Come September, Why is Ebay reversing their decision to hold Return Requests against Sellers?

[mam98031]

Why is Ebay retracting their previous statements and policy that RRs [return requests] will NOT count against us if we resolve them while they are in the request stage?  The Summer Seller Update has this statement: “Starting in September 2018, if you have very high occurrences of these poor buyer experiences, you will be notified via email and may be subject to extended estimated delivery times and additional fees.”

This statement appears on the Service metrics and competitive insights page of the update.  Here is a link.

https://pages.ebay.com/seller-center/seller-updates/2018-summer/selling-metrics-and-shipping.html Not only that, they are going to make it retroactive.  It will go back to the evaluation period.  So for those evaluated for the previous 90 days or the previous 12 months will determine how far back Ebay goes.  When things are made retroactive here, that is a problem too because during that period of time, Sellers did NOT have RRs held against them.  And therefore may have responded differently to them if they had known it would go against their stats for eval.  That is one reason.  It is simply unfair to hold sellers to a standard that is NOT KNOWN at the time. Then there is the lack of support sellers get from Ebay when a buyer opens a false SNAD/INAD.  When there is clear proof, I’m not talking about guesses, feelings or subjective proof, but clear proof from the buyer’s themselves that it was not a SNAD/INAD, but in fact a BRR [buyer’s remorse request].  The buyer may not have been honest when filling out the reason for the RR because they didn’t want to pay for return shipping or in the case of listings prior to June; they didn’t want to pay restocking fees.  So they file a SNAD to avoid these costs.

It happens all the time.  And even when we have emails from the buyer inside of Ebay’s M2M [member to member] system or in some cases they type out a comment on the SNAD that clearly shows a BR reason.  Ebay will not assist us.  It will stand as a SNAD. 

[tealt]

---

@mam98031 wrote:It is simply unfair to hold sellers to a standard that is NOT KNOWN at the time. 

---

Yep.

Making penalties dependant on standards that are months away from announcement is one of the most reprehensible things eBay does to it's sellers.

When return percentages first began to appear on dashboards, sellers were assured that these stats were to "help you" and would never be "used against you".

Uh huh.  I had been selling on eBay way too long to believe that. 

When eBay invests money in software to collect stats on sellers, one can (rightly) assume that no matter how many the denials, those stats will be eventually used to judge (and penalize) sellers. 

[downrightspecialkids]

I agree! They are already not helping us when false SNADs are filed. I had 2 last month that said item didn't fit and 2 other bogus ones last month as well. Ebay didn't care, even when they stated doesnt fit in comments. 

Now buyers' dishonesty will not only cost us money, but will count against us as well. 

Who makes up these rules?

[gracieallen01]

Why?  Because - "at our sole discretion" - they, possibly, decided that it fit better with what they want to accomplish?