How Sellers Can Recover from Below Standard Status on eBay

Many sellers are still not educated on the eBay Defect System. This system is based on percentages. If a seller receives too many defects as a percentage of total ratings, the account will be moved into "below standard" status. Keep in mind that defects are not the same as feedback comments from buyers. Defects occur in the following situations:

Seller canceled transactions due to loss, damage, or any other reason (does not include buyer canceled transactions)

Opened cases for items not as described

Return requests for items not as described

Low detailed seller ratings for shipping time

Requests for items not received

If a seller drops into below standard status, this is serious business. The account can be closed and the seller is prohibited from selling on eBay. There are ways to recover from below standard rating, and it takes commitment and aggressive action on the seller's part.

First, study your defects and determine if any can be removed. Call eBay and discuss. Many defects can be removed based on looking at buyer communications and other circumstances.

1. List the maximum number of items allowed. Let eBay see you are serious about getting back into good standing and you are actually doing the work.

2. Take low offers if necessary to get sales. It's a numbers game. You have to get sales to pull yourself out of the hole. eBay search rewards active stores - Cassini likes stores with sales and gives them a boost in search.

3. Think about the overall health of your account rather than how much money you are making right now. Without an ebay account you will make zero dollars in the future. Understand the concept of delayed gratification - rewards will come later.

4. Offer free shipping on as many items as makes sense. The buyer cannot rate a seller on shipping if free shipping is offered. This takes one of the ratings off the table completely.

5.Refrain from communications with buyers unless they ask a question, because if you don't have communications with buyers, they cannot rate the seller in that area, and that is also an automatic 5 stars.

6. Be patient, it will take time. Have patience and keep working on it. Have faith in the process and keep going. Lots of people have recovered from this.

7. Most importantly, learn the system. Check your Seller Dashboard daily (all sellers should be doing this already) and immediately address any defects that occur. Call eBay and appeal the situation. Sometimes it takes multiple calls to reach a customer service rep who is aggressive enough to resolve the situation.

Bottom line - sellers are responsible for the health of their accounts. Monitor your dashboard closely and often. Don't wait until it is too late and your account has been suspended.

Related Articles:

Need Some Help Increasing Sales in Your eBay Store?

eBay Consignment Done Right

21 Year Old eBay Seller Pays Cash for Car- Hard Work Pays Off!

Are You Wasting Time Micro-Managing Your eBay Store?

Over the past year, since eBay's new search engine Cassini has been in place, sellers have been scratching their heads trying to figure out how to to rise to the top of the search. There has been a boatload of "advice" on the eBay forums, Facebook groups, and blogs. But what are we REALLY supposed to be doing?

One tip given in a January 2014 article in Ecommerce Bytes stated,

"Don't Use Good Til Cancelled. New, well priced listings from a reputable seller with high DSR ratings will be automatically placed near the top of the Best Match category for the first day or two and then will slowly move downward as other sellers list their items and they are placed above yours. To make this work for you, don't use GTC, and end every item every 30 days and then relist them."

I started thinking about this strategy, especially when reading the Money Making Mondays posts on my Facebook group (which now has over 14,000 sellers.) Many sellers with large inventories post items that sold each week. I began to wonder if these sellers with larger inventories were using GTC or relisting unsold items. It would be a huge time suck for sellers with thousands of items in inventory to manually relist unsold items. So I asked some of them.

Kathy said, "I have 2 eBay stores - 1 has all GTC, about 250 listings and the other has 1,100 or so right now and I do mostly GTC and run auctions as I have time to list. I am currently shipping about 60 packages per day. I haven't had a slump at all. I think your standing as a seller and overall sales are what helps. if you have lots of sales in general, all of your items get a boost. That's why listing new things gives you a boost. You might sell a new item and it boosts everything else."

Jay, who has 3,400 items said, "Yes, all our items are listed once and 'good till cancelled.' Our motto is 'list it and forget it.' Most items sell within a year, but we have had items take 36 months to sell. At 5-cents a months for listing fee, that's only 60-cents a year. Being listed for three years only costs $1.80. If our profit is $20+ an item, we still make out like bandits.We want things to sell quickly, but you see how we have zero stress once an item is listed. Its not like FBA sellers who worry about storage fees. We do the research, put a strong price, and add 'make offer'. That's gives buyer leeway to haggle.  We did an experiment about six months ago where we ended all 3000 of our items and re-listed them as new. We saw no rise in sales. I couldn't tell if we were noticeably higher in search rankings. What it did do is lose all our followers on the items. Lesson learned.Instead of wasting time trying to fool the system, we just focus on listing more items. It's ridiculous to think that eBay would build a search algorithm that could be so easily fooled." 

*Note - Jay has an anchor store which explains the fee breakdown.

John, who has 5 stores and over 12,000 items in inventory said, "If I could I would switch all my items back to GTC. My number two source of traffic is Google. Before I sold half the business, my best performers were the old GTC items I had, and the traffic was not from eBay, was bookmarked and Google. I think instead of taking the time and relisting I would do something to change the listings. Price, add pictures, social media links, something. But as for traffic other than eBay the sell similar stinks, as when you sell similar you change the url of the item (SEO) with restockable items that long term url is a huge advantage." 

*John's business is based on easily restockable items, so his situation may be different than yours.

So there you have it. If you are spending precious time allowing listings to end than manually relisting them, it may not be doing you any good. The 3 sellers above are successful sellers with large inventories. If you want to be successful, do what the successful people are doing - and they are spending their time listing more items. Don't look back, look forward. Spending hours every week tweaking and micro-managing your listings isn't a good business strategy.

Everyone's most valuable resource is time. We can all get more money, more help, more space - but no one can get more time. Use it wisely so that your actions are focused on income-producing activities, not busywork.

What is your opinion on GTC listings? Are they working for you? Let's have a conversation about it so leave a comment below.

Related Articles:

Should eBay Sellers Use Auction or Fixed Price Listings?

6 Reasons to List Your eBay Items NOW - Don't Wait

How to Put an eBay Store on Vacation

 

3 Tips for Increasing eBay Traffic and Sales

eBay sellers are becoming increasingly frustrated with lack of sales or slow sales since the change in the search engine algorithm last July. Many sellers are intimidated all the changes, and what we are supposed to be doing now to be successful. I see this frustration daily from sellers from all walks of life, all store levels, and using different business models. 

Usually on a daily basis, I receive emails or Facebook messages about these issues:

My sales suddenly dropped off. What am I doing wrong?

Traffic to my listings is way down. What happened?

My items aren't coming up in searches - why not?

How can I increase sales? My prices are already as low and I can go.

If you don't understand the Cassini search engine, and haven't educated yourself about how eBay rewards and punishes sellers for different actions, this is a huge part of the problem. The new search engine not only rewards sellers for doing certain things, but it actually punishes sellers for doing or not doing other things.  The punishment is being pushed to the bottom of the search - so far down that buyers don't see the listings.


3 things you can do immediately to improve traffic, and hopefully sales:

1. Make sure listings are optimized for mobile. eBay estimates 40% of sales are made on mobile devices. I see this error a lot, and if buyers can't read your listings on mobile, they won't buy from you. This isn't a Cassini issue, but is important to connecting with buyers.

2. Extend return policy to 30 days, whether you like it or not. Cassini rewards sellers for this and you will be placed higher in searches.

3. Remove any extraneous HTML code from your description area. Listing templates, banners, widgets, maps, and info copied from the internet that carries code with it can junk up this area, and Cassini can't read it. Listings with too much HTML are punished and pushed to the bottom.

Learn about more ways to improve sales on eBay here.