This morning, I had an e-mail from "eBay Research". Usually, these look like spam, but I woke up early this morning to do work before I head to Wrigley for today's day game against the Cardinals, so I opened it to see what was there. Lo and behold, it actually looked legit:
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eBay sent this message to Sachin Agarwal (sachinag).
Your registered name is included to show this message originated from eBay.
Learn more. |
Dear Sachin Agarwal,
Thank you for being a valued eBay user.
We’re always trying to improve the eBay experience, and there’s no
better group of advisors than our buyers and sellers. We’d love to get
your insight on purchasing items on eBay and invite you to take a
survey to express your opinions. Your input will help us make eBay
easier and more enjoyable to use.
To take the survey, please click the link below or copy and paste the link into your browser.
http://survey.ebay.com/survey/ebay/eby09026?source=BJKjUlPeeK
Kind Regards,
eBay Research Department
Well, it looked like a legit URL, so I clicked the URL to see what was going on - if I had to log in, I'd abandon it, but hey, people like surveys, I'm a person, so I like surveys. (And
Dawdle.com gets paid for signing people up for MyView surveys when they
create new Dawdle accounts.)
It was a quick survey, just five pages, and it was around a new Item page layout and feature. Here's what they showed me:
The first time they showed me the image, they did so without the red box and asked me if I trusted the seller, what I thought about the item, blah blah. Of course, this is the sort of listing that makes me run away, especially with Brooklyn on it. We're all familiar with the Brooklyn electronics sellers that make you call them to "confirm the order" and then they hard upsell you. Plus, the font, all the colors, the bad grammar, and begging for DSRs just turns me off. (Damn straight,
Dawdle's Seller Rating system is the best in the world; people don't have to beg for five stars.)
But of course, none of that is new. What's new was what they highlighted in the red box the second time around: the eBay certified seller badge and description in the upper right of the listing, above the fold on the page. Now, this was just an image, so I don't know what the messaging in the blue links will be, but I thought it was interesting - again, eBay is trying to do right by buyers by segregating good from bad sellers with a bright red line.
Look, every marketplace needs to give buyers confidence about their sellers. I just think that the Dawdle approach is the right one - it's a pure level playing field.
Dawdle's benefits to our professional sellers are about ease of use, not bright lines that discriminate. Individuals on Dawdle who are just cleaning out their closet every few years can be five star sellers, too. Dawdle's Seller Rating algorithm - again,
it's more than just a straight average - doesn't favor our largest sellers. It favors
Dawdle's best sellers. That's why we let people screen listings - right from the get go - on Seller Rating.
We have thousands of items for sale by Dawdle's best sellers. (Our search returns only the top 1,000 matches for any search for performanance reasons. Plus users can easily screen listings by the left sidebar.) But Dawdle's five star sellers are not our biggest sellers, and we we designed our Seller Rating system to give the small, occasional seller as much of a chance to rise to the top.
Look - I root for eBay. I really do. They're not our competition; GameStop is. If people want to lump all marketplaces together, fine by me. They're totally wrong, but fine by me. I'd buy
Richard and Jose and anyone else out there a beer and just chat - talking shop or baseball - and I think we'd honestly get along and that we all generally see things the same way. But, personally, I just wish that eBay would stop trying to make buyers more comfortable in ways that don't favor larger sellers over smaller ones.
