eBay’s top Chiang Mai sellers and their SE Asian seller management team met at the Chiang Mai Holiday Inn yesterday (23 Feb 2009) to exchange information about the marketplace, its policies, and current sales performance.

Presentations were also given by international courier DHL and a new service for sellers to manage their multi-national sales marketing – Global MerchantRun (see photo).  PayPal SE Asia also attended and presented information.  A buffet style dinner was provided by the Holiday Inn for early arrivers.

Of the 30 or so sellers in attendance, approximately half were foreign expatriates resident in Chiang Mai and trading from here.  This is a stark contrast to the eBay team’s last visit to Chiang Mai, in 2006, when they held a seminar for all levels of buyers.  That earlier meeting was predominantly Thai attendees with only a handful of foreigners.  Could this disparity in ratio be indicative that Thai sellers are not succeeding on the platform? There is no doubt that eBay merchants trading in Thailand must sell cross-border in order to achieve success.  The level of eBay+PayPal fees per transaction raise product prices to significantly above the street prices in local offline marketplaces, hampering domestic sales.

Yet that requirement to sell internationally is exactly where most Thais are least self-secure … due to self-perception of poor foreign language skills, and a cultural state that discourages activity seen as “non-Thai”. This language-based uncertainty not only prevents some Thais from attempting overseas sales, but also hinders many of those who do try foreign markets.

Native English-speakers in their home countries can be very reluctant to buy from “Oriental” sellers, even more so when the English skill displayed is less than perfect.  Part of this is a false perception in western countries that all Asian sellers are scammers and copyright thieves.  These conditions all  suppress sales success on what is already an expensive route to market for low-salaried South East Asians.

Thus it was, that half of eBay’s top sellers from Northern Thailand, last night, were foreign nationals.  Their native language skills for foreign markets provide them an advantage over Lan Na natives in those foreign marketplaces, yet they still suffer the “Oriental” seller mistrust from far-flung buyers, and as was presented last night, in many cases they are being punished by the buyer ratings in the system that eBay introduced last year.

eBay’s Detailed Seller Ratings (DSRs) is a system whereby buyers can rate a seller on several key points of the transaction, including – item description, communication, despatch time, and shipping & handling costs.

If sellers average scores in any of those four attributes fall below certain levels, they are punished with lowered visibility in search and browse results, suspended from selling for a period, or could even be banned from selling on eBay completely – all this is done to aid eBay’s quest for their new Holy Grail – the ultimate “Buyer Experience”.  A quest in which many reports say eBay are trailing far behind Amazon.

The specific challenges that SE Asian residents face, from DSRs, when using the eBay platform include the language-based problems for item description and communication, plus severe handicaps for the two shipping criteria.

The Despatch Time DSR is supposed to be a way for buyers to rate how long it takes a seller to despatch the product after payment clears.  However, there are several obstacles to correct use of this determinant.

First and most prominent is a lack of buyer-education by eBay themselves.  Many sellers report that the majority of buyers continue using this rating for the total time from placing their bid or buy offer until the time of final delivery.  eBay themselves state this is not what it is intended for, it is supposed to be the delay between the seller receiving cleared funds and despatching the products.

Obviously it is not possible for Thailand’s sellers to compete, on a bid-to-delivery time spread, with trading partnerships where both parties are inside the same country, thus eBay insists the system is fair due to covering only picking, packing, and despatch time.  That still does not fix how buyers use it though.

The inclusion of DHL at the seminar was eBay’s cack-handed way of trying to redress this shipping transit time imbalance, without any recognition that the sheer upfront cost of using a firm like DHL is unacceptable to 99.9% of buyers on eBay.

Use of a courier firm for delivery will immediately place further handicaps on sellers due to eBay’s new search algorithms that rate visibility in search results based on total price of product and shipping.  If the price is too high, your item drops to the bottom of the results list, and that could be hundreds of pages behind those at the front of the list.

This too will also adversely affect the Shipping & Handling Costs DSR for any sellers who do finally manage to acquire a sale – higher costs = lowered ratings from buyers.

Instead of trying to patch a flawed system in this manner, eBay should be revisiting and revising the core system itself, agree many sellers including most of those present last night.

One reason for such a low turnout of eBay’s paying customers, especially Thai nationals, could be that many have tired of the punishments by DSRs and have closed their eBay accounts, moving their trade to other venues and channels where conducting business is now easier and less fraught with danger.

There was much learned in the after-presentations 1-on-1 discussions with eBay, PayPal, and MerchantRun staff (as always at such events) and I’ll be writing more about that for other sites (including at the BuildaSkill Global Biz Blog where I guest-write from time to time, and which focusses on ecommerce topics).

If you have questions or comments about this article, please post a comment.

Garry

(c) Garry Harbottle-Johnson 24 Feb 2009, 934 words, FSR available. All rights reserved, no reprint without payment.