There have been a rash of reports from sellers stating they have received a “Poor Seller Performance” notice from Ebay and their accounts have been restricted. This email basically tells them they are in the bottom 1% of sellers. It seems like Ebay is doing some spring cleaning, and about time.

It was about a year ago that I sent an email to Bill Cobb asking why Ebay didn’t use their own feedback system to monitor sellers’ performance. I received a reply giving me a complete history of the feedback system and how to use it properly. Not exactly what I was after. But now it seems that eBay IS actually using their own feedback system to monitor sellers and place restrictions if they see there is a problem.

According to an eBay employee posting on an Ebay forum:

“Sellers receiving this notification have been identified as part of this bottom 1% of sellers as measured by Feedback and Item Not Received complaints over the past 90 days. If more than 5% of a seller’s buyers are dissatisfied, as measured by negative and neutral Feedback left or Item Not Received complaints during a 90 day period, the seller is in violation of the Seller Non-Performance policy. In such case, eBay may take a range of actions intended to incent performance improvement — or, if the situation warrants, may remove the seller from the community.”

This is good - for the most part. However, from the posts I have read, the sellers being restricted are low to medium volume sellers, while sellers with 1000’s of listings a month, and 100’s of negs, continue on their merry way. Any seller with a feedback rating below 98% should be reviewed by eBay and action taken. How many high volume sellers have feedback below 95%? 90% or less? And yet they continue to be allowed to list thousands of auctions a month.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to start with the huge sellers who put up 5000 listings a month, and receive 500 negatives a month? Think about it - get just one of those sellers cleaned up and next month you will have 500 more happy buyers. Compare that to restricting 100 smaller sellers who have on average 4 negatives in a month. Much easier and faster to start with the large volume sellers and work your way down, right?

Good start eBay, but let’s do this on a “level playing field” just as you charge fees on a “level playing field.”

Cyn

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 22nd, 2007 at 2:54 am and is filed under Avenues of Opportunity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.