below standard penalty

[keithc2011]

After having an ebay store for 11 years and selling a lot of product, I was put on BELOW STANDARD for having 7returns which I refunded in full which were caused by moving my store to a new address and could not ship for a short period I fully refunded on all 7 items------   7 out of 157 sales and I am being penalized for this .   The BELOW STANDARD penalty forced me to end listing on 134 items which cost me money in lost sales as well as money lost for Ebay.     Now I have to wait a month and request an increase in listings !     Lost time and money !      I FEEL IT IS VERY UNFAIR !

[mtgraves7984]

Oh, my! Have you not heard of Time Away? >> Time Away | eBay

[robbie31415]

It's not unfair.

You didn't do what you claimed you would.

Doesn't matter if you fully refunded. You created a bad buyer experience and might have lost eBay some buyers.

Next time do the following if you aren't able to process orders .

End listings

Turn on vacation mode

Increase handling time until you can ship

Use out of stock function and make all your quantities 0.

You didn't do what you should have done.

I'm sorry if this causes difficulties in your life, but this is how it is.

[dhbookds]

If you don't deliver what you promised to deliver when you list, you get sanctioned for it.......  Presumably you knew you were moving and just didn't cancel the listings or extend your handling time.......  I doubt you are going to get an increase in listings until you show that you can handle sales........ 

How "fair" was it to the buyers who spent their time and effort buying from you and whom YOU disappointed? Some may never buy on ebay again........so the rest of us lose out on opportunities to sell to them. 

If you aren't willing and able to take responsibility for your actions......selling on ebay may not be the right thing for you.......

[12345jamesstamps]

A refund doesn't make a buyer happy. You should understand that after 11 years for selling. Quick , quick refunds and sending something for free usually helps a buyer's feeling. With this day and age of emails anything can be done in a day through emails.

[yuzuha]

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@keithc2011 wrote:

I FEEL IT IS VERY UNFAIR !

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And you don't think that it's unfair to those 7 buyers who bought an item expecting it to be shipped within the time frame stated on the listings that they purchased? SMH

[lamber9347]

This is the type of post we often see in this forum-- from newbie sellers. You are not a newbie seller so it's quite surprising to see you post this. Those 7 buyers were left without the item they paid you money for, regardless of your reasons, and regardless of your refunding them. You created a bad buying experience for those 7 buyers, which taints how they view this platform and affects every other seller on here. We need sellers who will follow the policies and procedures in order to keep buyers happy, so they will return and purchase from one of us next time. Lesson learned for you now, completely fair process. Best of luck to you....

[buyselljack2016]

@keithc2011 

ending your listings will not correct the problem.

in order to get out of "below standard" you need to sell things to reduce the defect %age.

failure to improve can cause your account to be suspended

[fern*wood]

As far as I know, we all have the same rules to follow in order to sell here.

[lakefor94]

Nothing unfair about it. You were not taking care of business and with that comes penalties. 

You might be better off to keep listing and selling to dilute the defect percentages.  I mean, what's another 6% in the big picture unless your margins are miniscule. 

[playwithitagaintoys]

Frankly not delivering on 7 of 157 items is bad, it's really really bad. You're lucky the consequences are not more severe 

[mam98031 · Accepted solution]

@keithc2011 

The first step in working your way out of being Below Standard is you have to understand what got you there.  Without that it is hard to fix the problem if you don't actually know what the problem is.

Your 7 Returns did NOT cause this.  In the Service Metrics you would have to have a minimum of 10 of them before you would start being compared to your Peers and then if you were in the Very High percentage you would have a problem.  But you aren't there yet.

For your Seller Dashboard, which reflects your Defects on the account, the only way those 7 Returns would cause a Defect is if you did not resolve the claims and Ebay had to step in to resolve them.

When you moved to a new address, how many days were you NOT shipping?  How many sales did you have during that period?  It wasn't 157, what was the number of sales you had during the time you were moving?  This is VERY important as to why you dropped Below Standard.

During the period of time that you were moving, what was your handling time stated on each of the purchases?  That is important too.

I looked at your listings and you have a variety of handling times depending on the listing I looked at.

It is highly likely if you would review your Seller Dashboard you would find out that you went Below Standard for LATE SHIPMENTS.  

https://sellerstandards.ebay.com/dashboard?region=US

If you are interested is some help on how to dig yourself out of this hole you are in, just ask.  You can do it but it will take a bit of work.  First by discovering the real reason you went Below Standard.

[inhawaii]

Refunding the buyers doesn't make the problem go away.

Refunding the buyers doesn't turn them from unhappy to happy.

7 out of 157 is terrible statistics. 

I agree with pretty much everyone else here.

[keithc2011]

i CAN'T THANK YOU ENOUGH FOR RESPONDING TO MY FRUSTRATING DILEMMA. 

During the move only 2 items were refunded and they are a part of the 7.     They show one of the 7 (the (coin game) as not being settled when in fact I refunded and closed it properly.    3 sales were made during my move and refunded and I responded with an out of stock  as a  reason.                                   I had 334 listings and I am following their orders to get below the 125 mark they are demanding.     I am there now and that is a lot of giant effort to list them initially and this makes that effort a waste of time.          I cannot get below the $5,000-   they demand for value of listings .           So I am continuing to end more listings today, which is depressing.   I am losing sales and both ebay and myself are losing due to this   This  is so frustrating !   They tell me I have to wait a month to get my amount of listings increased ?      Now with the few listings left I haven't had any sales for the last 6 days.                      I am going to have to cancel my ebay store position as without sales I cannot afford to pay for it each month......         Again, thanks for your effort to try to help.... 

[playwithitagaintoys]

What was your thinking here? I'm moving and won't be able to ship any of my items on eBay if they sell; should I do anything about that? Nah, it'll be fine?