Saturday, August 4, 2007

EBay Shoppers Have Stars in their Eyes

The new stars feedback system on eBay has been in place for a few months now and some sellers are still complaining. Yep, it's hard to take anything less than a 5 on "shipping and handling charges" when you charge actual postage, hard to accept a 4-point-anything on "item as described" when you include multiple pictures and write a really decent description, but what's a seller to do? At least the playing field is leveling out with all active sellers now in a similar situation. (If you have four rows of perfect 5's, please leave me a comment. I want to see what you do that I don't do!)

On what I thought was an interesting note, my sister-in-law recently wanted to purchase something on eBay, a specific item from a specific seller. She (new to eBay, no account yet) told me that the seller "has a very high rate of satisfaction." When I went to look, I found that the seller has 99% feedback with stars at 4.6, 4.7, 4.7, and 4.2. Personally, after reading the feedback comments and seeing several recent neutrals and a negative, I didn't feel that was a particularly "very high rate of satisfaction," but this was the opinion of a brand new buyer on eBay and she felt quite comfortable with the stars that weren't nearly as colored-in as mine and many others' are.

I suppose the value of the stars system really is in the eye of the beholder/buyer. It is a subjective system, so all we as sellers can do is to do our best to hold up our end of the deal in each of the star categories so that our ratings will stay as high as possible. And remember that stars really do get in our shoppers' eyes.


Now you can offer your shoppers 5-star merchandise.
Read this!

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