By now, most eBay sellers are sick to the back teeth of hearing about DSRs and the way they are used for the sole purpose of punishing sellers, robbing them of fee discounts, having them suspended from selling, or worse.

I know there’s a minority of sellers who think they’re the best thing since sliced bread, but most of us prefer not to have our noses permanently browned in order to become drones to the eBay hive of disingenuity.

Until recently, there’s been little a seller could do, over the last two years, to retain management control of their eBay selling activity, other than to give up and move on to greener venues.  However, the latest piece of disruptive innovation trying to fix a system that wasn’t originally broken, may just have turned the tables on San Jose’s short-sighted management.

The latest changes to eBay feedback and DSRs (for USA registered sellers) introduced a dismissal of DSRs on cross-border transactions.  If you’re a US-based seller, the shipping DSRs only count when received from US-based buyers.

The initial community reaction to this was that many sellers, especially some of the big names, said it might tempt them into selling internationally again, as they’d no longer be taking a hit from those overseas buyers, causing them to lose FVF discounts or worse.  Fair enough.  But also think about the popular advice given by some of the longest and highest feedback selling users on eBay UK - don’t run your business based on the DSR-bonded discounts, trade normally and use any discount received to pay for a night out or some Google Adwords for your website.

Sound advice, and those latest changes actually turn the table on eBay as I said above.  How?

I have several selling IDs, and because they were mostly started before there were any SE Asian sites, I pretty much have had my own choice of which eBay site they are registered on.  My sole “Thai” eBay ID is actually registered on the US but as a Thai account, as is the associated PayPal account, because at the time of registration, eBay had not secured the deal with Sanook.com to create an eBay Thailand marketplace.  This gives me options and insights that many people don’t have or don’t get.

Since the September changes, I’ve noticed some curious situations arising with DSRs on my various selling accounts.  At first they irked me, but these last couple of weeks they have intrigued and now please me.

My Thai account is, as I said, effectively a US account.  Despite that, I primarily use it to sell into the UK (or did until the UK prohibited it from adding any more listings a few weeks back – due to having “too many active listings”).

Whilst plenty of buyers are leaving feedback – roughly 30% of all transactions receive it, compared to 80%+ pre-DSRs – only around 25% of feedback leavers are also leaving DSRs – a dismal rate.

That’s roughly 7.5% of all buyers are leaving DSRs.

On the opinion of those 7.5%, eBay will promote, demote, or suspend a seller’s account.  Imagine if governments were elected on such minority numbers?

Because of the US/Thai registration of this account, and 95%+ of sales over the last few months being to the UK, shipping DSRs are not being recorded in the dashboard, or on the public view on my feedback page.  In fact, on this particular account, NO DSRs from non-US buyers are being recorded on the dashboard.

There’s two ways to view that lack of a shipping time DSR.  If the person viewing is an experienced and daily-active eBay buyer and seller, they’ll understand that recent issues such as the UK postage strike caused all shipping time DSRs to be suspended, and therefore the seller wouldn’t receive any.  Or, they may know that the new rules mean international transactions are exempted and no shipping time DSR counts on the scores.

On the other hand, inexperienced eBay users may look at it as a sign of extremely ppor performance and refuse to buy from a seller with a zeroed out shipping time score.  Conversely, inexperienced users might simply never look at the feedback ratings due to having no clue what they are, or where to find them.

In the seller dashboard (the thing that eBay uses to punish or reward sellers) it’s even more different.

All the screen shots on this page were taken within seconds of each other – note how the public DSR stars (above) show the description, communication, and P&P costs DSRs, but the dashboard doesn’t show any at all – it’s stating that only 5 ratings were received from US buyers, therefore it won’t show the current ratings at all.

Note in this dashboard shot, it says the last update was 24 October 2009, despite the screen-grab being taken on 22 November, with feedback received daily between the two dates?  That’s because late October was the last date I received feedback from a US-resident buyer.  Neat trick eBay - if I was bothered about hitting DSR targets to get the discounts, that would have me frothing at the mouth, but the truth is, you’ve turned me from an evangelical, into an apathist.  “So what?” is now my thinking on it.

Although, it gets very scary if you use the dashboard’s “reports” link.

When I performed a period search for the last 60 days, of US buyers compared to rest of the world, I’d received 3% ones and twos from the rest of the world, which I was able to narrow to a single multi-item buyer in the UK … but a whopping 23% from US buyers.  In mitigation, I’d like to mention that the US buyers mainly bought Economy Airmail, which states it is a 3-7 week variable delivery time, whereas the UK were stumping up for the marginally more expensive standard Airmail, which is a 7-21 day service worldwide.  Guess which of the countries goes to the bottom of my literacy table?

There’s a definite lesson here for sellers.

I’m going to credit eBay executive management with some critical thinking skills – unusual I know, but let’s assume some givens here -

1. eBay are aware of the crescendo of xenophobic angst displayed in the eBay US discussion boards with the incessant, and often incorrect, outcries regarding “flooding with cheap Chinese junk” and the “shipping gouging by Chinese sellers”.
2. eBay are also aware that US buyers (probably the hardest to please of any country) are slamming the feedback and DSRs of overseas sellers with unreasonably low scores, despite those same overseas sellers being the most meticulous in spelling out despatch and shipping transit-times in their listing descriptions.
3. eBay know that, what American buyers perceive as shipping gouging, is in fact often not.  It is simply the result of distance-led higher shipping costs.
4. eBay know that Asian sellers in particular, are far more willing to offer worldwide shipping, than US sellers are willing to ship even to neighbouring Canada or Mexico.
5. eBay North America, despite the recent economic cycle, remains the biggest single marketplace for eBay sellers.

Whilst many pundits, including Ina Steiner, Skip McGrath, and Randy Smythe, plus other luminaries in the eBay blogging world, have hailed the suspended shipping DSR for international sales as a boon to North American sellers, they have completely missed (or ignored) the reverse logic.

As a seller outside of North America, but with a US account, I can completely nullify DSR-based punishments by simply not listing on eBay.com and by setting buyer preferences to exclude bids from North Americans when listing on other sites.  Using my US-registered selling account, I have shown this to be fact.  US-resident sellers can do the same – stop listing on eBay.com and set your buyer preferences on those listings to “block bids from countries to which I do not ship”.

In theory, regardless of what shipping-time scores I collect from non-US buyers, my US-account’s dashboard DSRs will always remain empty, and thus eBay will have no DSR-based ammunition with which to punish me or my ID … if they stick to the terms of their own rules and user agreement.  So far in my experimenting, that has proven true also.

Another side to this relates to the near incessant marketing to sellers throughout Asia, offering “incentives” to list on eBay’s big-four (Australia, Germany, UK & US).

It could also explain why eBay SE Asia are so tightly in bed with DHL, the international courier, and the near-monthly offers of discounts to eBay sellers, from the carrier.  Many US buyers are just too damned impatient to wait for the regular USPS delivery, and have no trust in the integrity of Asian sellers to fulfil the order without immediate entry of an online tracking number now that the facility is there.

For those of us outside America, there’s the Damocletian swing to the sword though – if we want to list on dot com, and sell to US residents, we need to use a non-US registered account or sure as eggs are eggs, our US-registered account is going to take a hammering for the shipping time DSR … even though it’s supposed to be about the time to despatch after cleared payment, NOT the total time from payment to delivery.  Alternatively, it could be eBay’s roundabout method of getting us to list on other countries and pay the International Visibility Fee to show listings on the USA site.

The more I experiment, observe, and analyse this policy and its after-effects, the more I am convinced it is NOT about giving feedback and DSR relief to US sellers, and the more I am convinced it is about protection of the US marketplace from outside sellers.

Back in early 2007, when eBay UK first secretly chopped the trans-Atlantic visibility, I tabled a rumour heard, that Meg’s whisperings with political chums had led to the suggestion that eBay US sellers start exporting more, and US buyers start importing less, because of the then state of the US economy.

Whilst it was potentially an absurd rumour, it did have a modicum of plausibility (and later events seem to have made it even more so).  Has the play-out of the suspended shipping-time DSR made that rumour yet more plausible?

If I’m right, that the policy is intended to keep foreign sellers with US accounts off dot com, and push them into listing on the overseas territories and emerging markets, then yes, it gives more credibility to that rumour.  It also opens the can of worms, that this policy may be an overt eBay move to “clean house” and clear the path for the Diamonds to completely take over eBay-core in the 50 States.

All of the above attributes a deviousness to eBay executive that some people may have trouble believing they are capable of engineering.  The mobius-ring psychology of the manoeuvre is certainly very twisted.  It attributes Donahoe and Co. with the ability to predict opinions emerging counter-intuitive (as per above) to the obvious (Ina, Skip, and Randy’s takes on it) followed by the promulgation of “beat eBay at their own game” advice circulation.

OK, fair call.  I’m up for a bit of “devil’s advocacy”, hence this post.  I’m calling your hypothetical bluff eBay – now what will you do?  Where does your anti-seller crusade go next?

Gaz