How I lost my 100% Positive Feedback Rating

The eBay Seller's News, May 22, 2008, Volume 8, No. 9

Learn How To Sell More on eBay with The Newsletter for Professional
eBay Sellers by: Skip McGrath

In This Issue:

Musings

How I lost my 100% Positive Feedback Rating
Protecting Your Seller Reputation with Blocked Bidder Lists and Other Tools
Is the Digital Goods Market Dead on eBay?
Niche of The Month: Political Memorabilia
New eBay Wholesale Sources for Midmonth May 2008

"The opportunity of a lifetime must be seized within
the lifetime of the opportunity." ~ Anonymous

If you live in the Dallas Texas area, the Dallas eBay Usergroup is holding a meeting with Uncle Griff and several eBay executives on May 29^th. Here is the information. $18.00 includes reserved seat and buffet dinner. $5.00 includes non-reserved seat and beverage (non-alcoholic). Payments to be made in advance via PayPal. Date: May 29^th Time: 6:00PM - 9:00PM Place: Canyon Creek Country Club; 625 Lookout Dr., Richardson, TX 75080 You can join the group or get further information at these links:

eBay dropped the other shoe earlier this week when they announced several new policies including the end to mystery auctions, a ban on all links off of eBay –even from your blog or About Me page and changes to search and several other selling policies. The announcement is too detailed to cover here, but I wrote extensively about it in my blog. Here is a link to the post.

I often get questions from readers who have large heavy items they want to sell, but wonder about how to ship them. There are many shipping services who can handle large items, but there may be a better solution: Sell them locally and ask the buyer to pick them up.

The two main sites for doing this are Craigslist and LiveDeal.com. Most of you are familiar with Craigslist –it is basically a free online local classified advertising site. Live Deal has also been around a while but is less well known. It is free to list up to 10 items on Live Deal. They also offer upgrade fees and store subscriptions. A buyer types in their zip code and then searches for items. If there are no items locally, then Live Deal displays items nationally. I emailed some Live Deal sellers and several of them told me it takes slightly longer to sell something on Live Deal than on Craigslist, but that they usually receive higher prices. One seller in Denver told me he buys stuff on Craigslist all the time and turns around and sells it on Live Deal for more money.

eBay has their own free classified site called Kijiji at www.kijiji.com. I have tried it but haven’t had any luck. They just don’t have the user base that Craigslist has.

eBay Boot Camp DVD set Still Available with The $100 Discount

We still have some copies from the first production run of 200 sets of the complete videos from my recent eBay Boot Camp Seminar. The set consists of 5 DVDs covering the entire two day seminar. Unlike big seminars with hundreds of people –this was a small event aimed at experienced eBay sellers where we focused on the tips, techniques and strategies to help eBay sellers make money by increasing their listings and sales. I did an initial production run of 200 sets. Students paid over $2000 each for the seminar and travel, but you can see the entire event for the limited time discount price of $197 which includes a book with all of the power point slides used during the event. Click here to read about the event.

My friend Tim Knox also recently put on a small seminar for online business owners that covers more than just eBay. He brought in experts on many other subjects related to running a small online business from home and filmed the whole event. He is offering my readers a special on the complete set for just $97.00. You can read about Tim’s seminar here.

Speaking of Craigslist, have you heard that eBay and Craigslist are suing each other? eBay owns part of Craigslist and filed a lawsuit and Craigslist responded and counter sued. You can read the whole story in my blog post. It is the kind of David vs. Goliath case that California juries love. I am neither a lawyer or a Judge, but when I read both complaints, I suspect Craigslist is going to win this one pretty easily.

If you are getting frustrated with eBay and would like to try selling on Amazon.com, my friend Steve Lindhorst just released a great little book. I mentioned it in the last issue and got some really good comments from the readers. The book is called Selling on The River and you can read about it at a special page for my readers: www.selling-on-the-river.com.

Let's get started with this month's articles:

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1. How I lost my 100% Positive Feedback Rating

When I went to bed on Sunday, May 18^th my feedback rating was 100% positive. When I woke up on Monday, May 19^th it had dropped to 99.9%. Did I get a negative feedback overnight? No. What happened is that eBay implemented its dreaded new feedback policy. They now count neutrals as negatives and it is retroactive for twelve months.

Here is a screenshot of my feedback profile on Sunday:

And here is what my feedback profile looked like on Monday:

Also notice that my feedback total jumped from 7088 to 7573. No, I didn’t sell that many new customers overnight. eBay now counts the feedback earned from repeat sales. So those extra numbers indicate people who bought more than one item.

I earned the neutral last November. It was from a buyer who purchased something late in the evening when we weren’t at the computer and complained that it took overnight to check out. He also mentioned that our emails to him were “condescending.” That is really interesting because Karen handles all of our customer email and she earns rave reviews for her communications. Even when we receive email from the occasional wing nut, Karen always keeps her cool and replies politely and professionally.

Under eBay’s new policy, in November when the neutral becomes 12 months old, we will theoretically be back at 100% assuming that we don’t receive any negatives or neutrals in the meantime. But I suspect we will never see 100% again, as there are no longer any reasons preventing the small handful of irrational and impossible-to-please people from leaving a neutral or negative. All buyers will have 100% positive. Very few sellers –most likely only those with a low overall feedback number, will have 100% positive.

In the past we always made a point of asking buyers to leave feedback because we knew we gave good service. We pack all of our shipments carefully and professionally, we ship quickly, send buyers an email with the shipping information, follow up to make sure they were happy –and we usually put a small free gift in every package (eBay mints or pens, or free coffee stickers when we sell a Starbucks mug –that sort of thing). We don’t mark up shipping and we always leave positive feedback for buyers when they pay. We have never held feedback hostage or waited for buyers to post feedback first. As you can see, that policy paid off for us with an excellent feedback and DSR rating. Going forward, if a seller leaves feedback – great. But, we aren’t going to risk our reputation by asking people for feedback. It’s voluntary, after all.

So what will the future look like? The first thing has already happened: eBay lost thousands of PowerSellers when the policy changed earlier this week as their neutrals were counted as negatives and their positive feedback rating fell below 98%.

eBay has increased the benefits of being a Power Seller, but has made it much harder to obtain. You can argue that this is both good and bad. Some marginal sellers and really bad sellers who run thousands of auctions may leave the site as they see their sales and profits erode. This will be good for those who stay as there will be less competition. However, if sellers try really hard to give excellent service but can’t achieve Power Seller status and keep their DSRs high there will be a disincentive to sell. Over time this will affect the number of listings and the depth and breadth of merchandise available on the site. This could be a negative for eBay.

I also suspect that over time, Feedback will cease to be important –and in fact eBay may someday decide to scrap it altogether and just rely on the Detailed Seller Ratings.

The stark truth is that eBay is rolling the dice. No one really knows how the new feedback policy will turn out. eBay makes money in two ways –when you list an item and when you sell an item. eBay does not sell any merchandise. What eBay sells is access to a platform where buyers come looking for goods that sellers have to sell. We, the sellers, are eBay’s customers. The people who buy on eBay are our customers.

As long as eBay brings the buyers and the experience is such that the buyers bid and/or buy, the sellers will remain. But if traffic falls (as it did in the first quarter of this year) and conversion rates decline, then sellers will look elsewhere. We won’t really know the full impact of the new policy until later this year. The summer season is slow anyway so it may be hard for sellers to tell if slowing sales are simply seasonal or if they are a function of the new policy. Mixed in is the slowing economy that could also skew results. But once the hot Fall selling season is here sellers will either be increasing listings because the new policy is working –or they will be looking at other venues to build their online business. So we won’t really know if the roll of the dice worked out for several months.

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2. Protecting Your Seller Reputation with Blocked Bidder Lists and Other Tools

It is true that most people are good. If you are honest with them and give them good service they will leave you positive feedback and fair DSR scores. But we all know that in every population there is a small handful of irresponsible people, non-paying bidders and outright screwballs who live to make other people miserable. One of the ways you can protect yourself from these folks is with the blocked bidder list. eBay now allows you to add up to 5000 members to your blocked bidder list –up from 1000. This isn’t a perfect solution, but it can help prevent these folks getting to your auctions. And if these folks keep trying to bid on auctions and keep getting blocked the theory is that they will eventually go away.

A lot of these strange folks often write screwy emails to you through the eBay message system. Whenever I get an email from someone that has an attitude problem, I always answer their email politely but then I usually add them to my blocked bidder list. The other place to find bidders to block in on the eBay message boards. Sellers will often post situations where they felt they received an unfair feedback. So if I see a forum post about a weird buyer I will usually add that person to my blocked bidder list.

In addition there are a couple of services that can help you build your blocked bidder list:

Dr. Benjamin Bishop has started a service in conjunction with some Gold and Silver PowerSellers called After The Gavel at www.afterthegavel.com where sellers can enter eBay ID of buyers who left them negative or neutral feedback. Once you register, you can look up bidders to see if they are in the habit of leaving negative or neutral feedback. Of course this will only work if thousands of sellers register and take the time to report the feedback they receive. It remains to be seen if sellers will do this.

Reputation Exchange launched a public beta of a free service, called RepXchange, at www.repxchange.com. The service allows sellers to anonymously pool their blocked bidder lists (black lists if you will) and extract a new, custom list of blocked bidders that fits their own business profile. With RepXchange, sellers can weed out bad buyers, and by extension, save sellers from spending needless time on re-listing, or worse, filing dispute claims.

The RepXchange filtering functionality provides the ability to, for example, take a pool of 10,000 blocked bidders and narrow it down to a list of 1,000 bidders who have been blocked by at least 3 US based sellers who have sold on eBay for more than 3 years and specialize in electronics worth over $200. The goal of this service isn't to simply fill your blocked bidders list with a lot of names; when sellers do so, they are potentially losing good buyers in with the bad. On RepXchange sellers can be very specific about the buyers they want to block, thus allowing them to focus on servicing profitable customers.

The site is pretty new –and therefore not perfect, flashy or slick. However it is free. As sellers sign up and provide feedback, the operators hope they can expand the service and provide more features. What I like about this site is that I can just upload my blocked bidder list and they do the sorting.

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3. Is the Digital Goods Market Dead on eBay?

If you define “digital goods” as products that are delivered digitally, then yes it probably is dead. I have heard some rumors that eBay is revisiting the issue and trying to find some way to allow digitally delivered products. The trick is to figure out how to block all the people trying to sell 99¢ eBooks and other junky stuff. But I wouldn’t hold out too many hopes for this.

The bigger question is can you still sell “information products” on eBay? The answer to that is yes. There is a lot of confusion over what constitutes information products. Most people think eBook when they hear that term. And it has been the tons of low-cost and low-value eBooks that have given information products a bad name.

There is still a very healthy market both on eBay and the wider internet for good information products that deliver real value. The only real difference is that now, you have to package your information product on a physical medium such as a CD, DVD, Flash Drive or even a printed book or manual and actually ship it to your customer.

The world of information products today, while yes it does include eBooks, also includes a much wider variety of products –and even some services.

Technically speaking if you are selling a book, you are selling an information product, but for the eBay seller when we talk about the “information products business” we are referring to self-published products or packaged products that might include public domain materials. These include books, videos, audio files, music, photographs, and electronic files that include things like design templates for eBay stores and websites.

The new eBay policy may actually be a benefit to the people who really want to create and deliver real products because it does get rid of the eBook junk sellers. Obviously you aren’t going to sell a CD or DVD for 99¢ when your physical cost is higher than that unless the disk is nothing more than a sales pitch for a more expensive product.

You can, of course, still sell digitally delivered products from your web site or from venues like ClickBank. One strategy is to use eBay to sell your materials via a CD or DVD –or even in print. Then on the product you provide links to your website where buyers can make future purchases from you directly and they have the option to download digital products. For example, if someone buys my Complete eBay Marketing System, there are several links to my website printed in the book. Once clients arrive at my website then they have the choice of both printed or digitally delivered products that I offer.

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4. Niche of The Month: Political Memorabilia

I was talking to Darryl Lambert who runs the 31 Club for people who sell antiques and collectibles. People have collected political memorabilia for years and some of these items can get quite expensive. But there are also tons of low cost easily available buttons and other memorabilia available cheaply from garage sales and even by going to the candidate’s local offices where you can get the stuff for free.

If you are a real political junkie, you can really get valuable items by attending the rallies where the candidates are present and have them sign something for you.

Prices for political memorabilia can be quite volatile. In general, older (pre-1980) items are pretty stable. It’s the really current stuff that can rise and fall in value depending on how the candidates are doing. Mike Huckabee buttons and tee shirts were doing very well until he quit the race. And Senator Clinton’s stuff has really fallen in value over the past couple of months as Obama has surged in the delegate counts and seems poised to win the nomination. If he does, those of you who visited Obama state campaign offices or attended the rallies and collected stuff will have some valuable goods. They will be even more valuable if he wins the presidency.

Here are some screen shots of recent sales of political memorabilia sold on eBay.

I have shown both some of the higher priced items as well as some of the lower priced ones. See what I mean about the price of Hillary buttons dropping? Several months ago you could go to a Hillary campaign office, pick up a handful of buttons and sell them for prices as high as $5.00 each. Today you can get a lot of 100 buttons for $27 –or 27¢ each.

Older memorabilia like that shown in the first image is fairly easy to find. I see it often at garage sales, estate sales, flea markets and small town auctions. You can often buy a box of older buttons for just a few dollars. There are several price guides to political memorabilia. A popular one is Warman's Political Collectibles: Identification and Price Guide which is available on Amazon.com.

If you would like to learn more about political collectibles, Daryl Lambert has a great blog post on the subject that you can read here.

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5. New eBay Wholesale Sources for Midmonth May 2008

Don’t forget to check our FREE wholesale search engine. Remember though – this is a search engine. There are a lot of companies that are good at gaming search engines. Just because a company comes up in a search does not mean that I support or endorse them. But, in general, you can find some good sources with this tool if you take your time to look through all of the results. And research, research, research.

Licensed products are perennial best sellers. NJ Croce is a large supplier of licensed products like Gumby, Betty Boop, Popeye, The Simpsons and others.

Toon Art sells photos, posters, tee shirts and other movie star products.

Entertainment Earth is a major retail and wholesale seller of Action Figures, Toys, Replicas, Collectibles, Gifts, and More! From Star Wars and GI Joe, to The Simpsons and Anime. Manufacturers such as McFarlane, Sideshow, Dragon and Mattel.

ABC Toy4Me sells a very complete line of Anime figures and toys.

Delight Arts and Crafts is a large distributor of Handmade Fountains, Lucky Bamboo and Tropical Bamboo furniture.

RetailPets.com sells to Pet Product Retailers, Resellers, Vets, and Non-Profit Groups.

Watch Wholesalers offers wholesale pricing on name brand designer watches like Seiko, Armitron, Swiss Army, Timex, Casio, Wenger, Bulova, Luminox, Disney Watches, Pulsar, Puma, Invicta, Movado, and Skagen.

Art International is a distributor of original high-quality hand-painted oil paintings. They deal direct with artists to get the lowest prices.

That's it for this month.

Skip McGrath
The eBay Seller's News

P.S. If you missed the last issue, click here to read it.