wooden_flower Volunteer Community Mentor.
disneyshopper
The defects roll off month by month after 12 months. Go to your dashboard to see the monthly breakdown -
https://sellerstandards.ebay.com/dashboard
Your next evaluation will be 8/20 for sales 8/1/20 - 7/31/21. Your dashboard will show you the new % for the 8/20 evaluation.
Then use the monthly breakdown to figure out when enough defects will fall off to get you down to 2%. If your 12 month sales are steady at 550, you need to get down to 11.
It is unlikely that you can quickly increase your sales enough to reduce the % that way - you would need your new 12 month total to jump to 750 to cover 15 defects.
Transaction defect rates and cases closed without seller resolution
One of the key seller performance measures is your transaction defect rate. A defect is added to your account if:
- You cancel a buyer's purchase because you no longer have the item in stock or you chose not to send it.
- An item-not-received or not-as-described request from a buyer is closed without seller resolution.
You are in Managed Payments. So ebay charges you 12.55% on item price + shipping + sales tax + .30 but because you are a below standard seller, there is an extra 5% FVF charged.
You did receive notification from Ebay, even warnings that you were approaching trouble. Ebay assumes that sellers will monitor the Dashboard on a regular basis. It is there that you see all your numbers and seller stats. There are also places to get detail reports on some of the areas in which you can get a defect.
I would strongly suggest that you make this part of your Weekly process at a minimum. That way you are more likely to be able to head off certain problems.
Think sales. The best way to battle this now until enough of the fall off is to dilute the number. And the way to do that is to have more sales. Find your hottest selling items, promote them in an effort to sell more of them. Go to your Markdown manager and run a sale on inventory that you can for a couple weeks or more. Consider coupons. Anything you can think of to up your sales numbers will do nothing but help you. But stay aware to do it within what you can afford to do since you have the added expense right now of the penalty fee.
I wish you nothing but the best of luck.
FYI Something I just noticed with your item titles. You have cute little emojis in them. They look great, personally I like that added touch, however the Google search engine likely doesn't. We get a lot of customers that come in through Google, so don't dismiss the impact this might have on your sales.
Leesa,
I think you have to look at the math. If you slow down sales to not pay the higher fees, it will take even longer to get above standard - the 550 is not static. The sales from each month roll off along with the defects. So if your 12 month sales decline, you also need fewer defects. At 500 sales you can only have 10 defects, etc.
Most people go in the opposite direction - try to sell more to get past the penalty sooner. But unless you can think of an item you can add that would get you 100 additional sales over the next 6 weeks, I think you have to find a solution in the middle - keep your sales up and tough it out until the end of November.
If you can keep your 12 month sales at 550, you will be right at 2% for Nov - Oct at your 11/20 evaluation. The penalty runs through the end of the month, so you will be back to normal fees 12/1.
So you may have to run some sales, or sell off more inventory with no profit to get there - you need to find the combination that works for you.
As long as you use the time away setting, eBay adjusts your expected shipping time and the projected delivery date shown to the buyer.
@st.remydeprovence wrote:I did get some messages from eBay regarding that. But I paid them no attention. 🙃 (♥️our emojis!) I’d never had any trouble before, and I have over 5,000 transactions (the ones who left feedback, so actually many more). It was reckless of me not to read and understand what they were saying. There is sooooo much information on eBay! It’s hard to know what, if any, directly affects you that you are not already aware of. I guess I like the KISS rule — keep it simple, stupid!
I have an (over)shopping habit 😬 and have accumulated so much — closets overflowing with stuff, mostly new purchased for gifts. Also, I am finishing my parent’s estate. So I’m really selling just personal possessions. I don’t have any stock items that I can quickly sell to get my numbers up quickly. But I’m going to try to find some!!
And I’m going to study and understand my Seller’s Dashboard. It never occurred to me that eBay would financially penalize it’s sellers. I am a good performer. I just messed up with those cancellations — which I wouldn’t have done if I’d read their messages!
Thank you so much for taking time to give me all this info! It is really helpful!! 👍🏻
Leesa 🤗
Yes the Seller's Dashboard is a KEY bit of info that ALL sellers should regularly review.
I think you have a good plan here. I might just add that for the future, don't ignore those Ebay emails or automatically assume you know what they say. The other thing I would strongly suggest is that the couple times a year when Ebay does a Seller's Update that you read through that update for new changes to the site. Never overlook them or delete them. Save them as you need to learn the information they contain and will likely need to refer back to them from time to time. Keep yourself better informed.
The rules that caught you regarding the additional fees have now been around for a few years.
I hope your future is much brighter. I have faith that you will work through this current challenge and come out the other side more knowledgeable.
Did you know you can send your buyer an invoice that can include all the items they have purchased but not yet paid for. And when you do that invoice you can offer a discount on the shipping if needed and a discount on the products if you want to.
https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/shipping-items/shipping-rates/offering-combined-shipping?id=4169
