EBay Inc. announced today a series of changes that will reward eBay merchants that provide good service, including thousands that have been too small to enjoy the benefits of eBay PowerSeller status.
As part of the changes that will take effect in the fall, eBay has created a new category of Top-Rated Sellers who will get a 20% discount off of eBay’s fee, a Top-Rated Seller badge for their product pages and more prominence in search results. EBay says about 150,000 merchants will qualify, including 86,000 whose annual volume has been too small to qualify them for the benefits of PowerSeller status.
“We're well aware that sellers of all sizes deliver the deals and quality experiences that bring buyers to eBay and keep them coming back,” says Stephanie Tilenius, senior vice president and general manager of eBay North America. “That's why we're taking new steps to reward great service, bring you more sales, increase your profitability, and help you succeed.”
The changes also include improvements aimed at the larger retailers eBay has been seeking to attract in the past year as it seeks to shift its focus to more sales at fixed-price, instead of the auctions that eBay is best known for. For instance, eBay says it will soon be easier to edit listings of items available in large quantities, which are likely to be offered by bigger retailers.
All retailers will be affected by eBay moving to a new way of rating retailers that focuses more on low detailed seller ratings, or DSRs, of 1 or 2, rather than high marks of 4 or 5 on the 1 to 5 scale. In order to qualify as a Top-Rated Seller, no more than 0.5%, or one in 200, customer feedback grades can be 1’s or 2’s and the retailer must have an overall rating of at least 4.6.
“Buyers have different ideas about what constitutes a high rating, but most leave a 1 or a 2 only when they experienced a significant issue with their transaction,” Tilenius wrote in an online posting explaining the changes. “EBay will be shifting focus from average DSRs to the number of low DSRs as a more accurate measure of customer satisfaction.”
To qualify for Top-Rated Seller status on eBay, a retailer need only make 100 sales totaling at least $3,000 each year, well below the current PowerSeller requirement of 1,200 sales or $12,000 in volume. PowerSellers will continue to get their current discounts, which go as high as 20%, until April 10, 2010; at that time eBay will reduce to 5% the discount for merchants that have not brought their ratings up to the level of Top-Rated Sellers.
EBay says it is continuing the current PowerSeller discounts through April so that those larger eBay retailers can modify their business practices to qualify for the Top Rated Seller discounts. Many of those PowerSellers have work to do, says Scot Wingo, president and CEO of ChannelAdvisor Corp., which helps retailers sell on eBay and other online marketplaces. "We did some calculations and amongst our high-volume sellers, about 20% qualify for that program, so the bar is set very high," Wingo says.
The Top-Rated Seller program will be implemented in the U.S., with similar programs rolling out in the United Kingdom and Germany.
In another change, only feedback from domestic customers will count in retailers’ ratings. That pleases John Lawson, president and CEO of eBay apparel store 3rd Power Outlet, who says international orders are especially prone to go missing. That can lead unhappy customers to give low ratings to a retailer that shipped the item on time.
Lawson also likes a new feature that lets customers see tracking information when they leave feedback, so they can see when the retailer shipped the item before giving a negative rating. He also likes a new rule that will allow him to respond to customers without using the eBay e-mail system, because he prefers not to give his customer service agents full access to his eBay account just to answer an e-mail.
Although Lawson is now a Platinum eBay merchant, which means he sells at least $25,000 a month on eBay, he agrees with rewarding smaller retailers that do a good job. “I was a small seller before I became a large seller and you need that exposure,” he says. “You want these guys who are doing good to be able to grow on your platform.”
Other changes include:
- Sellers will be able to see why they rank where they do in eBay search results for each item.
- Sellers will be able to more quickly file a claim when an auction buyer does not pay for an item, and use automated processes to obtain eBay fee refunds faster.
- Sellers will be able to block out individual countries that they do not want to sell to, instead of regions. “Every eBay seller knows that Italian buyers are terrible to deal with so you can finally blacklist those guys vs. all of EU,” ChannelAdvisor's Wingo wrote on his blog today.
Most of the changes announced today will take effect between Sept. 22 and Oct. 1, eBay says. The company says it plans to announce major changes in the eBay platform only two or three times a year, instead of making changes throughout the year. “Last year we introduced a whole lot of improvements over the course of the year and we caught sellers off guard,” an eBay spokesman says. “They told us we need more consistency and predictability.” He says this is the last planned release for this year, and that there could be as many as three releases in 2010.
The changes represent a recognition of the value of good sellers, regardless of size, and a continued shift away from auctions toward fixed price-transactions, says Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Lazard Capital Markets LLC who follows eBay and other e-commece stocks. "From the buyer’s perspective, the changes more closely emulate Amazon’s holistic approach to shopping online, with improvements to several key buyer touch points including selection, search relevance, seller performance, communications, and dispute resolution," Sebastian says. "While the changes demonstrate that eBay continues to play catch-up in e-commerce, the announced changes also increase our confidence that the company is repositioning its Marketplace 'needle' in the right direction to narrow the performance gap with other Internet leaders.
More detail on today’s eBay announcement can be found at http://pages.ebay.com/sell/July2009Update/Details/index.html#3-2.
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