Please read this. It is very important. Every eBay user should know about it. Probably I should have made this a separate thread.

It is about DSR (detailed seller ratings) -- those 5-star ratings that buyers can leave for sellers when they leave feedback. They can make or break sellers. EBay buyers may be killing sellers with these ratings and not realizing it.

I'll explain in a moment. To some extent they are silly and time consuming. When they first came out, I (as a buyer) ignored them, which is OK still. In this thread I am not defending them or denouncing them. I just want eBay buyers to know their importance.

When a buyer leaves feedback for a seller, he is given the opportunity to rate the seller from 1 to 5 stars in these four areas:
How accurate was the item description?
How satisfied were you with the seller's communication?
How quickly did the seller ship the item?
How reasonable were the shipping and handling charges?

What is causing the uproar is that if a seller gets below a 4.1 average rating (until recently it was 4.3) in any of the four categories, he is kicked off of eBay!

This is a huge topic on eBay discussion boards (see, for example:
http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID=520054442&tstart=0&mod=1227888626901 ). Most/many buyers would think they are doing the seller a favor by giving him a 4-star rating. (Actually, it is killing him. If he averaged 4-star ratings in any of the four categories, he'd be kicked off of ebay as a seller!) After all, 80% is a decent score in school. Four of 5 stars is great for a movie review. Buyers can easily think that 5-stars is the rare exceptional performance, so they leave 4 stars. They might think 3-stars (a kiss of death) is neutral, meaningless! What gets the sellers particularly riled is the quick-shipping category -- they could send out the item quickly, but the post office can deliver the item 3 weeks later.

So, in conclusion, realize that if you like the seller/don't want to hurt him, either (1) leave positive feedback and ignore the DSR ratings, or (2) leave positive feedback and 5-star DSR ratings for all 4 categories.

Robert

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