We have a Cross-Border Trade Team… who knew?

Sue @ TameBayOn 04.08.2008 at 12:50 pm Said:

70% of my eBay trade is cross-border. I *beg* eBay not to interfere in this. I am more than capable of keeping my buyers informed as to delivery times; the last thing I want is some buyer education program telling them it’s going to take a long time for me to deliver (FWIW, it doesn’t).

I operate different IDs for domestic and international deliveries: the domestic ones are all 4.9 for dispatch time and the international one wobbles between 4.8 and 4.9. I don’t believe that buyers ding sellers so long as they are told honestly how long delivery is likely to take.

AmberOn 04.08.2008 at 1:35 pm Said:

I find it interesting that we’re being charged for something that used to be free.

The CBT would argue that, yet prior to June 2006 ebay.com listings WERE visible in international default search. They took that visibility away once listings climbed on the other sites and now–a year and a half later–are charging for the privilege.

75% of my sales are international, and I do believe we are being rated lower by overseas customers. Not as a sign of dissatisfaction, but over the fact that $20 for shipping is never going to be VERY reasonable. Even if the shipping is exact postage with no handling fees, many overseas buyers aren’t going to be hopping for joy about paying so much. Adding to that is the major restructuring of international mail last May and the forthcoming increases this May.

Another reason for the low shipping DSRs is–AGAIN–the misleading terminology used in the shipping time DSR on the .com site. Other sites, especially the UK and AU sites, use the term “post,” which indicates the actual time it takes to mail…not delivery time. The US term “ship” is much more ambiguous and most buyers, international and domestic, are equating it with delivery time. That is NOT what the buyers are supposed to be rating.

Processing or handling time would be far more accurate; eBay has yet to address these issues. Sellers have absolutely no control over how fast the carriers deliver, and eBay complicates the problems by including overly optimistic delivery estimates in every listing.

FB SmithOn 04.08.2008 at 2:41 pm Said:

I think CBT is a good idea. International buyers need help in understanding the following:
As a seller, I can’t mark a purchase a “Gift’, it is illegal to do so.
I have no control over the length of time a purchase is in transit. I also have no control over Customs.
I am not responsible for any Duty or Brokerage fees, because these are taxes that their country has imposed on them.
I usually have to use a higher cost shipping service, so tracking and /or delivery confirmation is available. This is needed for both loss prevention and to be able to keep my customer informed.

Now, I could educate the buyer myself, by adding this information in my listing page, but with the information I need to post about my product, shipping and refunds, I would not have the room on the page.

It is in the best interest for both the seller and buyer to be informed. I hope eBay will step up to the plate on this one.
Thank you

JimOn 04.08.2008 at 3:37 pm Said:

“As it stands now, the buyer is confused with the current set up (yes, I agree with Scot’s assessment)…”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe Scot’s piece was from a seller’s perspective and discussed seller confusion.

DaveyOn 04.08.2008 at 4:13 pm Said:

Richard, I hope you didn’t misunderstand me earlier when I asked about a functional Cross-border team. I knew there was one, but the things they had turned out to-date including the most recent Best Practices document, had several pieces of misinformation that could mislead sellers, especially non-Powersellers, to assume they were protected against fraudulent payments in “190 countries,” which is more like 2– the UK and Canada. Some of these sellers have big wakeup calls the first time they encounter cross-border fraud or an unreasonable buyer (yes, they do exist!), and of course, Best Practices documents are not binding on eBay when it comes to policy disputes. I also hadn’t see any positive output or advocacy on other cross-border sales issues either. I have received phone calls from an eBay rep promoting international sales, telling me how great they are, but offering nothing other than a brief “rah, rah, sell!” encounter to tell me how eBay was “partnering” with me. I want a partner that won’t hurt me instead of helping.

How many things that the cross-border team is developing were done with input from a reasonable cross-section of experienced cross-border sellers? Or, in a vacuum? Do they have backing from the top, so that policies are coordinated and synergistic across business units? Remember that we have to deal across business units of the organization, and things don’t often seem coordinated in their goals. If you get crossed signals, the business units point fingers at each other and say it is the other unit’s issue.

Like sue@tamebay, I really don’t want eBay’s outright intervention in cross-border sales, other than to address the specific inequities of current policy as applied to them.

Of course, my biggest beef is with the DSR system, especially the shipping portion, which is patently unfair. Sue@Tamebay may ship different places and offer different methods than I do, but the shipping DSRs and customer expectations of transit times are a problem for me, and I ship rocket-fast. Of course, my items are low-priced, so my customers don’t generally choose Express Mail International or Priority shipping either, although I offer them.

Shipping is sort of a Catch-22 for cross-border sellers, especially when your items are not expensive. You need trackable online proof of delivery for Paypal Seller Protection, but this is expensive, and your Shipping Cost DSR will get dinged. If you let the buyer choose economy methods, or allow shipment to black holes like Italy (sellers cannot block sales automatically by-country), your Shipping Time DSR can get nailed even if the item sits for 12 weeks in Italian Customs. You are also fully exposed to fraud as an INR claim is a guaranteed 100 percent loss. I would feel much better if I only had to bear the responsibility of what I could control with cross-border shipping, plus some occasional lost packages and fraud. There is no sense in taking DSR penalties that may affect my domestic sales, where my DSRs are stellar.

That 0.1 of a DSR rating can mean the difference between being branded as a bad seller and not. Ebay’s marginal DSR rating is so close to 5.0, that there is little wiggle room. In practice, I see more like 0.2 to 0.3 star difference with cross-border sales.

Other pain for cross-border trade involves Paypal policies, especially claims and Seller Protection. Do you know that an international buyer can file a Paypal claim for non-receipt several days after shipment, AND WIN before a reasonable transit time has even passed? They can get their money back before they get the package! Don’t ask me how I know that as it gets personal and I get real angry about it, real fast.

There are several schemes now that easily allow cross-border buyers to cleanly scam sellers through Paypal claims. I won’t go into detail on these, but I can assure you when a buyer can’t get negative feedback anymore, these people will be invisible to sellers. Given my interactions with eBay’s customer service, I don’t get any warm fuzzies that the frauds will get weeded out or prevented from getting another ID, as we are told they will. eBay may eventually learn how to stop this, but the sellers will bear their tuition in the forms of losses.

Richard, try to use Customer Service sometime on about any question. Count the percentage of boilerplate responses you get that have nothing to do with your questions. This will perhaps be one of the best educations you get into the eBay system. What do you think sellers and buyers think of this? Customer Service almost qualifies as its own blog subject.

Also, one answer I would like to get when you get to the Paypal team, is to ask why only Powersellers get extended cross-border SPP, and not other sellers that have excellent credentials and probably service their customers better as they have fewer of them and interaction is more personal? After all, everything is now about buyer experience.

International sales have been OK for me (something near 33 percent of volume), and I’d hope to expand this, but there has to be some incentive to help on eBay’s part. The policy changes of January 20th were a series of solid disincentives, instead. I don’t believe anyone at eBay asked long and hard how these policies would impact their cross-border sellers.

DaveyOn 04.08.2008 at 6:39 pm Said:

@Dan,

It is great to be able to have dialog with members of the cross-border team. We’ve heard from an International Pink exactly once, and that was a pretty lightweight “So are you going to sell more cross-border now?”

My encouragement to the team is to become a stronger voice that unifies policies between business units, which appear to conflict a lot. I’m hoping for a group of people that remove hurdles by educating the management team as to what their policies mean to cross-border sellers when the rubber meets the road. Like why Paypal allows cross-border INR claims before a reasonable transit time has elapsed?

As I said earlier, my items sell in volume, and are fairly inexpensive. I can’t force my buyers to pay for Express Mail for all its benefits and Paypal SPP, as this is more costly than my items.

I might suggest, though, that simply coming up with better DSR wording as you mentioned really is not going to be effective in addressing shipping DSR inequities. While I agree that eBay really blew it with domestic DSRs and the double-standard of their descriptions to buyers (4 = Satisfactory) and sellers (4.5 = marginal), internationally, there are other factors at play that you won’t be able to educate away.

An example: When I have a buyer in Italy complaining that he has not seen my package in 12 weeks, and I explain that Milano Roserio (the Customs choke point in Italy) has been exposed as having severe problems and delays are common, he answers back that his last eBay purchase made it to him in only 5 days via First Class International while he was waiting for mine–why was mine any different? This sheer unpredictability escapes education.

Again, what eBay needs to do for an honest Shipping Time DSR is to capture how fast a seller ships after confirmed payment is received! This is the one and only thing I can control except forcing a customer to pay more for premium shipping (and a potential cost DSR hit and greater buyer dissatisfaction). Capturing this information is eminently possible electronically, even if using First Class International economy shipping, by using the Customs label number to show acceptance! Slam dunk! We all win! You move sellers to use some sort of electronic shipment acceptance, allow sellers to give their buyers a wider range of shipping choices without fear, and pick out the sellers who are truly slow to ship which is what eBay really wants to do! One more advantage of the system I suggest, is that Paypal echeck delays are compensated for! Paypal tries to “educate” buyers about echeck delays, to no avail as no one reads their confirmation emails.

As another poster mentioned, someone needs to change the transit time suggestions in Shipping Calculator!!!!

If you would be open to free input from a 1/2 Powerseller who has sold internationally for 10 years, I’d be perfectly willing for Richard to give you my contact info. While my posts have expressed sheer exasperation at times, I’m really quite reasonable on observations and the reasoning behind them.

Kevin_TOn 04.09.2008 at 3:36 am Said:

I am based in Australia and do target international sales - 10 years ago I was selling about 95% of my items internationally, now it probably varies between 40% and 60% for international sales, due to the increase in Australian Ebay users. My dsr ratings are a consistant 4.9 throughout, while I have seen domestic sellers who offer FREE shipping with lower DSR ratings for shipping charges (which suggests to me that the DSR ratings are seriously flawed and meaningless already).

The cynic in me says that Ebay has effectively deconstructed the “world wide web” over the last 8 or 9 years - partly because it has feared the implications of International trading relating to buyer and seller protection, but now have found an opportunity to charge sellers extra to use the “world wide” part of the world wide web.

It should be remembered that in the case of auction, full competition will result in the strongest marketplace and prices, but Ebay has fragmented the international market very much. Offering to list items on the other sites for a fee may help, but unless CATEGORIES are consistant across all sites (as they should be) many items will not be found by buyers who browse the variant categories on the foreign sites. A more competitive international market means higher prices (even when one economy/region slips into recession), and higher prices mean higher commissions for Ebay’s bottom line - thus the fragmenting of Ebay over the long term has cost Ebay money, has cost international sellers money, as well as removing site consistancy for people looking for items to buy (often without advising them that they are no longer seeing listings they previously were - such as Royal Doulton buyers in America who were not aware and not advised when UK listings were removed from Ebay.com, in spite of the fact they were spending thousands of Pounds Sterling per annum on Doulton figurines from Great Britain).

Regards, Kevin

Scott @ TradingAssistantJournalOn 04.09.2008 at 6:58 am Said:

Re: “Further, it was agreed that the current DSR set-up is not the best for international transactions and they are currently focused on addressing an improved rating system”

Richard, The quote above is the jewel of your article, please expand upon this aspect if you can. The eBay sellers I know and who read my blog would very much appreciate knowing if adjustments in international and/or domestic DSR functionality or wording is under review.

I personally think some very basic changes in the wording of the star ratings, as discussed here regarding shipping time versus handling time, and specifically explaining the terminology re: a rating of 3 is judged as a very poor DSR for a seller by eBay and can have drastic effects on the overall DSR rating which is linked into Powerseller status and discounts. While this same star rating of 3 is explained to the buyer as “performed as expected”.

When the buyer is told that the 3 rating is “as expected” i.e. the seller did what was expected and everything went fine…The buyer will most likely lean towards a 3 rather than a 5 star rating, people just do not give out top of the scale ratings on a consistent basis. I think we could all agree it is against our own human nature to do so, especially when a 3 is described as a merchant did everything the buyer expected them to do.

Re-defining this disparity of terminology could improve the DSR system dramatically while changing the sellers point of view regarding the system across the board.

DaveyOn 04.09.2008 at 8:55 am Said:

@Kevin_T

Fear not, it appears that eBaY is reconstituting the world, at least starting with the US site and sellers. Of course, they are going to charge us sellers an extra fee for this reconstitution.

Mark ClassicOn 04.10.2008 at 10:17 am Said:

Hi Richard

My question on the other posts has yet to be answered.

Ebay should have a standard FVF discount for good DSR’s no matter what site is listed on or what country of origin the lister is from.

Instead of the current situation, which is extremely confusing and just not worth participating in.

So lets have a standard worldwide DSR/FVF system that is not linked to individual sites.

Problem solved - simply…

Then the DSR problem:

I concurr, match the wording for the buyers to the results the seller recieves.

Its a bit like being in the playground and Timothy comes up to Sid and says he is likes you and the way you are, then Sid comes up to you and says, “Actually, Timothy is not all that keen on you, you know…”

Ebay has taken a fibbing role here, don’t you think?

So match the comments when left to the comments when recieved - simply…

There is that word simple again…

Mark

PS

Thank you for taking the time to round up this topic.

BertaOn 04.11.2008 at 12:20 am Said:

Dear Richard,

Welcome! Here are some of our experiences - 100% of our sales our cross-border and let me tell you, it’s a challenge balancing the shipping charges and shipping time rating.

We’re based in Taiwan, so sending things x-border may be slower than someone based in France shipping to Belgium as we have a few oceans and continents to cross.

In general, we’ve gotten around that by shipping via EMS. However, we have charge below our actual shipping costs to maintain our DSRs. Thus, our item price increases - of course, eBay wins here by collecting higher FVFs.

For another account, which have lower-priced items that can’t support Express Shipping, we ship by AirParcel. Again, we see higher ratings from shipping prices but lower ratings for shipping time. It’s the inverse, and we’re just 0.1 below the cut-off for discounts.

Even though our item description offers a choice to buyers that clearly spells out delivery times vs. price trade-offs, we’ve gotten dinged on shipping time as the buyer equates it with “shipping time” (exactly as its worded) instead of “processing time” (which is what it’s intended to reflect. By dinged, I mean a ‘4′ rating - which is worded as “satisfactory” but of course is unacceptable in eBay’s internal system.

We recently got a negative from a buyer who didn’t like his product. When we contacted him, he said he found our service to be exemplary - he just didn’t like the product. Now that we’ve explained to him what the feedback rating really means, he’s willing to withdraw the negative. Good for now - but what about the future when eBay will supposedly remove the Mutual Feedback Withdrawal process?

Other challenges for us - no PayPal seller protection for x-border trades (we’re based in Taiwan, so I guess we’re too small a market for PayPal expand seller protection).

Finally, I’d definitely like to re-iterate the suggestion to try eBay Customer Service while looking for answers. I find the email support to be the worst in terms of canned answers that don’t answer the question. I do have to give credit to the Greater China PS customer service hotline reps - as they’re generally more helpful, but even still, aren’t as familiar with the system as one would like. (i.e. I wanted to change the phone number to my work number with an extension, but eBay’s system for non-US registered sellers does not allow you to enter “x” or “#” to indicate an extension. The customer rep insisted this was possible, even though I told her I would get an error message when I did exactly as she suggested.)

DaveyOn 04.11.2008 at 11:49 am Said:

Reflecting on Berta’s post and customer service, it is amazing that when you reach a person (better than trying via email where you are much more likely to get meaningless boilerplate responses), you can often get inaccurate answers, or answers that indicate the rep knows little or nothing about ebay’s own systems. This is common on the Paypal side too. Very little training of reps, or apparently high turnover.

The reps are generally empowered to do one thing and one thing only–to “apologize for your inconvenience.” They get a lot of training or experience in this area, apparently. I must say the reps have all been friendly, but generally unable to solve common problems I run into.

Richard, if you run into Jim Ambach, ask him about his March 25th announcement that eBaY had addressed sellers’ pain of listing pulldowns, by putting the failed listings back in your unsold items bin to get re-edited and relisted. Ask him if that really works now. Yes? Set yourself up a dutch auction of a few cheap items, then put in a violation phrase on purpose and self-report your listing to get it pulled. Does it appear in UNSOLD ITEMS? No, it won’t. The capability doesn’t work for at least dutch auctions. Try phone support, and you’ll find that the reps say this should happen, but they can’t help you–you have to email T&S, they say. Then, send T&S Customer Service an email asking to have the listing sent back to you and sit back and watch the unrelated boilerplate responses fly at you. This is not a hypothetical situation–it is ongoing with me right now. And my listing only had what the list patrolling bot thought was a violation, as I had the word “fee” in my description and it honed in on that. Poof! Gone! Shoot first, and ask questions later…or maybe not…

If you have a few of these things happen to you, you may understand why sellers think what they do about the organization. Do I trust eBaY’s promises to eliminate fraudulent buyers and other things to protect me as a seller, once they eliminate negative buyer feedback? About as much as I trust Customer Service now, and you can gather how much that is, from my experiences. I’m not a high-maintenance seller either.

DaveyOn 04.14.2008 at 3:06 pm Said:

@Richard

Thanks! My bouts of despair with where eBay is apparently headed are tempered with occasional glimmers of hope. Let’s hope this is one such glimmer.

I wouldn’t trade jobs with Jim, having the title of VP of Seller Experience, right now.

DaveyOn 04.15.2008 at 9:47 am Said:

@Richard,

I also wrote a short missive via snail mail to Jim on this subject, and had someone from T&S call me today at his bequest. While we agreed to disagree on why my listing was taken down that led to my discovery of the non-functionality (turns out I was hit by an unpublished policy that has wide internal interpretation), the listing feature I mentioned was apparently only in beta, and was not fully available as the announcement on March 25th explicitly said it was. In other words, the announcement was premature. Customer support reps apparently think the feature is working, while the individual I talked to said it is not completely working yet. Score one for attempt at communication, although it would have been great to hear this up front.

It would also be great if these internal plans were actually vetted with a cross section of users beforehand. I can’t knock having eBay call me, but some of my suggestions elicited a response from the rep as if he’d never heard a seller bring them up before. Such things as “Make the shipping time DSR automatic based on time from payment receipt to shipment acceptance from the carrier.” To me as a 10 year seller (and buyer), some of these solutions seem like no-brainers and would have probably met with a few muted cheers from conscientious sellers rather than groans across all ranks.

If eBay sees the need for something to either cover their derrieres, or improve the buyer or seller habitat, there are plenty of people who have long-term experience IN their marketplace willing to make suggestions that fit, are workable, and satisfy eBay’s goals. As a seller, I want a better experience for my buyers too. But things like recent DSR policies make evident that such input appears to only be considered after the fact, leading to eBay’s customers bearing pain for eBay’s learning curve. As Deming used to say, it takes 10 times the cost to fix an error once it propagates a stage down the chain.

I guess communication is one of the purposes of this blog. I’m sure if you asked John Donohoe or anyone on staff whether they thought of themselves as being arrogant, and they’d say “No.” Why then, would many sellers, and perhaps buyers, say the opposite and with conviction?

One remaining suggestion… In most organizations, there is some sort of ombudsman who takes the position of the parties that management policy affects as their champion. Someone who can communicate to the policy geniuses what the impact of their ideas is likely to be. Has it ever been suggested that there needs to be a high-level ombudsman on Donohoe’s staff who is allowed to have some authority to influence policy? This person should be a long-term seller and remain so in order to have credibility with the rank and file (Hint–Griff is not the guy, as he’s burned too many bridges while toeing the company line lately).