Email marketing shows neutrals as negs
14/05/2008 at 15:58
Sellers have been complaining for a while now that eBay are treating neutral feedback like negatives, but now on email marketing, neutrals are actually appearing on the “negative” line of the feedback scorecard.
PowerSeller Angie from TShirts-4-U first highlighted this on a post on the PowerSeller Board: here’s her scorecard from the feedback page:
and here’s her score from a marketing email:
As you can see, all neutrals have been turned into negs. Other sellers have confirmed the same thing has happened to them.
Could this be the first indication that eBay are getting rid of neutral feedback altogether? It’s not clear at the moment whether it’s a deliberate change, or a glitch. I think it’s more likely to be the latter, though frankly nothing eBay could do with feedback would surprise me any more. Until we have some clarification and maybe a fix, sellers would probably do better to leave feedback off email marketing altogether.
Updated to add: examination of more cases shows that the problem is almost certainly that the figures for negs and neutrals have been swapped over; this is a glitch, but one that desperately needs fixing.
EH says
9:41 am on 15/05/2008
“incorrect human decisions”
eBay might have the rubes thinking that code magically appears, by calling them “glitches”, but that is rarely the true.
This is another case of eBay taking already written and implemented code and turning it on. Before it’s time.
Like the BM (Best Match) glitch of last year. Where an eBay “glitch” caused BM to become the default. BM is no longer glitching, is it?
Computer glitch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch
A computer glitch is the failure of a system, usually containing a computing device, to complete its functions or to perform them properly. It frequently refers to an error which is not detected at the time it occurs but shows up later in data errors or incorrect human decisions. While the fault is usually attributed to the computer hardware, this is often not the case since hardware failures rarely go undetected. Other situations which are frequently called computer glitches are:
* Incorrectly written software (software bug)
* Incorrect instructions given by the operator (operator error) (this might also be considered a software bug)
* Undetected invalid input data (this might also be considered a software bug)
* Undetected communications errors
* Computer viruses
* Computer security cracking (sometimes erroneously called “hacking”)
* Another human error unrelated to the computer