EBay rolled out its top-rated seller changes this week, but managed to upset a number of sellers before clarifying rules and dates. As we covered back in July (Sellers: Get Ready for New eBay Policies), the company rolled top-seller status into the PowerSeller program and now rewards those who have only a few 1 and 2 DSR scores with a special badge to inspire buyer trust.
This month, when top-rated rolled out, a number of sellers who met the requirements were not invited to the program because they were not PowerSellers. Information provided by eBay in a previous announcement indicated that qualifying sellers who were not PowerSellers would not receive an invite to top-rated until April of next year. Being excluded from the top-rated seller program right before the rush of holiday sales was the biggest issue for sellers.
New eBay search options let buyers see listings from only sellers who have a Top-rated seller badge.
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The topic had many sellers upset and frustrated, however Brian Burke from the Seller Standards Team used the official discussion forum to tell sellers that if they qualify for top-rated now—including those who do not have PowerSeller status but meet $3,000 U.S. sales per year— they would receive invites for the PowerSeller program the week of October 11th. This will make those sellers eligible for top-rated status around October 20th.
While the official clarification helped, some smaller sellers posting to the discussion forum believe that top-rated will continue to hurt their eBay business by making their listings near-impossible to find and less appealing to buyers in eBay search results.
EBay’s New Featured-First Option Now AvailableThis past week eBay officially announced the retirement of several listing features, including Featured Plus, Border, Highlight, Gift services, ProPack and Homepage Featured. Sellers who purchased these features for listings that are online past October 1st will receive pro-rated credit.
The new Featured First option was also made available to top-rated sellers. Featured First gives sellers a chance to have their listing randomly selected to appear in the Featured area (top ads) section of a search results page.
Featured Plus is another topic that has been debated in eBay's Seller Discussion forum. Some sellers are not pleased that Featured Plus will only show your listing as featured on the search results page it normally appears on. A few sellers believed that paying for Featured Plus would help them to be shown in top ads on the first page of search results. That is not so. If, for example, a listing was shown on page three during a search, Featured Plus bumps it to a top ad on page three, not the top of page one results.
To use Featured Plus, sellers must maintain a top-rated seller status. The optional listing upgrade also does not come cheap. EBay charges $24.95 for Featured First on auction-style or fixed price listings (in three- to 10-day durations) and $74.95 for fixed price (30 Days, Good 'Til Canceled) or classified ad.
New Buy It Now RequirementsYou can add eBay’s popular Buy It Now (BIN) option to an Auction-style listing for an additional fee. If an auction bid has not yet been placed, Buy It Now allows buyers to purchase at the BIN price, instead of placing an auction bid. Until now, sellers could set any auction start price and any Buy It Now price they wanted. Under the new guidelines sellers must set the Buy It Now price to be at least 10 percent higher than the auction start price.
In eBay's official announcement, the company stated that it noticed some sellers would set the Buy It Now price to be the same dollar amount or just a few pennies more than the auction start price. According to eBay this practice takes away from the excitement of auctions for buyers and also confuses buyers.
Keeping sellers on-task with the new guideline will be an automated process. When sellers create an Auction-style listing with the Buy It Now feature, they will be unable to submit the listing if the new 10 percent more guideline is not met. A message will appear asking for a valid Buy It Now price until a valid price is set.
Vendio Announces Reviser Special EditionAs many sellers know, eBay has changed its requirements on Good 'Til Canceled listings, requiring sellers to include handling and return policies. Working with eBay, Vendio has released a simple solution that can help save sellers hours of manual work to updating their listings.
The tool, called Vendio Reviser Special Edition, helps eBay sellers to quickly make changes to a variety of selling policies, including handling time and return policy. Using the tool, you would simply select the policies you want to update on a single screen and have the policy changes updated across all of your live listings.
To use the new tool, eBay sellers will need to register on Vendio.com then confirm their eBay Account with Vendio and enter in the new handling and return policies. Vendio Reviser Special Edition costs $20 per month, and there is no limit on the number of revisions you can make with the monthly subscription.
Vangie Beal is a veteran online seller and frequent contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com. She is also managing editor of Webopedia.com. You can tweet with her online @AuroraGG.
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