Thinking aloud about stars

soolin

I was mulling this over yesterday evening, so this is really me 'thinking aloud'.

As I have mentioned on other threads I am currently a huge buyer on ebay and I realised my thought pattern when it came to leaving feedback was sometimes not logical. I'm buying similar items and although they are not identical they are all about the same weight, give or take a bit.

If i get an item I immediately leave feedback as a reminder to myself that I have received it. So if i get something quickly with good postage I obviously mark 5* across the board. But then if i get something that maybe arrives a week later than an item bought on the same day (I am buying from overseas mainly) my brain tells me that the seller is not therefore as good as the earlier one so I ought to leave less than 5*- which is silly really as it all still arrives usually within a 28 day period which I allow for Far East sellers. I actually have to remind myself that as long as it arrives in a time frame I consider good it doesn't matter when in that time frame it arrives I should still leave 5*

Then postage is the same, although this is mainly on my UK or European sales. I get free postage quite a bit, sometimes i get stamp cost or stamp cost plus a few pence and they all get 5* (unless packing is rubbish). So if i get charged stamp cost plus 77p recorded on a sub £5 item (which I do quite often) it really stands out compared to other sellers it looks high and I automatically start considering a 4* purely because I am comparing to other sellers even though the seller has done nothing wrong. (I do still leave 5* though)

My thoughts are though what if other buyers are doing this automatically? 5* being perfect and any seller who doesn't then match up to a perfect seller getting marked down? So a buyer buys 4 items, 3 arrive quickly with free or cheap postage but one takes an extra day and with an extra 77p for recorded being charged- that makes it stand out.

Obviously there is no way of auditing this as a theory but maybe it is high volume buyers that we should be wary of, and not new buyers?

Crowqueen

Logic often doesn't come into it, Soo. I know I act irrationally as a buyer and therefore use that knowledge when I sell.

Unless something really annoys me I usually leave 5s across the board - not through any compassion to sellers, it's just what I do automatically and did right from when I first used the system back in 2007-08. If there's a delay in posting I have left 4s (I wanted to be nice but I felt someone forgetting to post an item wasn't fair on me paying absolutely promptly; in both situations I got a nice message but felt it had to be made an issue of because that's quite often how people learn - through making the mistakes and putting them right). I don't tend to look at postage cost at all and get very few recorded delivery items (none for about a year now).

I think sellers need to look more at averages and less at the idea that all 5s all the time is good and anything else is crap. People are worrying about 4.8s and 4.9s when it should be obvious that those aren't the stars that are going to get them restrictions, while people are in denial about 4.6s and 4.5s which are going to get them restricted and are lower than average (therefore meaning that most people do manage to achieve better, even with all those buyers who supposedly can't read the listings or want it delivered yesterday out there). The scaremongers have convinced the good sellers they are going to Hell if they have less than 5 star ratings, while the bad sellers don't see past their own emotional attachment to their sales or listings and therefore have convinced themselves that it's the buyers at fault - when the buyer doesn't actually have most control over the process. It's easier to give specific advice to people on the community forums where you can, as a matter of course, see their accounts and what they're doing wrong.

I think buyers do what they do with psychology and not logic, so it's up to sellers to understand that psychology better. We still get people who come complaining "buyers don't read descriptions" when they have a misleading photograph - which makes much, much more psychological impact on a buyer than any wall of text or pink fancy writing does which may obscure what the listing is trying to say even if the words are technically there. Someone's friend on one thread on the other forums suggested they make their description font bigger in order to clarify their listing (!), and then they themselves asked whether they should use a bold font so buyers see the words clearly! People don't understand what a good item description really is - and then say the fault is with the buyers somehow "not reading" - when they have never had a problem reading mine.

I see no reason to stop being illogical because most people just don't think this hard about DSR ratings if they are not sellers themselves - which probably is the vast majority of eBay users and the ones who dictate site averages.

soolin

I think then that the trick would be how to use psychology to get good stars..an interesting thing to think about.

wendym

The trick is clearly to have had 5 stars (wish I knew how) from the beginning, then buyers tend to follow the trend and go with the flow.

I'd like the DSRs re-phrased to make it clearer that they are supposed to be objective, not subjective eg for 'communication' something like 'did the seller let you know the item had been dispatched, and did you receive replies to messages you sent?'.

I think the crunch is that we (certainly I) tend to forget that most people are buyers and not sellers, and as a buyer you can have no idea of the significance of low stars.

But last night I heard something I had never considered. Having a drink with neighbours, I was asked for advice about selling on Ebay. The questioner 'just knew' she'd be good at it. Missing out all the dull bits, she told me that she 'usually' leaves 1 star for postage charge because she thinks Royal Mail need to be told that their prices are exorbitant. Seriously. She claimed that my interpretation must be mistaken.

Crowqueen

You don't see the sellers' other stars when making a decision how to mark them, so I doubt buyers are going to look at any trends.

They are subjective, but so is the opinion of any transaction, based on how much the buyer has paid and how well they think the seller has responded.

hermum

Crowqueen wrote: »

You don't see the sellers' other stars when making a decision how to mark them, so I doubt buyers are going to look at any trends.

They are subjective, but so is the opinion of any transaction, based on how much the buyer has paid and how well they think the seller has responded.

You may not know whether they have got one x 1 or 7 x 3's but you do know whether they have 5 across the board or 4.8 etc.
They are rarely marked on how much someone has paid, nor should they be as there isn't yet a star for that.
If they think that the cost is too high then they shouldn't have bid that much, in the case of BIN's nobody has forced them to press the button.
If that happens every time someone gets caught up in auction fever, that will be the seller marked down & their account lost.
Possibly for taking good pictures writing good descriptions & having a sought after object.

FRUIT_SALAD

wendym wrote: »

But last night I heard something I had never considered. Having a drink with neighbours, I was asked for advice about selling on Ebay. The questioner 'just knew' she'd be good at it. Missing out all the dull bits, she told me that she 'usually' leaves 1 star for postage charge because she thinks Royal Mail need to be told that their prices are exorbitant. Seriously. She claimed that my interpretation must be mistaken.

:eek: doesnt she realise that RM and eBay are two seperate things?

Strapped

FRUIT_SALAD wrote: »

:eek: doesnt she realise that RM and eBay are two seperate things?

Unfortunately, some buyers don't. I charge actual postage on one of my categories and have had a couple of comments now that £4.41 is too much postage. I've noticed that I haven't since I put the price of the item up, so maybe it is relative to the price of the item (eg £5 + £4.41 = high postage but £15 + £4.41 = OK postage).

pitkin2020

To complete the DSR's properly you can not really compare between sellers, each seller should be marked upon their own merit. Not every seller goes to the post every day, some only twice a week. Even if they are posted the same day it doesn't always result in them arriving the same day.

If you think the postage cost is excessive when comparing with other sellers then don't buy it, don't complain and mark them down after you have bought it. The postage charge is clearly listed before buying so there really is no excuse for anything less than 5 star. Not all P&P costs the same to each person, some seller will buy jiffy bags in bulk costing a few pence each others may buy them from the post office cost upwards of 30p each.

If the seller dispatches within the listed time, again clearly marked on the auction why would you give less than 5 stars if they did dispatch within the listed time frame. Marking them down because the post office failed isn't really fair.

Crowqueen

hermum wrote: »

You may not know whether they have got one x 1 or 7 x 3's but you do know whether they have 5 across the board or 4.8 etc.
They are rarely marked on how much someone has paid, nor should they be as there isn't yet a star for that.
If they think that the cost is too high then they shouldn't have bid that much, in the case of BIN's nobody has forced them to press the button.
If that happens every time someone gets caught up in auction fever, that will be the seller marked down & their account lost.
Possibly for taking good pictures writing good descriptions & having a sought after object.

I didn't mean that I thought there should be a star for how much someone pays. That's patently absurd, for the reasons you suggest.

I meant that when I buy something, I base how I respond on the size of the transaction. If it's just a book or a DVD that I pay a couple of quid for, I'm not entirely bothered how long it takes or how much it costs to post. If it's a more expensive transaction I'm going to be more critical and pay more attention to the seller's performance, and my ratings may be harsher. If someone sent me a camcorder that didn't work and I paid £200 for it, then tried to tell me I was a scammer when I tried to return it or made it difficult for me to assert some of my legal rights on that sale, that seller is not going to get top marks regardless of what other people have left them. I don't see what other people mark, and thus my ratings are left on the basis of my own transaction with the seller and no-one else's.

However, the buyer's opinion of the transaction is just that - it relates to their transaction and no-one else's - how they feel the seller performed for them. Perhaps I worded it a bit oddly, but when I pay for something, does that not give me the right to an opinion on how I rate the sale afterwards.

Objective criteria are all very well but some sellers forget their customers are human beings and are the ones whose money is at stake. They effectively want to shut us out of the picture altogether, and take away any risk for themselves - while being in denial about issues with their selling that are grinding away at their ratings.

That's what I meant by what I said.

@Strapped - that actually might be where it's at. From a buyer's POV, some items are expensive to buy online compared to their relative worth (e.g. a 99p book which I can get in Oxfam but has to be sold for £5.40 given the price it costs to post). It's not cost-effective to sell these sorts of items, never has been (tried back in 2004-05 to sell some old HB books I'd read and it was a dead loss even then). So people will notice the cost of posting bulky but cheap items more than they will when they are buying something more expensive. I'm with you on that one.

comic_sans

hi,

i'm new to post but as i often use ebay as both buyer and seller i read the forum with interest and hope i can add to the conversation..

regarding stars, i read an interesting post yesterday that looked at the DSRs rating with a different approach, as in the weight eBay themselves give to the star rating. To be clear, the star rating should be looked at like this: if as a buyer we receive our item as described, in a timely fashion, and with reasonable P&P charges then a star rating of 3 or 4 should suffice, only when we receive outstanding service should we award a 5. this follows in other markets as a consumer such as when booking a hotel, 3 stars is fine (although we woul;d like 5!)

Now, i know Ebay doesnt look at it in this way, and i certainly do not award stars in this way, as i know how it works due to buying and selling, but perhaps this explains why as a seller with an excellent track record can suddenly have a low avearge, because this is how buyers see it... just a thought