Why one should not choose ebay for selling

One the top rated e-commerce company in the world also has shortcoming and policies that do not favour seller that much.
Oh! correction here - Ebay have policies favourable to buyer and not sellers.


Some of the facts that are really disturbing as a seller:


1. Biased Policies - Does not value sellers as partners and has policies favouring buyers.

2. Rating Mechanism - Seller can be rated as neutral, positive or negative BUT a buyer can only be rated positive. Why? don't know?
There is catch here. If you wish to be a seller and has zero rating then obviously you would not attract lot of customers. Simple solution - just keep buying stuff at Re.1/$1 untill you get 100 positive ratings from seller. Normally all sellers rate their customer within 2 days of sale.
Now You are good to sell...

3. Sellers are rated 2 folds. One on the number of positive feedbacks and second the DSRs - Detailed Seller rating. which included seller performance in terms of shipping time, shipping charges, delivery time etc.
These 2 scores - feedback % and DSR runs independently.
Now if you have 100% positive rating but the DSR is low, then ebay would suspend your shop with giving you an opportunity to improve. WHY?
The answer is - ebay only looks at last one month scrore and not the total score. So imagine a situation where you your heart and soul to get 100% rating and 5 star DSR score but in a given month you score goes down to 94%, then you are in trouble and your shop on ebay will be closed.

4. Customer Service - Poor customer service. Hold on... by poor customer service here, I mean that the customer is not empowered to answer all customer/seller queries. Poor representative have to bear the brunt from the callers and usually are in a sorry mode. Let me explain you with an example - sometime ebay would put selling restriction because of their policies and low % rating. You would be simply informed by an email that sch action has been taken. Now when you try calling customer service they do not know why such restrictions has been imposed? Poor poeple... they would then guide you to write an email to inrswebhelp@ebay.com for correct resolution of the problem.


5. Training of customers on rating - The sellers are consistently living on the mercy of the ebay and more importantly the buyers for the positive rating. Because if you rated negative then you may lose your ebay shop completely or even neutral remark over 5% is not allowed. So that sense negative = neutral.
Ebay does not provide a sound training to the buyer on the feedback mechanism and buyer would rate the seller as per their understanding. Example - You can be rated negative without any fault like:
a.) you sold a manufacturer warranty product which later had problem but the manufacturer was not able to fix it.
b.) refund is delayed by ebay but the seller is rated negative.

6. Biased Promotions - Sellers with 100% positive rating and a good DSR can only participate in promotions. No opportunity is given to other to sell in bulk and improve their ratings. Also promotions are expensive.

7. Lack of transparency - ebay has a habit of  hiding behind it policies. You may to struggle a lot to find the exact reason for suspension of your shop. A customer service representation or their email response service will never disclose the reason. I do not why? What are they trying to achieve - an error free world or dark world with no clue whats going on.

There more issues which are critical but I have not encountered them my self. Like billing issues, discrepancy in payment amount etc. You may list here the issue you faced with ebay...