Glitch doubles international DSR count

Richard from MagnumOpus warns us of a potentially disastrous glitch he’s seen with DSRs and transaction counts left by international buyers. It appears that these figures have both been doubled in the DSR reports.

Richard writes:

As a real life example on this ID if I run a report for 25/08/2010 – 17/09/2010 it’s showing 36 international transactions, when in fact I’ve done 18. Instead of the 3 dinged DSR’s I was half expecting from one international buyer I’m showing a figure of 6, so I’m pretty sure that’s doubled too.

It seems that this isn’t necessarily quite as simple as just “doubled” either: on a PSB thread other sellers report “nearly but not quite” double figures.

So does it matter? This is almost certainly a glitch and eBay will almost certainly fix it. The question is whether it will impact seller accounts. The good news is that it seems (at the moment) to only affect non-domestic transactions, so for the vast majority of sellers, won’t affect the TRS score they’re bothered about.

But if your main market is overseas from your residence, and eBay choose to go by the figures they’re displaying on the dashboard rather than the correct ones, then this could affect TRS status quite badly. Whether it actually does so will depend on your number of sales:

  • if that’s more than 400, then both numbers are doubled, it won’t make a difference: the percentage rate stays the same. In Richard’s example, 3/18 is the same as 6/36 (16.6%).
  • if the actual number of low DSR scores is being incorrectly reported, and you have fewer than 400 transactions, then both TRS and PS status could be affected.

On the other hand, this might actually work in sellers’ favour: other sellers are reporting that the number of transactions has been doubled, but the low DSR count has not: in which case, the percentage represented by low DSRs falls dramatically and could save TRS status for some sellers!

It’s hard to tell exactly what’s gone wrong here, not least because the DSRs themselves are obscured so completely and sellers really have no way to tell what their score should be. If your numbers appear to be wrong, leave us a comment about where exactly the discrepancy is for you.