mam98031 • Volunteer Community Member • Buyer/Seller since 1999
Ebay hasn't had the Feature Plus program in many years.
The lawsuit was from 10 years ago, so I don' think it is a "proposed" settlement, but an actual settlement. One which is not all that unusual in the legal world since it would have likely cost them more just in legal fees to defend the company. You see this kind of thing all the time, settling out of court.
I assume in today's Ebay you might be referring to Promoted Listings which is a tool sellers can use if they want to as long as their account is in good standing with Ebay. This and other tools are not available to sellers that fall below standard. Being Below Standard also causes all your listings to get reduced visibility as they drop you down a bit in the searches.
This should not have come as a surprise to you if you had been paying attention to your Seller Dashboard and the numbers in which Ebay evaluates sellers on every month. You would have been warned you were getting close to having issues.
If you are talking about getting dropped to below standard because of the Service Metrics number, you having too many INADs or INRs, those don't even come into play until you have 10 claims filed against you. So if you had 5, the Service Metrics wasn't your problem.
Fair evaluation and seller protections
To ensure your ratings are based on valid statistics and fair comparisons, and that we only place limitations on selling activity when significant differences are identified:
- We only benchmark you against sellers with similar sales activity, items and business policies (see How we benchmark performance)
- We may adjust a rating in certain circumstances so that it won't affect your account. When we do this, you'll see a message in the service metrics dashboard. For example:
- Your sales have grown and you've changed from a 12-month to a 3-month evaluation period and peer group. If this results in your rating becoming Very High, we'll adjust your rating and limitations won't apply for one evaluation cycle
- A service metric rating is High or Very High, but the rate of reports/requests is less than 1% of transactions
- A Very High rating won't affect your account unless it involves at least 10 reports/requests with 10 unique buyers
Defects are what you can see on your Seller Hub. In order to try and help you, we need a clear understanding as to what got you in the Below Standard setting. What you have shared so far doesn't do that and certainly isn't clear. Go look at each section in your Seller Hub and let us know what you see. That would help.
"my sponsored and promoted listings never made it to any shopping search result of any search engine, google or otherwise" I have no idea how you could or have proved that. That would be a darn high bar to meet. Keep in mind that while you are Below Standard, you have no Promoted Listings.
All promoted listings can't appear at the top of the search returns. That isn't even logical. There are too many of them, therefore they are likely rotated in some fashion. Same as they are you when click in to view a listing and there are a bunch of promoted listing showing inside some other seller's listings. They can't all be there at the same time.
Now not all sellers use Promoted Listings, but there are over 2 Billion listings on Ebay. Even if it was 25% of the sellers that used PL on 15% of their listings, that would still be millions and million of listings being promoted at any given time.
Every seller that gets downgraded to Below Standard feel the penalty fee of 6% is excessive. Can't say as I blame them as it is a lot, but it is an incentive to keep sellers from falling in this hole and heeding warnings sent and to encourage seller to pay close attention to their statistics.
A lawsuit isn't the answer.
