So back in April we talked about the pretty drastic and much
needed overhaul that eBay made to how they calculate seller
performance standards, many sellers breathed a collective sigh of relief that they no longer
had to live in fear of that nightmare customer that leaves negative feedback
and wont remove it. But don’t breathe easy just yet, there is one thing that
you may not have considered and that is Cassini. What is Cassini? you might ask,
well believe it or not you are probably using Cassini all the time it’s the
eBay internal search engine. Launched back in 2013 Cassini was a complete
overhaul of how eBay searched the site and how it decided your listings relevance
in the search rankings. Gone are the days of loading your title up with
keywords and just kicking back and waiting for the sale. Now according to Todd
Alexander director of search at eBay Australia (check out this very
informative video) it boils down to relevance, value, trust and
convenience. So let’s address the trust criteria and how this pertains to your
feedback and how negative feedback can hurt your sales.
How is
Cassini grading your trustworthiness? It’s using a lot of different variables
and two important factors are your feedback and your open cases. Bear in mind that Cassini is geared toward the
buyer and not the seller, it’s made to lead a potential buyer to the item they
are looking for at the right price from a reliable seller who has a flexible
store policy regarding shipping and returns. This means that when Cassani
performs a search it’s downgrading your listings in the results if you have a
lot of negative feedback or open cases, essentially saying you are a less
trustworthy seller. What can you do as a seller to combat this? First and
foremost keep all potential negative feedback and returns to a minimum by
accurately describing your items and have multiple clear images of your items.
Second when the issues do arise take care of them promptly do what you have to
do to get that negative feedback removed or that return request closed quickly.
Let’s face facts eBay stacks the deck in favor of the buyer all the time and
this is no exception. As a seller, you are open to potential abuse by an
unethical buyer who may attempt to abuse your returns policy or may just be
fishing for an after purchase discount. Since negative feedback for customers
is no longer allowed how can you tell the good customers from the creeps? Sadly
you can’t, so the best approach is to assume the grievance is legitimate take
the hit and move on. To put it plainly don’t let one bad egg drag down all of
your business.