Lorrie: "judge us by our actions, not our words"

21/03/2008 at 23:54

Last night, President of Global Marketplaces Lorrie Norrington announced a series of policy changes on eBay.com, which are very good news for sellers.

Seller Dashboard Lite to launch next week

The rolling 30-day average should now be visible for .com sellers. The full DSR console is to launch in May.

Several UK Pinks have said that the 30-day average will be visible to UK sellers by the end of March. In the meantime, PowerSellers can call PS Support for their figures. Frankly, this isn’t good enough. If they’re basing my discounts on these figures, my DSR averages should have been visible on the site from the same moment that discounts were linked to them.

1 out of 5 for dispatch time

Feedback Extortion

One of the most incomprehensible eBay policies to date has been the feedback extortion one. This has, til now, said that buyers who use the threat of negative feedback to force unreasonable terms on sellers (“gimme free P&P or I’ll neg you”) were at risk of having their eBay account sanctioned, but that feedback extortion was not grounds for feedback removal.

Well, no longer. Sellers are now invited to report feedback extortion, and if the buyer has a pattern of this behaviour, or “if the evidence is clear”, the feedback will be removed. Sellers are invited to to report attempted feedback extortion. (The page still says that extortion isn’t grounds for removal, but I’m assuming that’ll be updated PDQ.)

4 out of 5 for finally communicating a policy that makes sense

Negative Feedback from NPBs to be removed

Currently, feedback from non-paying bidders is descored if they have not responded to the unpaid item dispute. This is to be expanded so that non-paying bidders’ feedback will be removed “if the buyer does not specifically call out poor seller performance, item condition or transaction problems during the UPI process”. In other words, just clicking the button to say “I’m going to pay” and then not paying, will no longer be good enough.

Of course, there’s nothing to stop buyers maliciously making up problems to post on the unpaid item dispute thread. But I think very few of them will actually bother to go this far; this policy change should kill off most negs left because the buyer is angry at being given a strike.

5 out of 5 for shipping this policy and handling NPBs the way they should be.

It’s currently not clear how these feedback policies relate to sellers outside North America. There has been no corresponding announcement from eBay UK, but then it is a holiday weekend.

PayPal Expanded Seller Protection

Finally, eligible sellers will have PayPal’s seller protection on all deliveries, whether to confirmed addresses or not, and have unlimited coverage rather than the current $5k limit.

Lorrie’s announcement says that this is for US and Canadian PowerSellers only, but PayPal’s guidelines offer it to “eBay PowerSellers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Hong Kong, Canada, and France”. And UK and French PowerSellers are most definitely able to sign up now.

5 out of 5 for item as described: a payment now *is* a payment

“I look forward to the continuing dialogue”

Let me close by saying that we’re pushing hard on these and other changes because of how much eBay means to you (and to us) but we expect to be judged by our actions, not our words. It is my intention to earn your trust and respect by making eBay a more responsive organization that is unafraid to take some risks and move more aggressively while always striving to do right by you, our customers.

I don’t have any issue with most of the changes eBay have made recently: I think that holding sellers to higher standards can only make eBay a better place to trade for those of us who choose to remain. But we do need eBay’s support to get to where we all want to be. Too often over the last couple of years, it’s seemed like eBay and sellers were different sides in a war. Now, it feels like things may be starting to change.