August 10th, 2008 by Skip McGrath

If you are looking for your Seller Dashboard and can’t find it –eBay took it down. Sellers have been complaining for some time that their DSRs were not being calculated correctly. This has affected seller discounts and Best Match search results.

In an announcement, eBay admitted their DSR calculations and therefore the Power Seller discounts were off the mark. Here is the statement from eBay:

As a result of an issue we experienced during the daily update to the 30-day Detailed Seller Rating (DSR) averages, some sellers are experiencing either an increase or decrease in their DSR scores. In order to recalculate all DSR scores as quickly as possible, we have temporarily disabled the Seller Dashboard. We are also removing the trust factors (DSRs; buyer satisfaction rating; and shipping cost, including free shipping) from the Best Match algorithm so sellers are not promoted or demoted unfairly.

Finally, we will not calculate PowerSeller discounts or Best Match standings until the recalculation is complete and the DSR averages have been verified. We are working these problems around the clock and apologize for any inconvenience or confusion that we may have caused our sellers.

It was pretty obvious to me that something screwy was going on.  Although my buyer satisfaction score was excellent, over the past couple of weeks my major product lines had essentially disappeared from Best Match and sellers with lower satisfaction and DSR scores –as well as sellers with higher shipping costs were showing up above me.

Other people have noticed that their visibility and therefore sales were off as well. Here is a note I got from a medium-sized seller of sports cards:

Thought Id send you some stats from Omniture traffic reports on eBay.

On my site….compared to last year, Aug 2007

  – page views down 53%

  – unique visitors down 67%

I have ~1,000 more products in my store than this time last year. Is it the economy finally checking in or is it the new eBay search results?

I just had my worst week of sales in any weeks since I started full time in April 2005.

There are always a lot of conspiracy theorists on the eBay boards, but this time they may be on to something.  Several board posts theorize that there really isn’t anything wrong with the DSRs –but instead eBay is seeing its new system hurt sales and they are tweaking the numbers to bring some sellers and sales back.

There were two major message threads related to this problem. Mysteriously one of them disappeared completely. Why does eBay do stuff like that/ Don’t they trust people to read a thread and understand the difference between facts and BS?

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