You are so correct when you discuss how outside factors can affect a buyers mood, and thus, what rating they give you.

Hopefully, once all sellers have thousands of ratings, then their true rating will come to the surface. With DSRs being so new, they can be, as you stated, swayed by a few poor ratings.

We understand why eBay is doing this. They have to do something to make the marketplace appear to be more trustworthy. Hopefully they will do the right thing with all of the DSR information they are gathering. And hopefully the use of this information will only affect those that it should and not harm the honest sellers.

Only time will tell…

Yes, we do agree that there is too much room for interpretation in what people are asked to rate. However, as Gary points out below, there will never be a perfect scoring system.

We do like what you say about reasonable. You are spot on! However, if you are being rated purely based on your shipping charges being reasonable, then, assuming you do have reasonable charges, you should get a 5 out of 5.

In other words, you are not being ranked from 1 to 5 with 1 being horrible shipping charges and 5 being excellent shipping charges. You are only being asked if your charges were reasonable.

The problem lies in what people consider to be reasonable. What is reasonable to one might be outrageous to another, and you would be rated based on this.

Again, too much room for interpretation.

Amazon has used a simplified version of the 1-5 seller rating system for years and it’s not at all uncommon to see rating such as:

“4 – lightening fast shipping, absolutely pristine book, great seller. I’d buy from again in a heartbeat.”

The simple fact is that there are people who are never going to give a rating of ‘5′ no matter how well we do. Factor in the possibility that an hour before a buyer leaves us feedback they may have had a fight with their spouse or children, the garbage truck may have just run over their dog, or any number of other things that affect their mood at the time that we have no control over, and I think that over time ratings of 4.8 and 4.9 will rise to the top.

Another factor that comes into play is that the use of DSR is still relatively new, meaning it only takes one ‘3′ or ‘4′ to significantly affect our rating. As time passes, these occasional blips will have less and less affect on our overall ratings.

One bright spot is that we have been given some warning of how DSRs are likely to impact our businesses in the near future. As sellers, I’m sure we can each think of a few small changes we can implement now, that may improve our customer’s perception of our services and, hopefully, cause most of the to bump their ratings from a ‘4′ to a ‘5′ in each category.