Who collects dustballs? I have a fine selection. Have her contact me.
As to SUSPENSIONS, doesn't this sound all very Mrs. Battleax, Middle School Principal? And the upshot is that logicall, Eboy will lose revenue! Did they think about that?
Stay with me here, I am going to make some logical arguments.
If you suspend or reduce someone's sales, then you must lose listing fees and final value fees, thus cutting revenue. Right? The unintended consequence. If I were doing the forecasting, I'd point this out and run some scenarios.
The assumption all this new system is based on, is that unsatisfied customers are tied to sellers with feedback at or under 95%. I agree with that assumption in part--I won't buy from someone with below 96% feedback and think long and hard and use toolhaus if they have under 99.
But lo! isn't that how feedback is to work? Caveat emptor? If you read someone is getting crappo feedback, you can CHOOSE not to bid. And the marketplace SHOULD ferret out the baddie and force them out of business. That was the original idea of feedback. Let reputation build or tear down a seller.
But someone DOES buy from MrBadFeedback and so...one assumes all these folks take the risk of a poor sale in exchange for low price or availability of some doodad, and some guarantees (SNAD) will provide insurance.
If there are automated suspensions, sales will automatically dip and the real fun is that some big guye, the ones Eboy wants to cultivate, may decide a new marketplace is where they want to be. So this could be the edge that gives St. Elsewhere's a nudge past the infinitesimally small market share they have now. I would ADORE to be the fly on the wall in corporate discussion of some quarter's lousy results when the full impact of buyers' low feedback on high shipping (whether deserved or not) is unexpectedly coupled with a rash of suspensions and reductions that reduce the overall results.
The maths on this new system is untested. I would have tested current feedback with suspensions and run a simulation on reduced fvfs (maybe they did do that) but even that test and assumption would not hold in a new feedback system as the public's use of any system has MANY unpredictabilities. BELIEVE me, I know. I used to do work with software and customers came up with uses of it that never matched our exhaustive bug testing. Uses we never even imagined.
What's especially sad is that Eboy has a model in how un-successful the star system is with Amazon--they use it and it's not working well at all for sellers. Many have feedbacks in the 80s and sell mega amounts. The sellers complain about misuse of the feedback system and unfair feedback and suspensions over there, but the mega-sellers with low feedback persist because ultimately, the buyer knows the feedback system seems inadequate or irrelevant. It is not a match with the current system here and thus, the assumptions of current buyers will not be congruent with a star system such as Amazon has. (the two scores have different meanings...star system being ultimately lower as it's easier to ding.)
Keep watching the WSJ. It will get interesting.
