jonathanbrightlight Volunteer Community Mentor
mam98031 • Volunteer Community Member • Buyer/Seller since 1999
So we've not had as much discussion about the automated feedback in the last week or two, which is fine, people are getting used to it and/or just don't have as much to say anymore, but I thought I'd share our company's experience with it. I'm not including the company's eBay username or link here because I don't want this to appear like advertising, but it's not like it's a secret either.
I have been copying our feedback into a spreadsheet so I could do some analysis on it for a bit, mostly so I could see if any of the automated feedback appeared to have been replaced with customer feedback (other sellers have reported seeing this, but we get enough feedback there's no way I could keep track manually). It's not perfect, but it gave me at least a rough idea.
So, since the first automated feedback was left for our account, we've had feedback left for a total of 715 orders. Of those, 591 are eBay Automated Feedback, and 283 were left by the buyers directly. It appears about 40 of those manually left ones were originally automated and then changed by the buyers.
The interesting thing about that to me is that the number of manually left feedback appears to have actually increased over our usual monthly total. That first automated feedback showed up almost exactly 30 days ago now if not exactly, and in any given 30 day period I've usually see us get between 230-250 feedbacks from customers before the automated feedback began. So while it's not a big increase necessarily, in the manually left ones, it is still an increase.
With the automated feedback, we'll end up getting over 9,000 feedback per year at this rate, since almost every order will receive feedback of some type. We're on track for around 9,500 orders this year if the pace stays consistent, but the holiday season will likely bring more orders per month, so 10,000 isn't impossible at all. If an order has an INAD or INR case opened it won't get automated positive feedback, or I think my understanding is that if the order is delivered late it won't either, but even so, that's a lot of feedback. We have just over 17,000 lifetime feedback over the past 14 years, so that's a massive increase in the numbers, though to be fair we've greatly increased the size of our operation over that timeframe too. We could easily have double that in the next two years, though, which is crazy.
Open to questions if anyone's curious about any of this!
@nyr134 wrote:Good information - thanks for sharing.
One of the concerns expressed by some here was that the positive automatic feedback would be replaced by manual feedback that was either neutral or negative. Have you seen any of that yet?
We haven't had any neutral or negative feedback since this started, no, whether it was replacing automated feedback or not. I don't know how actively I'll be able to track this going forward to know if that happens in the future, but so far we have not seen that happen at all.
Automated feedback is counted in the percentage just like manual feedback. So if you had say 40 manually left positive feedback, 59 automated feedback (all positive), and 1 manually left negative, you'd be at 99%.
@pickapaper wrote:I think a lot of us are small sellers and it really isn't going to make that much difference. But it is interesting to read what you have written.
The only thing I don't care for with the automated feedback is that sometimes I don't want to leave a buyer or seller feedback at all, for one reason or another, so I'm not fond of the idea of eBay giving that buyer or seller automated feedback. But I can live with it.
While your number of feedback will be lower, I would think it would be more beneficial for your feedback percentage if you're a smaller seller.
The difference between receiving 20 positives and 50 in a year doesn't matter if that's all you receive, but if there is even one negative in there, it's a bigger difference. 1 negative in 20 is 95%, 1 negative in 50 is 98%.
@broto_64 wrote:Now all that's left to do is educate every dropshipper that they can stop sending feedback begging messages.
That is by no means just a seller that dropships their stuff they sell.
@gurlcat wrote:First, thank you so much for taking the time to analyze your numbers for us.
Did you happen to record any date data? Last I knew of, we weren't certain if there was a set number of days between item delivery and the auto appearing. The default 'guess' was 7 days because that was the stated time eBay gave when they were doing this only for new sellers, but in our earliest observations the lapsed time was all over the place, as few as 4 days and as many as 10, if I recall. But of course it was working 'retroactively' at that time, so I wonder if it ever settled into regularity.
Also did you notice a few days ago the comment changed? Not just on new ones moving forward but all the pre-existing ones too, a mass edit. I wonder what that was about.
"Order completed successfully-tracked and on time" (2025-2025 R.I.P. 😆)
I haven’t, that would have required more active tracking than I have done so far (which is why I’m also not completely certain on how many have changed, I didn’t check it every day even, just something like 5 times in the last month).
I did notice the comment change, though I think I saw it discussed on these forums before I noticed it in our feedback.
@ittybitnot the only thing I think might mitigate the issue with fake tracking sellers getting automated positive is that I think if a case is opened (item not received or item not as described), no matter the outcome, it doesn’t leave the automated feedback. However, I don’t know that it would be removed if it had already been left before they opened the case, and sometimes of course they don’t file a case.
