While there are still some people whining about the eBay feedback changes that will be going into affect in the next few months, there is additional information about these eBay feedback changes that many sellers should view as having a positive impact on their eBay businesses.

Lisa Suttora from WhatDoISell.com in her recent newsletter reported in part:

“I attended the eBay Developer’s Call this week (open only to eBay Certified
Providers) and found out a couple pieces of information that had previously not been made public that you’ll want to know about:

1. In May, eBay will go back and retroactively give sellers credit for previous repeat customer feedback. (Not sure yet how far back this repeat feedback credit is going to go. I’ll keep you posted.)”

Additional remarks made on eBay Radio over the last day or two make it sound as though these retroactive changes will extend all the way back to the creation of each eBay user ID.

That should be good news for many sellers. I just looked at the eBay ID is use for selling antique/collectible advertising items. It has a total of 7347 feedback but currently only 4198 are used in determining my feedback rating. Those 3149 ratings that are currently un-used, should add significantly to my overall rating. Even if the changes result in a small number of negative feedbacks being left, my overall rating of 99.4% should stay the same or maybe go up a little.

Lisa went on to say:

“2. The Detailed Seller Ratings (DSRs) which will impact your listing’s visibility in the eBay search results will be based on the previous 30 days of DSR rankings.

What this means is that your listing’s visibility will be based on your most current seller ratings as opposed to a static rating. And will reflect a seller’s most current performance.”

This is good news for sellers because, since their DSRs will impact both how their listings show up in buyer searchs and the size of Final Value Fee discounts they qualify for, if they aren’t satisfied with their results, it will be much easier to improve them than if they were dealing with DSRs over a long period of time.

On a side note, yesterday Randy Smythe, in a post titled Wow, eBay Users Sure Do Like To Vent!, said:

“…..Ina Steiner gets over 700 comments on a blog post and CNN - Money gets close to that many on their blog and this isn’t even the Community Messearchessage boards where threads have thousands of posts.”

That got me thinking. Even if those ‘thousands’ of posts were from different sellers (and you can be 100% certain they aren’t. Whiners don’t just post once, they do so every chance someone gives them.), what percentage of the total number of eBay sellers are actually causing all the uproar?

1%? .01%? .0001?, .00001? I think all this ruckus is a case of a very small number of malcontents rocking the boat and getting all the attention.

One can say the attention is merited because most of the people complaining are mega-sellers and some of eBay’s best customers. But my guess is that even they are really a small percentage of the large sellers who list thousands of items a week.

Photograph by Nerelle Ring

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