Guest post: eBay, the scammer, and the seller Part 2

This post is going to deal with open cases and the further impact the scammer has on your eBay sales.

Firstly, just a thank you to the two readers of this blog who used the TRS10 redemption code and a reminder to the readers of this blog to use the code ‘TRS10’ for a 10% discount on your purchase from by eBay stores. Click here and here to access them.

Ok. So now that the scammer has got his free product the real repercussions start. There are 4 levels of sellers on eBay; Top Rated, Above Standard, Standard and Below Standard.

The level of the seller determines where on the page they will be when someone searches for an item they are selling. So a Top Rated will generally be right at the top followed by Above Standard, Standard and at the very bottom of the (or 6 pages later) the Below Standard seller will sit. So the higher you ranking, the more sales you will potentially make.

All sellers will generally start at standard or below standard and work their way up. There are various requirements to climb the ranks, amount of sales (quantity), amount of sales (monetary), DSRs and open cases to name a few.

The maximum amount of open cases the seller is allowed to have to be at the lowest rung (Standard) is 1% (so for every 100 sales there can only be 1 open case, or for every 1 case that is opened 100 items need to be sold to counter that case). Tough, I know!

Ok, so one would assume no problem, as long as the case is closed or sorted out I am safe... No! An open case is any case opened against the seller and even if the case has been closed it is still counted against the seller. Only cases found in favor of the seller are not counted.

So this case that this scam artist pulled can have a detrimental effect on the seller. It can put him from Top Rated to Below Standard just like that. And obviously being Below Standard makes is very hard to rank even Standard. The lower you are on the page the less sales you make, so the longer it will take to compensate for the case.

And these cases stay for 3 months so it can take a very long time for the seller to dig himself out of that hole.

Hope this (and the previous) post hasn’t been to long and boring! In part 3 I will discuss how to look out for a scammer, what the seller can do about it and, most importantly, what eBay are doing about it.