2015 Fall Seller Update

[raphael@ebay.com]

Welcome to the 2015 Fall Seller Update discussion thread. Myself and other eBay staff will read all your comments and do our best to respond as our schedules permit.

Thanks!

[rose-dee]

Yes Raphael and Rodney, you've got guts to run the gauntlet here of angry, scared and confused Canadian sellers, and deserve credit for doing so.  

We know this wasn't your doing, but I hope that you guys at .ca at least have the ear of someone at eBay HQ on behalf of thousands of Canadian sellers.  

Having had more time to consider this situation, I have some more questions: 

1)  Are these policy changes applicable in the same way to other international sellers (outside the U.S. I mean)?

2)  If so, what effect does eBay (not you personally, but HQ) imagine these policies will have on international sellers' willingness and/or ability to sell outside their own borders, considering the horrendously expensive cost of international tracking?  Couldn't this also seriously impact buyer selection on eBay? 

3)  Now that Canadian sellers will be frightened into wanting to use tracking, wouldn't this be the ideal time for eBay Canada to approach Canada Post with a proposal to make tracking available on Small and Light Packet USA at a small premium?  They already have bar codes on those labels -- why can't they put them in the tracked stream?  Tracked Packet is a silly, redundant service, which is too expensive and duplicates less well what Expedited does at a price that's almost as high.  What we need is a reasonably priced tracked service. 

This alone, with so many Canadian sellers selling to the U.S., would alleviate a big portion of the trouble with the new policy.

And perhaps also tracking on a particular class (oversize?) of domestic letter mail within Canada?  (Although I realize letter mail is a less likely target).   ). 

Canada Post would have an almost guaranteed eBay buyer base for such services that was not the case up until yesterday.  

4)  In the above regard, can you tell us what eBay Canada has been doing lately, or plans to do soon, to move this along? 

5)  Either you or Rodney (I'm sorry I don't recall which) mentioned that eBay tested the new policy on buyers and found buyers' answers to the question of late arrival to be by and large honest.  

I'm wondering how eBay knew the answers were honest (i.e. correct vis-à-vis the expected delivery time), unless the test used tracked parcels and there was therefore a way of checking the buyers' answers?  

Clearly, if eBay was using tracked parcels for this testing, the results were irrelevant to the Canadian situation, and saying buyers were "honest" (when buyers knew eBay would be able to check up on them via the tracking), is no comfort at all to Canadian sellers. 

[rose-dee]

In the cold light of day, after reading and considering what has been announced and explained by eBay, I realize that, as a Canadian seller, selling mostly to the U.S. and not being able to afford tracking most of the time, this new policy will not be an evaluation of my performance as a seller, but an evaluation of my luck: 

• Luck that Canada Post will do its job in a timely manner and get my items to the border
• Luck that U.S. Customs will do their job in a timely manner
• Luck that U.S.P.S. will do their job in an efficient and timely manner
• Luck that there will be no weather events (ordinary snowstorms cause delays!) or air traffic tie-ups along the route
• Luck that the delivery window determined by eBay is actually accurate and reasonable for the destination and shipping service type I've used
• Luck that my buyer may not choose to leave feedback, thus exonerating me from the consequences of "The Question" concerning timely arrival of my item
• Luck that if the buyer does decide to leave FB, they will properly remember, or care to be honest about, the delivery timeline; 
• Luck that I have enough buyers in the next year that the percentage leaving FB and answering "The Question" will not destroy two years of work to attain TRS (or worse, send me to eBay search limbo)
• Luck that my U.S. competitors, who can afford tracking and are now released from most of their previous defect restraints, will not trample me

Every time I drop each parcel on the Post Office counter now, I must leave it to luck and fate to determine how good a seller eBay will judge me to be.  

Oh yes, I forgot, I'm being evaluated on parameters I have control over...

[pierrelebel]

"this new policy will not be an evaluation of my performance as a seller, but an evaluation of my luck: "

???

Maybe something got lost somewhere in translation (from american to canadian perhaps).

Read carefully:  http://pages.ebay.ca/sellerinformation/news/fallupdate2015/seller-standards.html

It clearly states

"A new on-time shipping metric will measure shipping performance, based on what you can control—shipping your item on time."

Luck has nothing to do with it.  According to eBay it is all under your control as a Canadian seller (shipping without tracking).

[rose-dee]

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@pierrelebel wrote:

"Luck has nothing to do with it.  According to eBay it is all under your control as a Canadian seller (shipping without tracking)."

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As I said earlier, classic Catch-22.  

EBay can spin it however they like, but we all know that the end result in practical terms of everyday reality is that it is going to be a matter of good or bad luck for most Canadian sellers.    

[jt-libra]

On the subject of luck .... I don't buy as much as I used to on eBay but, on three occasions in the last few weeks, I was asked "The Question".  In one case, the item came from Quebec (I find packages to Quebec from Winnipeg and vice-versa take longer than any other province or territory) and arrived one day after the estimated date.  Two parcels from the U.S. came two days after the estimated arrival date.  In all cases, I was pleased with the delivery time; I didn't think they were inordinately long so, of course, I answered "yes", I had received them within the posted delivery time frame.  I guess those sellers were "lucky" that I'm also a seller and would never contribute negatively to their performance rating by some unsubstantiated (although eBay says otherwise) shipping metric.

It's frightening to think how many buyers will select "no" without understanding the consequences of doing so.

[Anonymous]

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@rose-dee wrote:

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raphael@ebay.com wrote:

"6.5%"

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OMG. 

So, this means eBay will be basing my performance not on all my buyers' experience with me, but only on that smaller sub-set of buyers who leave FB?  

Logically then, the smaller that FB number gets (as it has been doing for the past 2 years), the bigger the risk of falling on a "late delivery" landmine.  

(I have always been of the view that those buyers who don't leave FB are satisfied, otherwise I'd hear from them one way or the other). 

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So guys, can anyone tell me their opinion - is it better to hope to get MORE feedback or LESS??  Which would give us better odds?

thanks for your opinion - I am so confused!!!

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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@rose-dee wrote:

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raphael@ebay.com wrote:

"6.5%"

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OMG. 

So, this means eBay will be basing my performance not on all my buyers' experience with me, but only on that smaller sub-set of buyers who leave FB?  

Logically then, the smaller that FB number gets (as it has been doing for the past 2 years), the bigger the risk of falling on a "late delivery" landmine.  

(I have always been of the view that those buyers who don't leave FB are satisfied, otherwise I'd hear from them one way or the other). 

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So guys, can anyone tell me their opinion - is it better to hope to get MORE feedback or LESS??  Which would give us better odds?

thanks for your opinion - I am so confused!!!

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And what about a buyer who says the order was late,  who purchases multiple items and leaves multiple feedback - if items are in the same box but separate feeback is left , does it count as ONE defect or several???

thanks

[rainbow71113]

sorry, don't know if this was mentioned or not- I frequently get buyers who purchase and pay for an item or two and then ask me to hold off shipping the package until they are finished shopping.  What date for the estimated handling time will be used for the shipment? the first items purchased and paid for, or the additional ones?  I noticed that if a buyer buys an item, and does not pay and I go into my sold area on ebay.com, it will show that date and if they go for 5 days without a purchase and then they add an item it shows the combined invoice on the new date.   But what happens when the first item is paid for? will this make problems for combined shipping?

[rose-dee]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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So guys, can anyone tell me their opinion - is it better to hope to get MORE feedback or LESS??  Which would give us better odds?

thanks for your opinion - I am so confused!!!

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The way I see it is this:

a)  Strictly speaking, having no feedback whatsoever will be the only way to escape this policy (LOL). 

b)  The second best position to be is to have a high transaction volume with a high FB percentage, and hope that most buyers leaving FB will be happy with delivery time.  Really big sellers will have little to worry about, as their numbers turn over every 3 months.  Many very large sellers will also no doubt be able to work out arrangements of their own for tracked shipping at affordable rates, which by and large excuses them from the whole problem. 

c)  The worst will be (as for most of us smaller sellers) to have a relatively low transaction volume, with a relatively low FB rate.  In that situation, even one or two wrong answers to "The Question" will cause trouble.  However, if you encourage FB somehow -- and as we know, this isn't a good idea in the first place -- it's still a numbers gamble, since you have no control over the percentage of buyers who may say "no" when asked if their item arrived on time.  More FB responses could very well mean more "no's".  Basically Russian Roulette.  

A seller with a fairly high transaction volume will want to hope most of his buyers leave FB so that the percentage of those who may say "no" the item didn't arrive on time will be proportionately lower.  This is because, as Raphael has said, the allowable percentage is calculated based on the total number of buyers responding to "The Question", not on total transactions. 

Personally, I've just removed my friendly request to please leave FB from my parcel insert notes.  

My thought on this is that the small sub-set of buyers who now do bother to leave FB (less than 60% in my case), are likely to be those most "engaged" in the eBay experience and most satisfied with the transaction, so hopefully less likely to say their parcel didn't arrive on time (whether it actually did or not).  

Still, that means I will have a lower number of responses against which any "no" answer(s) will be calculated, giving a higher resulting percentage.  D----d if you do, d----d if you don't.  Yikes.  

You know, 'jt's' story above should be a cautionary tale for all of us.  I think we all just have to hold our breath and hope for the best.  We really have absolutely no control over the rest of the rest of the process once we plunk down an non-tracked parcel on the Post Office counter, and yet we can't afford to use tracking 100% of the time simply to have control over the few buyers who might possibly say "no".  

That is a classic example in real life of Catch-22. 

The only feasible way to stack the odds a little more in our favour is to use tracking selectively, i.e. in those situations where the item price makes it reasonable, or we have a feeling that we may be dealing with a problematic buyer.  

[rainbow71113]

Amazon has had this option for years and I'm not one to leave feedback but they send a followup every once in a while saying "you haven't left feedback for this transaction" and it's usually after quite a while has passed.  Then I figured, what the heck, I'll leave it to stop the emails and it will say did you get it by, say, Aug 2nd...and a month has probably gone by, I usually put yes, but I would be 

lying if I said I remembered if it was delivered by that date.  I wonder if ebay is going to send out these kinds of reminders...?

[momcqueen]

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@isis1313 wrote:

Amazon has had this option for years and I'm not one to leave feedback but they send a followup every once in a while saying "you haven't left feedback for this transaction" and it's usually after quite a while has passed.  Then I figured, what the heck, I'll leave it to stop the emails and it will say did you get it by, say, Aug 2nd...and a month has probably gone by, I usually put yes, but I would be 

lying if I said I remembered if it was delivered by that date.  I wonder if ebay is going to send out these kinds of reminders...?

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If ebay were kind and decent, there would be a third option from which to choose aside from 'yes' or 'no' and that would be 'I don't know and/or remember' so that buyers could leave HONEST feedback instead of feeling pressured to indicate one or the other.

[momcqueen]

I do use tracking on approximately 50 per cent of my orders (that number includes domestic and international sales) but, really, only 30 per cent of my buyers leave feedback. This has led to a great deal of hand-wringing on my part and I always wonder what else I can do so encourage more. Every buyer has feedback left for them as soon as their order is shipped. Every order is sent with a packing slip and this is what is says, 

Thank you for choosing McQueen and Mo Mater! Your __________ shipped SAME-DAY WITHIN ___ hours of payment (at cost with NO handling fees added) via ____________ which has a delivery estimate of _______ business days, not including the day it is received by the post office for processing, weekends or holidays. When your order arrives, please let us know if there is anything that we may do to increase your satisfaction with this transaction. McQueen and Mo Mater aims to provide each buyer with five-star service so if you feel that we have missed this mark, please let us know before you leave feedback and we will make it so. Thank you and have a great day! - Maureen

p.s. We added a little something extra to your parcel which could ship at no additional cost to you as a thank-you gift with purchase. Your purchase is very much appreciated. McQueen and Mo Mater hopes to hear from you again.

I'd like to note that I do provide mention customs fees if it is an international order and an exact number of business days (gained from the Canada Post website) if one is available, such as with tracked domestic service. 

Considering that every order is dispatched on time, same-day (or within 24 hours on weekends as per the details in each listing under the COMBINED POSTAGE section) and with some manner of freebie, there is literally, honestly nothing else that I can do to achieve a more satisfied customer. I have NO defects ever and never negative feedback.

If I start gaining defects under the new system while providing the same bend-over-backwards service that I always have, I will be very, very unhappy with ebay indeed.

I estimate that all it will take for me to lose Top Rated is one or two people per year answering 'no' to That Question regardless of whether Canada Post screwed up with mis-delivery or ebay underestimated the delivery time as they routinely do to remote areas (not everywhere in Canada can be reached within eight business days regardless of what ebay promises in the listing) or they just plain don't know when their item arrived. Two-thirds of my buyers don't leave feedback. Period. This is also something I cannot control.

[rainbow71113]

I have seen sellers leave similar wording on listings and they STILL get negative feedback

[momcqueen]

I 'get' that ebay.com management had the best interests of their largest demographic of sellers within their most profitable segment in mind when they created this new defect-management system but I must object to being marginalized like a third-class passenger. The only thing that I truly can 'control' as a seller is my own high standards of service to buyers. That won't change; the manner by which I am graded may change but my grade should not. 

[lukey9]

I'm not to Happy over the changes on the shipping defect but I was just checking my Sellers Dashboard on shipping and over 1800 transactions I have not received any low Feed backs for slow  shipping. I am using allot of Free shipping now mainly because of the high US dollar and I list every thing in US funds and it kind of off sets it. I think E-Bay was slowly get rid of the old poor Sellers  with the defect

system but now it will be going back to the same poor service and Negative FB as they will not count, it is to me like rewarding the bad sellers again but don't have one Parcel arriving late or you will get a defect.

[mxjay219]

Following.

[rainbow71113]

my biggest concern is the post office.  I use old stamps and apparently some idiot in Montreal doesn't have a calculator, scale or price guide.  Last March they returned 6 packages to me asking for additional postage...ALL were correct and last July they returned 7 packages ALL were correct.  I even have 2 supervisors looking into it for all the help that's going to do even photographing the scale showing the packages were 180 grams or less so well within the limit-it seems they want me to put on $10.30 for all packages when under 200 grams is only $5.15 to the US -lettermail- and it doesn't make sense especially if it WAS over 200 grams the next rate would be $7.00.   It isn't just the returns, it's the 3 week delay before I get it back and of course ebay only gives a couple of weeks for it to reach the customer so I'm screwed right from the start.  I've been jumping through hoops with my customers promising refunds, etc to try to avoid claims and negative feedback.  This has been extremely frustrating and now I have to put on EVERY package the type of mail, weight and price even for lettermail which doesn't require that.  I've been selling for 8 years and I know what I'm doing with shipping.  With this new system I'm really going to be at the mercy of the buyers.  At least I won't have to offer refunds to avoid negatives but might have to offer them to negotiate delivery time.....it's always something

[momcqueen]

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isis1313 wrote: .... my biggest concern is the post office.  I use old stamps and apparently some idiot in Montreal doesn't have a calculator, scale or price guide.  Last March they returned 6 packages to me asking for additional postage...ALL were correct and last July they returned 7 packages ALL were correct.  I even have 2 supervisors looking into it for all the help .....

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That certainly does place you in a quandary. It also further illustrates the point that we as CANADIANS SELLING ON EBAY.CA TO FELLOW CANADIANS cannot be held to the same standards as our American counterparts selling to Americans. We simply do not have the same tools. In Canada, we have no USPS-style domestic First Class Mail or Media Mail category with tracking for three bucks. That is my complaint. Domestic oversize lettermail which I use (as do many other Canadian sellers) for about half of my domestic orders. 

There is no level playing field. Lump Canadians with Chinese sellers as far as selling on ebay.com, fine, I don't care about that as I don't expect we should be granted some kind of golden preferential treatment but to expect Canadians on ebay.ca selling to Canadians to hit the same standards as Americans selling to Americans on ebay.com with none of the same tools....?

Can a staffer at ebay.ca please explain how Canadian sellers are expected to do that? Padding handling times and 'allowing for a range of defects' is not a satisfactory solution to me, I am very sorry to say. 

[rainbow71113]

what's interesting is, it's only packages mailed late in the afternoon for 5 pm pick up, morning pickup and with my mail person(s) don't seem to be affected so we think it's a certain shift that is responsible.  We depend on the post office to do their jobs, Halifax already checks the stamps and cancels them and then Montreal turns them around again, what's the point of Halifax even bothering?  AND one $5.15 package they marked that they wanted another $5.00....to make it $10.30 would have been $5.15 so that person really doesn't know what the heck they are doing....

[rainbow71113]

you know, every year we have these changes and discussions, I wish ebay would release the info on how many stores were negatively impacted by the last changes- we only see negatives and neutrals but I would be interested to know how many stores were actually suspended or reprimanded as a result of the defect system.  Maybe it's not as many as we think...or many it's more..but if ebay would say, out of, let's say, 1 billion sellers only 5,000 were suspended we would probably feel a little better.