train wreck all together- wouldn't that be awesome?  Again - transparency is the way to go in all ecommerce transactions.  Is it a great buyer experience to order a $200 diamond ring and then to have to learn your customs are $75?
     
4. Get rid of the shipping time DSR and measure this with software - eBay knows when the buyer clicks the 'pay now' button and when an item ships, so make this a software measurement and set a bar and hold sellers to it, vs. a survey.  Of course as a buyer, I always want things to a) ship faster and b) ship cheaper - duh!?  This is like a survey from the IRS - were your taxes too high Mr. Tax payer?  This is probably too radical for eBay to consider, but they really should.  It's time for some radical behavior.  To quote Tina Fey: "Let's get all Mavericky in here!"
5. Nuke UPIs - I'm convinced that the UPI process is just so broken that it needs to go away totally. If eBay won't take that step, at least stop buyers from the ability to leave negatives or worse postives+1 DSRs. (Also probably too Mavericky)

Call to action
For you sellers out there with a TSAM or access to eBay management, we need to work together for the longevity of the eBay ecosystem on these 5 fixes or I fear that eBay will continue to lump more and more programs on top of a wobbly DSR foundation and if you've ever played Jenga, you know how that plays out.  Right now these DSR flaws make the eBay Jenga tower feel like it has one little crooked block and is 20 stories high and the wind is blowing at 20mph.

SeekingAlpha Disclosure: I am long eBay and Google

 

Comments

[Travis]

I agree with most of you above. After selling for 3 years I've found at the end of the day Amazon sells more for me and is less of a game. We offer terrific service and same day shipping with typical 48-72hr Priority Mail delivery times.

I'm getting burnt out on the high fees, like many of you I'm paying about 20-30% on average. I'm also tired of getting a malicious feedback or DSR for no reason and getting my listings kicked to the bottom of the ebay pit. In theory I could buy from a few of my smaller competitors and give them a bad rating they didn't deserve and hurt their ebay rank, ebay would do nothing. I've had proof of a lying customer that gave bad feedback and ebay gave me... shrugged shoulders.

It's at the point now where it doesn't really matter to our business and has become a pain the as$ to deal with. Ebay has become a headless machine, luckily ebay is only about 2% of my total sales, they could be more like 6% like Amazon.

After the holidays we'll be strongly looking at other ways to spend our time and money rather than ebay.

[Arie Shpanya]

Hi There,

UK feedback revision is available starting from tomorrow, Oct 20:

http://www.tamebay.com/2008/10/feedback-revision-rolls-out-for-ebay-uk-ireland-com.html

http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/feedback/feedback-revisions-faqs.html#Why%20is%20the%20seller%20required%20to%20send%20a%20request%20to%20the%20buyer?

[Johnny]

I just received my first negative feedbacks - 2 of them - in Error! The buyer wanted to neg a different seller (a competitor of mine) but negged me instead. I contacted Ebay and they won't take them off, I asked the buyer to contact Ebay to have them removed (no results yet). The buyer them left two positive feedbacks basically saying to ignore the 2 negative.

I am a silver powerseller and have seen my fees almost double this month on a 20% increase in volume over last month.

No seller support, ridiculous fee increases, getting negged for absolutely no reason and no way to reverse it, getting lower DSR's because Ebay can't figure out that on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 is perfect and 4 is excellent. None of the current Ebay mangement has ever bought or sold on their own company's site. Ebay has lost all direction.

[Dan]

Here's one more reform Scot: Shipping Charges DSR: If I offer free shipping AUTOMATICALLY give me a 5. How about that?

[Stefan]

You know what's sad?

Even today, a full 7 months, SEVEN months after this so called "Best Match" was put into play, buyers still just cannot f*cking find what they are looking for.

Last year around this time, if you did a search for a hot item, let's say, oh I don't know, a Wii Remote, one of the most in-demand and sought-after commodity products of our time, instead of finding an actual Wii Remote, you would find about a million "wii remote silicon skins" & other junk clogging up the site. ...Best match was supposed to change all of that.

Yet STILL TODAY when you do a search on eBay for Wii Remote, what do you see?

A million wii remote accessories, skins, boxing gloves, and other useless items. Best match hasn't done sh*t, and everyone knows it.

"It learns over time", they say? BS, it learns jack. It is extremely flawed technology and it going to be the ultimate death of eBay unless they do something about it.

Compare this mess to a search for a Wii Remote on Amazon, and ask yourself whether or not eBay is f*cked if they stick with best match.

What's even sadder is this: The other day I figured, you know what, I'll pay $40 to try out this "featured plus" business. Surely if I pay $40.00, THAT should get my Wii Remote to show up at the top of the search, like it should. Yeah, that's it - eBay will show your item if you pay them $40! Right??

So I paid the $40.00, and guess what. Yup, you guessed it. No sales. Nothing. My Wii Remote still doesn't even show up in search. F*cking pathetic.

How broken is eBay search? So broken that STILL, to this day, a search for a Wii Remote just absolutely refuses to yield actual Wii Remotes, even when a seller pays forty dollars to have it show up.

Un. Believable.

[Gina]

Best way to cope with all of these ridiculous ebay changes? Move your stuff as soon as possible and regain control over your business and your life!
I have researched every possible alternative and found a great new site called Bonanzle. Every other alternative site looks cheap and tacky in my opinion, with the exception of Etsy or Bonanzle.
With Bonanzle you can even import your ebay feedback and listings with the touch of a button! That was one of the things that sold me, oh and listings are free!!!
Hope this helps! :)

[Joe]

Ebay blows, and has since August '06.

This company changed my life, for the infinite better, and now all I feel is hatred and resentment for what they've put me through.

Because I feel owned. But that won't last much longer, and they should know that!

I just had a phone conversation with one of my best customers. He doesn't sell so much, but time and again. He's 'worn out', his exact words. Stuff he wants, he doesn't know how to find (older fellah). Stuff he sells, from time to time, costs too much.

America Online was going to take over the world in 1999. Nobody even knows what AOL stand for anymore. Ebay is running for their corporate lives. This is the reason for all this baloney.

But they're retail morons, in my opinion.

Joe

[BMX]

In my opinion the only thing that will save ebay is a huge fee decrease.

I think they dropped the ball on FP30 pricing and will have no choice after the abysmal Q4 numbers come out, but then Zon might get into a pricing war with them and that's all she wrote.

[Dustin Jones]

Good comments and suggestions, but I can think of 2-3 ways around each one of them to game the system for each real solution that would be a advantage to others.

Calculate shipping time with an auto system- BAD. Everyone uses scan forms if they ship USPS, other than they packages are overnight and picked up same day. Easily taken advantage of.

Our DSR stars for shipping and handling are 4.89 and qualify for 15% off and 20% in 2 categories. We work with refurbished, used and new products. It's not impossible.

We're are on pace to do 650K+ this month and I attribute the success to quality thinking within our business, outside of the box thinkers and people who make things happen. I also attribute a 30% increase in sales to a) having more stock b) being on top of the changes and experimenting c) setting our selves apart from competitors who had horrible customer service and procedures in a tough category.

If you are a large volume seller before the changes and are dipping now ...it's simple. Your competition is making the changes better than you are.

Above all, I agree with your comments, even though these loopholes exists (I wont get into them, some legit some not so) ...it's too late for ebay. I think the big guys will survive...well! But the medium to small will vanish in 6 months or so.

[George Mehelis]

How can you be long eBay? That seems insane especially for someone with your intelligence and inside contacts. Everyone who works in silicone knows its commmon knowledge their cash assets are well inflated due to their stock buyback's and the skype inflated numbers fron one time users.

California A.G. Jerry Brown's office has been rumored to be investigating Paypal for months, if its true, who know's what going to become of that, donohoe certainly is one of the worst ceo's in tech history, but I'm not sure he's a criminal, but whatever Brown's office comes up with it probably wont be good for investors. This 4Q is going to be dismal, that much is certain. They are certainly the next IBM or Xybernaut of silicone valley.

[TekGems]

I am a moron please rememmber this facts when you read my posts. the only bigger moron is Tanny, what kind of name is Tanny any way?

[Jim]

Scot,
What about communication DSR? I send payment received "thank you" via eBay as soon as payment received. I send item shipped with tracking both by paypal shipment notice, eBay Selling Manager Pro email and the shipping client whether FedEx or USPS.

Problem I am finding is bad email address on file with eBay. The email gets returned to me as user unknown. Of course I have no idea what eBay does with these bad address back to them.

Within the packing slip I put my direct 1-800 and customer service email for issue resolve.

I still get dinged on communication. I guess they expect me to phone them??

[Tanny]

Scot as Tekgems pointed out your top sellers worry more about gaming the system and less on their customer service. That hasn't changed in all the years I have known them or your company. I have personally bought from most of your top sellers. I also competed successfully against many even being a much smaller seller. Your sellers consistently overcharge on shipping fees or have some of the highest shipping fees on the site. They use automated emails for everything and when a problem occurs it's a nightmare to get a real human being responding to the issue. I look at some of your sellers and nothing has changed in the six years I have been on the site. The only modification I have seen is the inclusion of the begging invoices "educating" me the buyer on why I should leave 5 star ratings for their usual mediocre service.

Sellers should NOT be told which products are receiving one star ratings. They should also NOT be told which areas are their biggest issues with low 1 star ratings from buyers. Maybe it will force your sellers to finally take a long, hard look at their products and customer service and fix ALL the issues. Then they won't have to worry about their DSRS. There really is a correlation.

[Larry Phillips]

Well said Scot. An underlying premise in your suggestions can be traced back to eBay's founder, Pierre Omidyar, who said:

"I founded the company on the notion that people were basically good and that if you give them the benefit of the doubt you’re rarely disappointed."

Unfortunately, the TnS people operate under the premise that "People are basically bad, and if you give them the benefit of the doubt, you will ALWAYS be disappointed."

Therein lies the problem. And there are so many scams out there, that it's sort of understandable that TnS sees it that way. So the policies and governance have been developed by TnS to punish the bad guys, without concern for how it impacts the good guys. eBay needs to turn that thinking around. They need to focus on a way to remove the trash sellers, and give the good guys more latitude to provide an excellent buying experience, without worrying about all this superfluous nonsense.

[Ed]

It gets worse - check out what I just blogged -

http://www.buildaskill.com/blog/2008/10/07/ebayag-reacts-to-free-pp-campaign-criticisms/

You just will not believe the latest messaging from eBay to sellers in the Asia-Pacific region.

Ed

[TekGems]

It seems your larger clients that sell on eBay make it a point to dismiss customer concerns. eBay is now noticing! If profitably on volume is more important than customer service, then lowered search standings should be the expected results. Sellers of all levels need to provide better customer service. I don't think eBay should tell sellers what products are receiving 1 stars because it becomes a privacy issue. If buyers know sellers can track who gave them 1 stars, then that compromises the DSR system. Sellers can figure that stuff out in-house -- go data mine your e-mails. If you can't cut it on eBay, it'll be even harder on Amazon. Amazon has even higher standards!

[As Was]

How about an automatic 5 for "shipping pricing" for sellers offering free shipping?

I heard that one reason many sellers offering free shipping can't get a more perfect score is because people give them 3s... not because they're unhappy but more as a neutral "not applicable" "hey I paid nothing for shipping" kind of score.

Free shipping? Automatic 5.

And if 4 is a good score, then make it not hurt eBay sellers. If 4 is a bad score that can hurt sellers, then make sure that's messaged to buyers as they are leaving the ratings. You can't tell buyers 4 is good and then treat sellers like they "can't perform."

[Alan]

It's too late for eBay.

Sellers are tired of changes and the only way to address seller concerns is with more changes. There's not enough daylight to deal with all the changes already.

A great leader knows he can't beat the troops into the ground and expect exceptional results. Once you have burned out sellers, all you'll get is apathy. BTW, sellers are customers and not employees, a fact seemed lost on eBay management.

The only way I see eBay motivating sellers is with a big fat fee decrease and wall street won't let that happen. Let's face it, eBay isn't the only game in town anymore, and the marketplace traffic is not as valuable as it once was.

Too bad. eBay was a great company who had fiercely loyal sellers. How they blew this is beyond me.

Alan