Saturday, August 9, 2008

DSR calculation error frustrates eBay sellers

Over the weekend, ebay announced  that sellers 30-day rolling DSR averages were not displaying correctly in the seller dashboard widget. Ebay initially told sellers that the problem was corrected, but later posted an announcement regarding the ongoing glitch.

DSRs Displaying Incorrectly

Ebay has now pulled the Seller Dashboard widget and announced that the best match logic will not use DSR's until the problem is corrected and went further to announce that seller discounts will not be calculated until the issue is resolved as well.

Nonetheless, several sellers have jumped to conclusions accusing ebay of DSR manipulation.

Personally I saw a sharp drop in my DSR averages which led me to believe something was not kosher. For example, my DSR average for the past 12 months for 'Item as Described' was consistently 4.9 or higher. This number dropped down all the way to under 4.7 in the matter of a few days.  Could this be because of the way DSR's are calculated on a rolling 30 day average?  Perhaps, but the number seemed very low from what I'm used to seeing, so probably not.

Seller's distrust of eBay is undersandable especially in this situation because of the way DSR's are calculated. Sellers don't see the raw scores from buyers and when problems like this rear their head's, sellers are quick to jump the gun.

I will commend eBay for stepping up and removing these items from the best match logic, however it does show how venurable sellers are to all of the constant site problems that eBay experiences. Sellers are always charged listing fees and have live auctions which are ending every minute and eBay's response in my opinion should be more swift and should result in some type of credit to sellers for the confusion and inconvenience.  After all, there is no sure fire way to tell how these bugs are affecting your bottom line as an ebay seller.   

Has anyone been negatively affected by the DSR calculation bug? How would you have handled this issue if you were eBay management?

Does anyone think its somewhat odd that this is even a bug?   

What is ebay doing updating DSR scores?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am a Ebay power seller. And because of these DSR "issues" all of my discounts etc are gone. I am not going to be afraid to say that most likely Ebay knowing of problem, doesn't fix it for reason. If I can go down from 20% discount to nothing in 3 weeks, having at the same time perfect feedbacks from all my customers. Then if we assume that additional few thousands of sellers were affected in similar way, you can simply calculated extra profit that Ebay generated in short period of time.
And shameless practices like this don't surprise me at all from Ebay side, but this DSR scam is beyond shameless. When I called Ebay they answer was that probably all my customers gave me perfect feedback's and then left me low DSR ratings. What a joke.