Q&A: How can I protect my seller feedback average?
QUESTION: How can I protect my feedback score? It seems giving great service isn't enough. I just got a negative rating from an old lady who blasted me for sending a book instead of a tape. She ordered a book! She won't respond to e-mails, and I'm at my wit's end.
ANSWER: I get negative feedback from clueless buyers too. But since Amazon began allowing buyers to delete feedback comments they've left in error, I've been pretty successful at getting bad ones removed. (At the bottom of this post I've provided a link for buyers to delete their feedback.)
As you know, preventing bad feedback is essential to a successful Amazon or eBay business. When I began selling in 2001, I decided to do everything possible to avoid bad feedback, within reason. So when I can't find a book that I've sold, I'll order the customer a copy myself. When the Postal Service screws up, I'll often refund the shipping fee. And while I'm packing a book, if I notice a flaw that wasn't in my description, I'll enclose a note and issue a partial refund. I jump through these hoops not because I'm a saint, but to compete with other sellers. As a result, I get lots of sales where the customer shopped for the seller with the best feedback.
But even when you correct the mistakes you know about, you'll still get negative feedback from more than 1 percent of customers. A brief, firm e-mail requesting removal of the feedback (and making the customer whole if they've been shortchanged) is successful about 75 percent of the time.
A good percentage of folks who leave bad ratings, like the old lady who zapped you, have some basic misunderstanding about their order. They've ordered the wrong item, or were expecting it to arrive in two days even though they paid for standard shipping. Your challenge is to figure what part of the process they didn't understand, then explain it to them without insulting them.
These days about half of the negative feedback I see was intended for a different seller and transaction altogether. These buyers are fairly cooperative about removing feedback, and I'm always happy to see the red marks erased. But I'll never understand how buyers can be so careless -- if I were going to accuse someone of fraud in a public forum, I'd want to be darned sure I was right.
The most trouble I ever went to in getting bad feedback removed was about three months ago, when a buyer left a bizarre rating, then didn't respond to e-mails. After sending the buyer two letters using snail mail, I discovered she couldn't receive e-mail from my Internet provider. In this case the snail-mail approach was time-consuming but effective.
Here's an easy link for Amazon buyers to delete feedback they've left. Remember to insert their order number after the equal sign:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/css/summary/edit.html?orderID=ORDER_NUMBER_HERE
Tell the buyer they'll need to scroll down the page, and they'll see the feedback comment they left, and a hyperlink labeled "Remove."
eBay has a similar process called "mutual feedback withdrawal."
ANSWER: I get negative feedback from clueless buyers too. But since Amazon began allowing buyers to delete feedback comments they've left in error, I've been pretty successful at getting bad ones removed. (At the bottom of this post I've provided a link for buyers to delete their feedback.)
As you know, preventing bad feedback is essential to a successful Amazon or eBay business. When I began selling in 2001, I decided to do everything possible to avoid bad feedback, within reason. So when I can't find a book that I've sold, I'll order the customer a copy myself. When the Postal Service screws up, I'll often refund the shipping fee. And while I'm packing a book, if I notice a flaw that wasn't in my description, I'll enclose a note and issue a partial refund. I jump through these hoops not because I'm a saint, but to compete with other sellers. As a result, I get lots of sales where the customer shopped for the seller with the best feedback.
But even when you correct the mistakes you know about, you'll still get negative feedback from more than 1 percent of customers. A brief, firm e-mail requesting removal of the feedback (and making the customer whole if they've been shortchanged) is successful about 75 percent of the time.
A good percentage of folks who leave bad ratings, like the old lady who zapped you, have some basic misunderstanding about their order. They've ordered the wrong item, or were expecting it to arrive in two days even though they paid for standard shipping. Your challenge is to figure what part of the process they didn't understand, then explain it to them without insulting them.
These days about half of the negative feedback I see was intended for a different seller and transaction altogether. These buyers are fairly cooperative about removing feedback, and I'm always happy to see the red marks erased. But I'll never understand how buyers can be so careless -- if I were going to accuse someone of fraud in a public forum, I'd want to be darned sure I was right.
The most trouble I ever went to in getting bad feedback removed was about three months ago, when a buyer left a bizarre rating, then didn't respond to e-mails. After sending the buyer two letters using snail mail, I discovered she couldn't receive e-mail from my Internet provider. In this case the snail-mail approach was time-consuming but effective.
Here's an easy link for Amazon buyers to delete feedback they've left. Remember to insert their order number after the equal sign:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/css/summary/edit.html?orderID=ORDER_NUMBER_HERE
Tell the buyer they'll need to scroll down the page, and they'll see the feedback comment they left, and a hyperlink labeled "Remove."
eBay has a similar process called "mutual feedback withdrawal."
posted by Steve Weber at 4/04/2006
1 Comments:
Systematically asking for feedback removal, even if it usually comes with the sour pill of having to give a full refund is very successful. However, 25 % of the cases to not respond to that, even if they are basically offered their book for free. Confused people who made an error can usually be persuaded and helped and if you are polite enough, they are usually pretty cooperative. Sending out a snail mail letter has worked for me in the past, too. That leaves a certain bottom percentage of simply miserable people who are just out to do you harm. If you have enough positive feedbacks, this tiny percentage of grumps usually blends into the rest without harming your overall performance. At least, it's been this way for me and I have been able to maintain 100% for the past two years. However, I think Amazon's feedback system allowing both "4" and "5" to mean "good" is absolutely awful. I wish I didn't have to waste such an obscene amount of time and money on feedback removal of well-in tentioned "4"s and having to explain over and over again that "4" simply does not mean "good", but drags my ratings down. It's driving me crazy, every time I see yet another person having left a well-meaning "4" and I have to go out and explain the whole Amazon feedback thing one more time... It's simply ridiculous. But there's no other solution right now. If you don't do it, you will go from 5 stars to 4.9 and then to 4.8 in no time, without ever having received one truly negative feedback. Your sales will decline. It's all in the "4"s!
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