eBay - NOT my Auction Site of Choice

In the last few months eBay has insititued policies regarding feedback and Detailed Seller Ratings, DSR, which many of us sellers thought to be unfair.

It appears that eBay, in an effort to be fair and protect buyers, has gone to far in the opposite direction and has now put sellers in jeopardy.

My own experience, has to do with the DSR. These are ratings of 4 different categories, Item as Described, Communication, Shipping Time and Shipping and Handling Charges. The ratings are given as a number of stars with 1 star being very poor and 5 stars being excellent.

The DSRs are used to determine the item's placement on a search page within eBay. They can also be used to suspend a sellers account AND keep PayPal payments tied up for as long as 21 days.

There are many problems with the system:

1: If the seller is a small seller, then some buyer not understanding the system can really do damage to a seller

For Example, and this is a very simple example: If a seller has one rating from a buyer that is a 5, then along comes someone who, not fully understanding the system, think a "3" is ok to give the seller, the net impact on the DSRs would be a "4". This "4" rating would put the seller's account in jeopardy and possibly hold up any PayPal payments.

2: While I do not know this as a fact, there are many stories on the eBay forum boards stating that eBay is telling buyers that a "4" rating is for Good servicce and a "5" is for Excellence above and beyond the call of duty. While this is not necessarily wrong or bad, what does make it bad is then eBay considers sellers who have a "4" rating to be poor sellers and need to be punished as evidenced by the example above.

3: The DSRs have two different time periods - a 12 month period AND a 30 day period. Problem is eBay uses the 30 day period to determine what happens to a seller's account. So if a seller gets a bad rating and doesn't have much to list durin that 30 day period, then as time goes by and the earlier "Good" ratings fall outside of the 30 day period, the later bad rating has more impact and the DSRs can, theoretically go down.

4: DSRs are anonymous. This means a buyer can give a seller a positive feedback and yet hurt the seller by giving a poor rating in the DSR. Unfortunately, the seller has no idea who or WHY they were given the lower rating. I have heard of some sellers getting a low rating on the Shipping and Handling Charges when the shipping was free.

5: eBay has now made it impossible for sellers to give Negative feedback on a bad buyer. The problem here for sellers is if a buyer is a bad risk then I may not want to sell to them.

I am a small seller but this action by eBay along with their constantly raising fees I have opted to change to a different auction site.

You can go here to view my eBay ratings:
http://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewFeedback2&userid=shaolindragon007&ftab=AllFeedback&sspagename=STRK:ME:UFS

The auction site is http://www.OnlineAuction.com. It is a growing site and there are many former eBay sellers there. With no listing fees or final value fees you will find the bargains there that used to be on eBay. As time goes on you will find a greater variety of items as sellers are more prone to list many different items since we don't have to pay a listing fee.

Right now I only have one item, but it has been an item that many people want - 8ml Frosted Plastic Atomizer Bottles you can go to http://www.onlineauction.com/index.php?page=auction:view_item&auction_id=656823&auction_name= to see this listing.