eBay misses own shipping cap deadline, media sellers confounded and befuddled

Back in August, along with a host of other changes, eBay announced shipping maximums (caps) for the media category.  They also published a checklist that pinned the date to October 5th.  Well here it is October 6th and... nobody knows why, but it hasn't rolled out.

Some sellers are reporting they've heard October 16th, others say it's been delayed till Q1. What's disturbing is nobody at eBay seems to know the answer.

Why does this matter?

You may be asking yourself why does this even matter? Why can't sellers just go ahead and set up the limits now and not worry about the date.  The problem is that ecommerce is a zero sum game and a marketplace has to change all at once for someone not to be the loser.

Let's look at scenario, for example video game systems (with a $15 shipping cap as per eBay).  Let's say these are $100 items with shipping included (all in).

Seller A lists these for $80 and $20 shipping

Seller B lists these at $1NR with $20 shipping 

Seller C is a model citizen and lists them at $85 with $15 shipping

Seller D is also a model citizen and is an auction traditionalist, starting the systems at $1NR with $15 shipping.

The whole reason eBay is implementing the shipping caps is because eBay buyers don't look at S+H cost very closely so with that caveat, Seller C is immediately at a disadvantage because their item is $85 vs. $80 on the others.  However, if they do get a sale at least it will be for the $100 target.  If they do sell something, they'll have the pleasure of paying eBay's FVF on $5 more so they face a higher effective take rate vs. non-compliant sellers.

While Seller C is in pain, Seller D is truly hosed because to buyers it looks like the market is saying $80 for the items, thus they stop bidding at $80 and the seller is left with a paltry $95 in total sales.  What's $5 you may ask yourself, well this seller was probably going to fund some S+H cost in the core price so they get a triple wammy.  Electronics margins are very thin and $5 on almost any sale with of $100 item destroys all margin.

Time for eBay to get buttoned up on these changes

The bottom line is eBay has to start realizing these changes impact their customers in serious and profound ways and are not to be taken lightly.  Of course a (maybe) unintended consequence of these kinds of random activities is that they really destabilize auction sellers who find themselves having to switch to fixed-price for some continuity or leave eBay for other pastures.

Can you imagine any other business doing this?  What if your employer told you pay day would be October 25th and then moved it to October 31st?  What if you hustled to do your taxes, and the IRS moved it June this year unannounced?  Those seem ludicrous, but this is how it now feels to sell on eBay.

Comments

[riley johnson]

great blog

[Steve Smith]

Ha Ha Ha, man you people are such sniveling little babies. It's like talking with whiny school girls. The people who complain are the people who don't know what they are doing, or don't want to change bad habits. It's shitty sellers like you, that forced eBay to make these changes. It's people like you who complain over nothing, because you just like to complain and act like an immature children.

[Laurel Kline]

Hi all,

The team just confirmed that the maximum shipping values are now being enforced for Media categories. It was turned on this morning.

Thanks!
Laurel Kline
Developer Relations
eBay API Team

[Steve Smith]

Dear discohristo. Very clever, you have quite the witty sense of humor. You were a bad seller, which is why your account was suspended. You will usually get a warning at least 30 days ahead of time about improving your satisfaction rate, and if you dont, then you get suspended. If you fall within the bottom 5%, that is usually when you would get the warning. You cant use other peoples feedback, because you dont know the full details of their account or what was behind the feedback. If you have lots of neg fb or bad ratings, or if you have disputes filed against you, those all count towards your dissatisfaction rating. Its very childish and immature to blame eBay for your bad practices.

I know its nice to blame others for your mistakes but Im guessing you were warned, and felt that you werent doing anything wrong and didnt change anything or look for assistance, so you ended up with more bad fb and/or ratings and you were then suspended. Take responsibility and be an adult about it, and worry about your own account not others in which you dont know any real details.

No one to blame but yourself, eBay doesn't rate you, its the buyers, and everyone has difficult buyers, but they're minimal and wouldn't cause your account to be suspended unless you had sustained practices affecting your seller rating negatively for an extended amount of time.

[DH]

The DSR ratings are starting to fuck over ebay sellers.. i'm a top seller on ebay.. discohristo is my name on eBay.. check out my seller ratings... they look pretty darn good don't they? WRONG.. i am no longer selling on eBay.. ebay suspended me indefinately for not keeping up with seller compliance policy.. they said i have too many unhappy customers.. too many unhappy customers!!?!?!!!?!?!? go figure.. and eBay top seller e-forcity has over 250 negative feedbacks a month... that's 250 unhappy customers a month. i haven't had that many unhappy customers the whole time i've been on eBay..

[Full time seller with good DSRs but who still agrees with Scot that DSRs are a faulty one size fits]

@Steve Smith,

Double Duh!!

PS-How is the weather in San Jose today?

[Steve Smith]

You guys ever think, that maybe too many people whine and complain over issues that are their responsibilities. You can obtain high DSR's if you are not, it is because you are not listing your items properly. Many sellers have high ratings and that can be acheived if you take the right practices. There are always going to be difficult buyers, that's life, and its your job to minimize the risk of receiving unfair feedback. Almost every seller who whines and complains has issues they dont know about in their listing or selling strategies. Once they make the changes, their ratings go up, SURPRISE! eBay doesn't sell your items for you, it is your responsibility, and eBay doesn't rate you, it is your buyers, if you have a constant issue with bad ratings take it up with your buyers, duh!

[David Hooper]

Hey Scot, Even though we can find no record of it anywhere on eBay, we are almost certain the shipping cap date was October 16th. Our TSAM didn't correct us as we discussed "October 16th" to him half a dozen times over the last 2 months. Now, no one knows. As with any large media seller (between all our brands we ship about 40k units per month), those shipping caps change our business MASSIVELY and we need advice on it. I have never seen eBay more dis-organized than this.

Last Thursday, upon hearing that the Shipping Cap date was 10/6 not 10/16 we had a meeting. In the old days, we would have worked all weekend to get prepped for this "revised" (?) date. Our staff has been dealing with eBay changes all year and they are burnt out. (I like your term of eBay-Fatigue). Since our own TSAM couldn't confirm anything, we decided not to worry about it. Maybe we'll get a violation but so far we haven't. We'll be up and in compliance within a few days, but I wonder if anyone at eBay knows what they put their sellers through. (I, too, am embarrassed to be an eBay seller. I never advertise it at parties or outside of work). I simply state that eBay is one of our channels. Our goal is to get our eBay business to less than 20% of total revenue within 24 months. Until then, we have to live with this circus-like operation and hope we survive while they fumble over themselves.

I once asked our TSAM if ANYONE running anything at eBay has ever been a seller. He responded (proudly) that a few executives sell trinkets on the side and used this as evidence that they understood sellers. True story.

And yes, DSRs have a major problem. But I think eBay likes that our entire feedback profile is somewhat subjective and hidden from us. THey promise us so many rewards for good DSRs (search standing, fee rebates, etc.), but realistically, it is not feasible for large sellers to reach any of those milestones. It's sort of like the boss who promises the new sales guy he can make $100k bonus and win the vacation, but once the salesperson gets into the job and looks at the other 100 sales people who have never hit the bonus and vacation and realizes he just got baited and switched. For eBay to advertise that they reduced our seller fees (because we can get rebates for unattainable DSRs) is kind of dishonest.

If anything happens, I'll let you know.

Dave

[Chris Oquist]

We also just noticed while doing a bit of competitive research that the shipping cap policy didn't take effect. I would consider my company one of the few "model citizens" in the large media powerseller category on eBay (and Amazon, and...), and found today that our efforts to bring all of our listings into compliance by 10/6 were just rewarded by eBay massively disadvantaging us - in exactly the way you point out - by not applying these caps when they reported they would.

Rather than level the playing field by normalizing shipping on like items as well as lead to a simpler buying experience for consumers, this seems even more destructive than some past changes eBay has made to their marketplace, by actually punishing those sellers who made an effort to comply with expected platform-wide changes.

We haven't been able to get an answer from our TSAM.

[Scot Wingo]

Hey Jay,

Could be, I give that a low probability. eBay is split into seller-facing teams and buyer-facing (finding) teams. Lately it seems anything with a large seller-facing component (S+H caps are all seller facing) are getting caught up internally. I suspect it's the big jumble of seller touch points they have now:
* SYI
* BT
* bulk things (turbolister, bulk listing thingy)
* SM/SMP
* API
* I'm sure there's more.

All of those tools will need to be able to block any S+H higher than the caps.

Scot

[Jay Senese]

Scot, do you think this might be deliberate on eBay's part? They want to 'Test' shipping & handling prices in a category with uniform items, so they announce a deadline expecting some sellers to comply (the Test group) and some sellers to do nothing (the Control group), and now they take a few weeks or months to compare one group's sales against the other?

[Travis Siardirano]

what a horribly run company. i guess they are to busy buying danish newspapers that have no upside nor future revenue potential. Their stock will be valueless in another year.

[Anne]

Scot,

Please, please, update this post as soon as you get firm news about this. I'm a full-time media seller who wants to know if the 85 hour work weeks that I've put in for the past month were all in vain.

Ya know, at this point I'm starting to feel ashamed to be an ebay seller. And I'm not an emotional business person, I'm pragmatic to the bone. Hell, I even have an MBA, (just like those ivory tower, golden parachute gamblers at ebay).

But its just so out of hand. Ebay is starting to make me feel humiliated for endlessly trying "to get that feeling again".

I might as well go work for corporate America at its worst, because dealing with ebay has become just that.

The money just ain't there anymore and it gets worse all the time.

Anne