How to find out who left you bad stars on eBay - with pictures!

This following post will bore my average reader to death. Seriously. You will die of boredom if you read this post. So proceed at your own risk.

I warned you!

Since eBay implemented their star rating policy, there has been all sorts of hub bub about the stars. Now, more than ever, our stars are incredibly important to us because they determine our placement within eBay's search function.  And the higher up on that page we place, the more money we make. So that's a big giant deal. GINORMOUS.

Stars are supposed to be anonymous. Sellers are not supposed to know who leaves what stars for them so that buyers can feel comfortable leaving completely honest stars without fearing any retaliation from the seller.

Now, I'm all for honesty. I think it's important that buyers leave honest feedback and honest stars because that's what is going to single me, a hard working and honest seller, from those sellers that have poor customer service and quality. However, now that eBay has implemented the Top Rated Seller program, my stars are everything to me.

And besides, what retaliation do we really have? We can add the buyer to our Blocked Bidder List and we can tell our friends. That's about it.

Over the past three months I have sold 416 items. If I receive more than two 1 or 2 star ratings in any category, I will lose my Top Rated Seller status. All it takes is three customers to decide that I didn't describe something as accurately as they'd like or that I didn't send them enough glowy emails (or maybe that I sent them too many!) and I lose that pretty little badge. If you're good in math, you'll note that three customers out of 416 is less than one percent. I can make 99% of my customers ecstatic, but three of them have the power to cause me to be shoved further down in the eBay search results and lose a 20% discount on my eBay fees. That's anywhere from one to two hundred dollars a month in lost discount and an immeasurable amount of money in lost sales.

So when someone leaves me bad stars, I want to know it. I want to know who that buyer is so I can make sure they don't buy from me again. I want to review the transaction and see if there was a legitimate reason for the bad rating so I can make sure I don't do whatever that is again. For me, a 1 or 2 star rating is worse than a big red negative.

So how do I find out who left me a bad star rating if eBay keeps those stars anonymous? Thanks to the awesome masterminds of some of my fellow selling friends, I found out how to do it. And I'm going to share it here with you.

First of all you need to go to your Seller Dashboard. You can find the link to your dashboard in a couple of places. One is at the top right of your feedback page and another is on the left side of the "Account" tab on the My eBay screen. I like to go from my feedback page.

Once you click there, you'll see your dashboard and you'll see a box toward the top of the page on the right that looks like this:

See that little link there that says "See your reports"? Click it.

When you get to your report page, you'll see a big blue button that says "Create report"... and here's where things get tricky. Click the blue button. 

Now you're going to get to this page:

If you forget to change the Report Type to "Item Numbers" this whole thing will confuse you. Don't feel bad, I've been there.

You can name the report anything you want that will make you remember to not delete it. I named mine "Test" but you can name it "Don't Delete Me" or "Important" or whatever. 

There's a field there that asks you to input item numbers. What you need to do is find 10 items that you've received feedback on and you need to input them into this field and run the report. 

But that's not all! 

Every one of those buyers must have left you all 5 stars in all 4 categories for the report to be accurate. So it may take a while for you to get your "Test" report. 

So input 10 item number that you've received feedback on and click "Run Report". You'll wind up back on the page where you clicked to create the report originally and it'll take a minute or two for the report to be generated. So just refresh the page until the link to your report is clickable. 

Once you click on your report, you'll find it will probably look like this one:

And you're like, "What the heck?? What do you mean there are no ratings?"  Some of those people definitely left you ratings, but not all 10 of them did. So you have to go back and pick different numbers until you finally get 10 that have left you all 5 stars in all categories. 

You also might get a report that looks something like this:

This one's no good, either. Here we did get star ratings from all 10 buyers, but one of them left us 4s instead of 5s. You can click on that little "Show" link to see that there were 4s left, if you'd like and you'll see it looks something like this:

But eventually, with perseverance and determination, you will finally get your test report with 10 buyers who left you all 5s. 

And the angels will sing when you click on a report and you finally see this: 

Okay, so you have your test report. Don't delete it! Now what to do? 

Now, you can find out exactly what stars were left for you on any transaction. You'll go to the page where you originally created your report and select your test report. But instead of running the same report again, you're going to click "Run Similar" to run the report that will give you the results of whatever transaction you're concerned about. 

Now, you'll just add the item number to the item numbers that are already in the report (making 11 item numbers total) and run the new report. I like to title the new reports with the item number of the transaction I'm testing, but you can title the new report with whatever title you'd like.

This buyer left me what anyone would think was glowing feedback. See?

But when I ran the report on that item I discovered this:

A dreaded 2 in the Item As Described category! I received no contact from this buyer at all and if it weren't for these reports, I would have no idea they were less than thrilled with the item. How on earth can I make anything better if I have no idea there's anything wrong? 

Now, as you'll notice in many of these screen shots, eBay makes it very clear that "It is against eBay policy to question buyers about the detailed seller ratings they left."

So I'm not allowed to contact this buyer to ask her what the problem was, but I might send out an email asking if everything was to their liking with no mention of the stars at all just to find out. And I'll definitely add this buyer to my Blocked Bidder List, because this is the scariest kind of buyer out there.

So there you have it! eBay secrets revealed!