Feedback revision now live on eBay UK
November 3, 2008
Feedback revision is now live on the eBay site, if you’ve got any negatives or neutral feedback for which you’ve resolved the problem with the buyer you can request them to upgrade their feedback (They’re unable to downgrade it).
There are limits of 5 edits per 1,000 feedback received and you can only request one edit per individual feedback so make sure you communicate with your buyer before sending the revision request. Options given are “I resolved a problem the buyer had with this transaction”, “The buyer confirmed that he or she had accidentally left the wrong feedback” or “Other” along with the ability to add a note to the buyer.
eBay India launch Community Court for feedback
October 14, 2008
While many other eBay sites are rolling out feedback revision, eBay India are launching their own solution to ‘unfair’ feedback: the Community Court. This will allow sellers to appeal non-positive feedback which they believe to be unfair or unjustified; their claim will be judged by 21 randomly selected members.
The Community Court process will collect input from the buyer as well as the seller. If a majority (11) of jurors agree that the feedback is unjustified, it will be removed. There is no further appeal beyond this.
In order to participate as a juror, members will have to have been registered on eBay for six months. In addition, they must have participated in at least ten transactions as a buyer, or have twenty feedback stars with an overall rating of 97% feedback plus at least one transaction as a buyer. Anyone wishing to register now, though, seems to be out of luck, as the link from the announcement to sign up doesn’t appear to work.
This is not the first time we’ve seen the Community Court idea. eBay UK was due to lauch a similar project earlier this year which would have been open to both sellers and buyers, but this was abandoned when non-positive feedback for buyers was abolished. Now that buyers cannot be left negative feedback, the whole Court process seems unnecessarily formal, antagonistic and heavy-handed: giving sellers the facility to simply ask their buyers to remove feedback seems, in most cases, to be more than adequate.
Feedback revision rolls out for eBay UK, Ireland, .com
October 13, 2008
eBay UK have announced that feedback revision will be rolled out on 20th October. eBay Ireland and eBay.com will also launch feedback revision on the same day.
As already announced for eBay Australia, the new system will allow sellers to request that buyers edit feedback within 30 days of it being left. Buyers will only be able to revise feedback “upwards” – i.e. a positive cannot be changed to a negative or neutral – and sellers cannot request that buyers edit positive feedback. Buyers will be able to edit the rating, the DSR scores and the comment they left.
Sellers will be able to request 5 edits per 1,000 feedbacks received, though eBay have said that this limit may be reconsidered: when it was announced for the Australian site, many sellers wondered what would be the position for buyers who’d left multiple non-positive feedbacks for combined transactions, so it would be good to see this addressed in the near future.
There’s more detail on exactly how the system will work in the FAQs.
eBay UK will also launch the new Resolution Centre at the end of October: this replaces the current Dispute Console, and just the change of name alone should make trading on eBay a more pleasant experience. There’s not much detail in the announcement of exactly what will be changing, but one welcome addition should be “a separate flow for buyers and sellers to mutually agree to cancel a transaction”: seeing this process made simpler and less antagonistic should be good news for buyers *and* sellers.
eBay to make free P&P compulsory for DVDs
October 11, 2008
eBay UK will announce a raft of changes on Monday including compulsory free postage for DVDs.
From early next year there will be maximum postage rates set for media and mobile phone categories. Richard Ambrose from eBay stated that some of the maximum rates will be below actual cost and for DVDs they will insist sellers offer free post, although upgrade to priority services and overseas postage can still be charged.
Other changes to be announced will include:
Feedback Revision
Feedback Revision will be live on the site in about a weeks time. Sellers will be able to request buyers revise negative or neutral feedback upwards with a limit of 5 revisions per 1000 transactions, which is roughly the rate of negative feedbacks left across the whole site.
Identity Confirmation
eBay have already announced they’ll be protecting seller accounts by checking they are creating listings from the computer they habitually use. This is already turned on in TurboLister but will now roll out site wide by the end of October. If a seller tries to list from an alternative PC they’ll be required to confirm their identity before continuing which will prevent fraudsters from listing on hijacked accounts.
Annonymisation of emails
Similar to Australia eBay will begin to hide email addresses between eBay users until they have transacted. When buyers and sellers communicate eBay will create a temporary email address which can be replied to from email clients such as Outlook or webmail without the requirement to log into the eBay account.
This will be a great assistance for sellers trading on multiple eBay IDs to save time having to log into the relevant account just to answer a simple buyer enquiry.
Postage and Packing maximum charges
eBay will begin to set maximum postage costs from January, begining in the media and mobile phone categories with free post enforced for all DVD listings.
DSR transparency
eBay will increase visibility of DSRs to enable sellers to improve their businesses. Users will begin to see a breakdown of DSRs by category to establish if particular product lines are dragging their overall scores down and enable them to target areas for improvement.
By early 2009 great DSR transparency will appear in the Seller Dashboard, but will be available to developers through the API by the end of the year.
eBay Priorities
eBay are focusing on the three top reasons why buyers stop buying on eBay
- Losing money on eBay
- Getting a negative feedback
- High postage and packaging charges
They have already made progress by banning sellers from leaving negative or neutral feedback for buyers, in 2009 they will be focusing on buyer safety – it’s simply not acceptable for buyers to be able to lose money on the largest ecommerce site in the UK. This is why changes such as anonymous emails and seller identity confirmation are being introduced. If fraudsters are unable to list on the site or contact potential buyers there is no way they can take their money.
Postage and packing charges will be next target area for eBay in order to meet buyer objectives. Although maximum or free postage charges are being introduced in media and mobile phones first, don’t be surprised if they come to your category next.
eBay Australia launches feedback revision
October 1, 2008
eBay Australia have announced the launch of feedback revision: from 13th October, buyers will be able to edit the feedback rating, comment or Detailed Seller Ratings they left for a seller.
- Sellers will need to initiate the process by requesting buyers revise their feedback, within thirty days of feedback being left.
- Buyers then have ten days to respond to the request.
- There are limits to the number of revision requests which can be sent. All sellers will get a minimum of five requests per year, but higher volume sellers will get five requests per thousand feedbacks received.
- Requests which are ignored or declined by buyers will still count towards the total, so sellers need to ensure their buyers understand the process and are willing to change their feedback before they waste a request on those who want the original comments or score to stand.
- Feedback can only be revised upwards: positives cannot be changed to neutrals or negatives.
- Sellers cannot ask buyers to revise positive feedback.
There’s more information about exactly how the system will work on the FAQs page, though the inevitable question of how eBay will deal with multiple negatives from one combined transaction, apparently hasn’t yet been answered.
eBay Australia also say that the Dispute Console is, from 21st October, to be known as the Resolution Centre. It’s about time this was done: the change of name alone should make the process a little less antagonistic for all parties. eBay Australia promise a streamlined reporting process and simplified management of open cases too.
At first glance, it looks like this has been implemented the right way. By making the process seller-initiated, and by the “only way is up” rule that prevents positives being turned into negatives, the revision process cannot be used to blackmail sellers post-transaction.
On the sellers’ part, the limits on the number of requests that can be sent are low, but not excessively so (eBay Germany allows two requests per month, regardless of sales volume). Non-positive feedback left in error can be edited, and prematurely-left feedback can be corrected once the buyer’s problem has been resolved, but no seller is going to be able to use this process to cover up multiple, ongoing issues with their service, which was always a problem with mutual feedback withdrawal.
As eBay Australia is the testing ground du jour for eBay’s new ideas, I can only hope this is going to roll-out elsewhere by the end of October as promised.
eBay strike will be non-event
February 17, 2008
The strike by eBay sellers that is supposed to start at midnight already looks doomed to failure. Listings on the site are reportedly up 25% following a 20c cheap listing day in the US and a revision of listing fees for US media sellers to reflect those already in place for UK sellers.
To be perfectly honest I’ve never considered serious sellers as likely to strike in the first place, larger sellers have employees and business premises that need paying for and medium sized sellers rely on eBay for their income. The only type of seller that can afford to strike are those that use the site for pin money and don’t rely on it for their income.
Auctionbytes commenting “Is eBay Boycott for real” appear not to be talking to business sellers with their summation “What I’m hearing from sellers is not, can we afford to boycott eBay for a week, but rather, can we afford to continue selling on eBay once these changes roll out?” Quite frankly listing fees are down, final value fees are up, you’ll only pay final value fees if your item sells so setting your prices at a realistic level and making a real profit is the way to go.
For far too long many eBay sellers haven’t considered the real costs of running a business – think about the overheads you’d entail if you ran a high street shop and in comparison eBay fees pale into insignificance. If a seller can’t make a profit on eBay then quite simply you have to question if they could make a profit anywhere?
My predictions for the week ahead are that serious business sellers will carry on listing in greater quantities then ever before, in particular we’ll see a huge increase in listings from media sellers in the US. A few hobby sellers who use eBay for pin money will strike, list elsewhere for a week, and be back listing on eBay by the end of the month.
Alternative auction sites will report huge spikes in listings and a bump in conversion rates, but will fail to quantify hard numbers but report fluffy percentages. (Remember when eBid reported a sales increase of 57% in the UK and 221% in the US they were comparing Christmas sales with the previous June’s!)
Sellers will find that listing on alternative sites simply doesn’t bring in the volume of sales that eBay does. Sellers will happily buy from each other for a week before realising sellers buying from sellers doesn’t make money – more buyers than sellers are needed for a successful marketplace and that’s what eBay has and the other sites don’t.
In two weeks time it’ll all be forgotten and with the fee changes and pending feedback changes and volume discounts kicking in, eBay will have become a better place for all sellers.
Easy peasy eBay selling
May 15, 2007
eBay UK are launching a new, simplified version of the Sell Your Item form, aimed at people who want to list super-fast. They approached TameBay to see if our readers would be interested in testing it: you can check out Easy Sell for yourself.
Jamie, eBay’s Seller Programmes Manager, told us “Easy Sell is currently a beta version, which means that whilst it’s in pretty good shape, it’s not 100% finished. What it needs is for some experts to try it out and tell us what they think – people like your Tamebay readers.†Happy to help, Jamie 
If you’re interested, take a look, have a go and tell eBay what you think. You can email them your thoughts directly at EasySellFeedback@ebay.com or PowerSellers can post their feedback directly on the UK PowerSeller Board. It is worth adding that once listed your item will go live to site, and from that point on can be treated as any normal item with the ability to make revisions available via My eBay.
I’ve had a play this afternoon and I like it *very* much. The new interface is bright, cheerful and very primary: it’s really inviting and looks like it will be easy to use. Once you’ve put in a title, the form suggests categories for you – for all the items I tried, it came up with reasonable categories too. I very much liked the “costs as you go” feature, where the fees for the listing you’re about to launch are updated live at the bottom of the listing.
The simplicity of the form won’t suit all sellers – for example, pictures have to be eBay-hosted ones, and the only upgrade available is Gallery (which, rather naughtily, is preselected), but those using self-hosted pictures and bigger listing upgrades are likely to be outside the target market for this new feature. Listing types are restricted to auction only, or auction with BIN – again, something that more experienced sellers won’t like. But for the new and/or occasional sellers at whom this is aimed, it’s a massive improvement on the current SYI form.
Why not have a play yourself and let us, and eBay, know what you think.
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