eBay’s TnS Crackdown: New Policies and How to Avoid Negative Feedback
You may have heard that eBay has recently clamped down on ‘bad sellers’ in an effort to improve buyer experience. What exactly are they doing and how can you protect yourself? We hope this post will shed some light on the matter for you and help you avoid facing penalties.
What Happened
eBay discovered that a small percentage of Sellers (1% to be exact) were creating 35% of the bad buyer experiences on eBay. These experiences were often so bad that the victims were dramatically reducing the amount they purchased from eBay, with some giving up on eBay altogether.
What eBay is doing about it
In an attempt to weed out bad sellers and improve buyer experience, eBay has been reviewing each Seller’s negative and neutral feedback activity and Item Not Received rate to determine the level of buyer dissatisfaction. If a Seller has greater than 5% buyer dissatisfaction within a 90 day period, penalty action is taken.
What? Neutral feedbacks? That’s right: eBay is effectively considering neutral feedback to be negative for the purposes of their cleanup, just one of the bones Sellers have to pick over this new initiative.
The consequences of having greater than 5% dissatisfaction are different for casual Sellers and high volume Sellers. Casual Sellers are banned from selling at all for 14 days, while higher volume Sellers are restricted to 75% of their sales volume (based on historical data). After 30 days, eBay manually review accounts to see whether the dissatisfaction rate has been bought down below 5% and then make a decision as to whether the Seller can return to their usual level of sales.
Note that different action is taken if you have a dissatisfaction rate greater than 10%. In this case, you have a full selling restriction.
See a full explanation on eBay Chatter.
The Problems
As Scott Wingo points out in his eBay Strategies blog, 1% of Sellers is rather misleading in that it sounds like a very small number of Sellers affected. According to his estimate, 1% actually represents around 15,000 sellers when put into concrete figures. And that’s a big number!
There are also a number of other problems:
- What about non-paying bidders who leave negative feedback in retaliation? This is nothing to do with the Seller.
- In my experience, some products are more likely to attract negative feedbacks than others. Products with a broader target audience are going to have far more problems than those with a smaller niche audience.
- Neutrals are now negatives? I can see eBay’s reasoning: most neutrals are given after a not so great eBay experience, but it’s their system after all! If they consider neutrals as negatives, they need to change the feedback system first to just the two options.
- And probably the biggest problem is - How do you work to improve your business when eBay has just guaranteed that you will lose 25% of your revenue?
- Plus: We all know some buyers will always cause trouble no matter what you do. How can Sellers get around that?
What You Can Do: Strategies for Avoiding and Removing Negatives and Neutrals
Clearly eBay need to refine their new policy further and yes, some buyers will give you negatives no matter what. However, there are some things you can do to limit potential negatives and also resolve negatives you already have.
- The majority of eBay negatives are in relation to shipping and communication. Make sure both of these processes are automated as much as possible to ensure buyers don’t end up waiting too long for a response from you or their parcel to arrive. You could also consider making insurance and signature required mandatory if you have consistent problems with shipping. And don’t underestimate the importance of communication. Buyers will practically forgive you for anything if you keep them updated and reply ASAP to their emails.
- If you haven’t already, put an FAQ section in your auctions and on your About Me page. Thoroughly detail your policies on postage options, packaging, insurance and return policies. Leave no question unanswered so the customer is very clear about what is going to happen.
- Include a note in your About Me page or at the bottom of your emails giving people your contact phone number if they are have any problems. Indicate your desire to work with them personally to resolve anything. This gives people reassurance and a course of action to try first rather than simply placing a negative.
- Review any negatives or neutrals and try to look for any patterns. Are there any weaknesses you need to address in your business model?
- If you do get a negative or neutral, contact the buyer – by phone if possible – and try to get a solution. You can then go through the procedure of a mutual feedback withdrawal.
- Square Trade is the best way to resolve disputes and get negative feedbacks removed. You will need to pay a fee, but it’s definitely worth it.
- Give yourself some breathing room and sell on several IDs. Make sure they don’t link to one another. This gives you an alternative if one account is unfortunate enough to be penalized.
I fully expect eBay to attempt to address some of these problems in the near future. I believe that they didn’t foresee the effect this would have on Sellers, nor the response. It should be becoming clear to them just how much business they might lose if they upset too many Sellers, so I remain optimistic for the future.
We’d love to hear your experiences and feedback about this issue – please share your stories using the comment function.
