@mark, you can read about how Response Time is calculated here and you can see plenty of examples of other brewers’ Response Times (and their corresponding scores) in my original post above. There have been no changes to any of that recently. If you’re asking what is the max response time you can have and still score 90% for that particular metric, the answer = 12 hours; although, the majority of breweries on the platform have average Response Time scores >= 95% (6 hours).
This makes me not want to list anything.
@jnorris Sellers who maintain a profile score above 90% pay no listing fees! Performance-based listing fees only impact sellers who fail to fulfill orders, don’t respond to messages promptly, ship slowly, or get bad reviews. Performance-based listing fees have greatly improved buyer experiences, which was the intent.
@iamjohnbryce – it feels like there should be a way for the system to account for the impact of holiday weekends on merchant shipping schedules without sellers needing to snooze listings. There’s value to Buyers in being able to order right before a holiday weekend, knowing the order will likely ship right after the long weekend. However, these sales punish the seller even though the shipping function is technically not in the seller’s hands (if the hops are stored at a merchant, like in our case).
As an example, take a look at Order #170233 – the PO was sent immediately after the order came in on the Friday before LDW; however, the merchant (YCH) didn’t ship until after LDW. I understand that the “Snooze” function could have been used here to save us from being punished, but is it really a good policy for mass amounts of the market to get snoozed before a holiday weekend? As a buyer, I think I’d want to still be able to start the purchase workflow and maybe just understand that shipping may take a bit longer b/c due to the holiday weekend.
It appears that Order #170273 & Order #170290, which came in the following day over LDW, encountered the same issue, although to a lesser degree – which I think illustrates the point I’m trying to make about how merchants handle order flow from POs arriving right before or during a holiday weekend.
Our score is still a 94%, but our score was close to 98% before this and dropped nearly 4% from this series of orders – all of which were handled promptly by us in the areas we actually control (sending PO, responding, etc.)
Any insight here would be helpful – thank you for all the help you provide on here!
@kavon I agree that holidays should be excluded from the shipping speed calculation. That is in our dev queue but there are a lot of higher priorities ahead of it. We’ve never prioritized this higher for several reasons. The main reason is because, as you mentioned, the impact to a seller’s score, even at worst case, is minor. Your score only dropped 3.63% which isn’t anything to worry about when you’re performing well in all other areas. It’s also temporary - you just had a new sale, so your score will soon increase as long as that new order ships quickly.
What’s curious here to me is why didn’t order 170233 ship prior to the holiday weekend? You’d have to ask your merchant about that. As noted in both the Important details about your new listing and Hops Sold - Action Required emails, we can’t influence shipping speed but sellers can. For example, we frequently hear about cases in which the brewer blames the merchant for slow shipping but then the merchant tells us that the brewery’s account was past due. We’re in no position to arbitrate those kinds of issues. Ultimately, it’s the seller’s responsibility to manage the relationship with their merchant and check in with them if orders aren’t shipping promptly. That’s the only way to ensure a great experience for the buyer.
Your score looks great - keep up the good work!
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