Open Discussion with Sharat on Seller Growth & Trust&Safety (28 Feb 4-5 PM)

[sapana@ebay.com]

Hi,

I am Sharat Digumarti and I have recently taken charge of a very challenging role as Senior Manager - Marketplace Health for eBay India. Under this role, my team and I are responsible for enhancing both Trust and Safety and Seller Development and Growth.

Trust and Safety
I will like to take this opportunity to have a look at the various TnS initiatives in the year gone by. Last year, we undertook various initiatives based on your feedback and requirements. Some of the key initiatives were:

Reduction in Genuine Seller Suspensions: Last year we introduced Enhanced Consequences Guidelines which, depending on the nature of a violation, warned sellers adequately before suspending them. This helped genuine sellers who were unintentionally violating policies to correct their mistakes. In addition, we also made it easier for good sellers to get a faster reinstatement. The introduction of ODR India on the eBay India site further helped sellers in resolving disputes. These initiatives helped us reduce unwarranted suspensions of genuine sellers.

Reduction in Unpaid items: Based on seller feedback, we took various initiatives to reduce unpaid items on eBay. In certain categories which are prone to a high UPI rate, we also initiated controlled buyer verification. This and other similar efforts helped us bring down UPI rates to some extent. However, we have a long way to go to achieve what we desire in this field.

Enhancing Buyer Experience: Our buyers often expressed their displeasure at excessive shipping charges charged by some sellers and bad browsing experience due to multiple listing of same product. We clamped down on high shipping charges and saw good results on the same. While the problem of excessive shipping charges is not yet eliminated, it has reduced significantly. Unfortunately, we were not able to replicate this success in reducing unnecessary multiple listings across the site. However, listing fees in Mobiles and Accessories category brought a significant improvement in improving finding and buying experience for buyers.

Proactive Action against Counterfeit and Infringing Items: In order to remove counterfeit listings from eBay, in addition to co-operating with Right Owners, we recently put stricter measures in place. For items reportedly favoured by counterfeiters, we’ve started requiring additional seller verification. We will continue to keep an eye on products which are prone to counterfeit and will take proactive action against those sellers

Success in Law Enforcement cases: Last year we did extensive outreach to law enforcement agencies and worked closely with them to solve cases against fraudsters who targeted eBay buyers which led to bad buying experiences. Though these buyers have been fully covered under our Buyer Protection Program we still actively supported and worked with various agencies to nab the fraudsters. Learning from these cases further helped us strengthen our filters to catch bad elements at the initial stages itself.

Increasing Transparency via Feedback System: The eBay Feedback system had pioneered the trust levels between complete strangers who transact on the Internet. With evolving times, we enhanced the transparency of the feedback system such that it will help buyers take more informed buying decisions and help identify good sellers. Some initiatives in this regard were the restriction in use of Private feedback by sellers, limitation in using Pre-approved bidder functionality, proactive action against feedback manipulation. The introduction of granular seller feedback will be another step in this direction.

All of the above will tell you about the change in Trust and Safety approach over the past. As my colleague Rob Chestnut mentioned in his message, TnS will be taking a proactive approach to increase trust on the site. I will like to discuss more on the next steps for TnS in my next Open House Discussion on 28th February 2007.

Seller Development Program
Last year we also saw an encouraging increase in Power Sellers on the site. My congratulations to all the sellers who worked hard to achieve the status!

Meanwhile, the Power Seller team worked on various initiatives to increase the value of the Power Seller Program. Some such efforts were the Power Seller Recognition program, Power Seller interaction events in Delhi and Mumbai, Free Packaging Material for Power Sellers, dedicated marketing links for Power Seller products etc.

While I will be taking up this role, my focus will be on enhancing the seller development program to ensure that our sellers grow their eBay business. As we finalise the program details, I will request your inputs on how you think we can help you increase your eBay business. The suggestions could be in area of, but not necessarily restricted to, business development support, customer support, increased interaction with eBay team required by you. Your inputs on the above will help us build a robust program that would benefit everyone.

I will be present on the Community Boards for an Open House Session and encourage you to post your thoughts, comments and suggestion on this thread. I am looking forward towards this meeting and I hope to gather lot of useful feedback on the new role which encompasses both Trust and Safety and Seller Development.

See you on 28th for Open house discussion at 4-5 PM!

Regards,
Sharat Digumarti
Senior Manager
Marketplace Health Team

[skygiftworldwide]

Hi Mr. Sharat Digumarti,

Nice to see you once again on Open House Discussion. I have few points to mention in this regard:

1. There are many cases of Unpaid Items by buyers these days. FVF is credited to the Seller's account but what about the International Listing Fee? The seller loses the listing fee for an Unpaid Item. Most of the sellers are annoyed with the buyers who do not pay after buying.

2. There should be some indication either an icon or some rating should be visible in the ID's of Buyers who receive Unpaid Item Strike. This will minimise the buyers who do not pay after buying.

Hope you should take some immediate action to minimise or stop Unpaid Items.

Best Regards,
Mohib-uz-Zaman

[amitava123gems]

To Mr Sharat,
You have already done great jobs.
We have experienced that in cases of reduced UPI and fast reinstatements of sellers.
My tips to sellers is that,they should list in multiple categories besides their main category. Somewhat like Navneeth selling coins and coin album and I am selling stamps and study materials.That will surely shoot up sells and FB.
Wish you best.
Thanx,
Truly,
Amitava

[snrama]

Hi Mr. Sharat,

Nice to see you again in the community boards. You have done great work and I can see the improvements.

Spam Mails have reduced from past one month and thanks a lot from blocking those mails.

As Amitava said, Selling different product does improve sales.

Bring back UTI Bank Transfers in PaisaPay, This will reduce more UPIs as I have seen rated customers turning down and asking for canceling the orders.

Increase Cross-Promotions Connections from 10 to 20. ---------------
With Regards,
Navaneeth (snrama) 😉

[indconcepts]

Hello Sharat,

Welcome on Board.

We might not feel the changes taking place but when we look back and see in totality .... we all have achieved a lot.

Nigerians gone.
Chinese gone.
Multiple Listings controlled.
UPI down, somewhat.
Fear of suspension gone.
Buyers showing signs of returning.
Feedback system improved.
ODR in place.
Power Sellers being respected.
and much more.

But we still starve for things like :-

1. Immediate payment required, Option.
2. Foolproof verification of Members through Credit Card
3. Affordable listing fee in all categories.

Am not selling in Mobiles & Accessories category but feel that such a high fee is not sustainable in other categories.

In my view, the 3 things mentioned above would definitely accelerate the growth of the site and Seller's business. .


best regards

Umang Midha

[snrama]

Hi, ---------------
With Regards,
Navaneeth (snrama) 😉

[bhagwatistore]

Hello,

We have an issue with Trust and Safety which needs your attention. Some eBay admin deleted all our listings on eBay market place without suspending our account.

We are Bhagwatistore now and were Bhagwatisales earlier.

If you check our about me page we own and operate a real business with more than 75000 sku's.

Please check our account. We have 98.1% positive with 67 feedbacks and marginal neutral (only 2) and no negative feedback from buyer.

Please check our account and confirm that we have always paid our seller fees on time.

We were gradually getting the grip of the eBay market place and even had applied for the trade assistant program.

We are honest, efficient and dignified in our transactions on eBay as we have been the same for the past 23 years of our business existence.

On the 12th of Feb 2006 we had 3000+ listing online in various categories. On the 13th of Feb 2006 all our listings were deleted. We had no products for sale on the eBay market place. This was a shock to us as no alert was given, which is a usual practice.

Let me give you a preview of what has happened before this event.

One major issue we had with eBay was miscategorization. On more than 3 occasions we had miscategorized the product and eBay system had sent us a warning and deleted the products. We did not relist any miscategorized products again.

Let me show you our view in this regard.

We gave importance to not listing a banned item on eBay. We are in the health industry and so we have too many medical products for sale which are banned on eBay. We have almost never had a notice for selling banned items on eBay after a single warning.

We gave importance to duplicate items. We deleted all the items once listed on eBay from our turbo lister so that a single item may not be listed again and contravene the eBay duplicate item listing policy.

For every mistake of miscategorization we had listing restrictions where we had to under go some training and then were allowed to list again. We never complained. We accepted that eBay does this tin good faith. We even had a selling restriction for 3 days starting from the 9th of Feb. We accepted that and then understood the importance of miscategorization.

Please note we do not claim to be perfect on the eBay market place.

On the 13th of Feb without any intimation all our products were deleted from eBay.

Please let us know why?

Were all products miscategorized?
Where in your eBay business policy there is a mention that all the seller products will be deleted other than if the seller account is suspended.

Our account was not suspended. So the result all our listings got deleted from eBay marketplace and we did not have any backup on our systems as we had migrated to the new turbolister.

We claim that this action eBay should account for. We believe that this is high handed and arbitrary behavior not suitable for a large organization like eBay.

Just to state the pain of your actions let me point out that our fixed cost for Shop subscription, Selling manager, employee salary, the courier monthly commitment are still very much a fixed expense. So in effect, your actions hurt our business operations.

Further more, consider that there were 3000 items listed on eBay. If we have to relist each item, which involves takeing pictures, processing the image and then adding information of the product to the turbolister, plus calculating the logistic costs etc. We can add about 50 items per day working for 8-10 hours daily. That means to go live again on eBay as we were before it will take us 60 days of work again.

Finally, we will have to live in fear that again some eBay admin may delete all our products with our a real dialog.

Is this work then really worth the effort? Is eBay mature enough to differentiate and handle good sellers in a better way?

Do let me know your views. Your views here are important because, a kingdom however large and strong with weak leadership will only be destroyed eventually. When eBay hurts good sellers eBay hurts itself. We are part of eBay and our work make eBay the big market place it is.

Thank you for your time.

Prashant
eSales, Shree Bhagwati.

[doyen_in1]

Hi Sharat,

In the last 4 months i have tried to sell a few cars via auctions on ebay.in But i have noticed that everytime there is a winning bidder, the bidder claims to have bidded just for the heck of it. I have noticed that till date none of my auctions have had a genuine buyer as a winning bidder. U can go thru my selling account and u would come to know that 4 times i have taken the final value fee credit. The issue is that i have put in 7 days of auction time and 7 days of waiting time of rthe buyer to respond but each time without any result. I guess there is a loop in your selling, buying system. There should be some way by which a bidder on any auction is compelled to pay for the item he bids if he wins the auction. The problem faced by me should be a common problem with most of the sellers using the auction option on ebay.in I request you to look into the matter and make ebay.in a better selling option.

Shahid.(Doyen_in1)

[shop4999]

Dear Sharat,
Kindly please tell what to do if there is some suspecious activity in our account for example from last 3 days some buyer form ahmedabad is buying many products with different ebay IDs from my listing almost all the address are same or similier with phone numbers also not correct, when i call the number he is not responsing properly that how he bought the item and his activity seems to be suspesious as many phone numbers are not reply. also it seem that payments were done by one bank account only. I jsut want to confirm from ebay that is there any fraud behind it but didnt found any proper link for same. I have shipped the products.
Regards
Jyoti

[veedeedirect]

Hello,

Going throught the help pages of ebay.com (USA), ebay.ca(Canada), ebay.com.au(Australia), etc., I found this policy on warranties:

"Warranties


eBay members who offer items on eBay valued at more than $15 and who offer either a written warranty or service contract with the items must in their item descriptions provide one of the following:

The full text of the written warranty

A statement explaining how a free copy of the written warranty can be obtained upon written request

A link within the listing that takes members to the warranty details

Violations of this policy may result in a range of actions, including:

Listing cancellation

Limits on account privileges

Account suspension

Forfeit of eBay fees on cancelled listings

Loss of PowerSeller status"

But I could not find a simillar policy in ebaY India.

Please comment.