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Posted By: Eric Brehm

Using Detailed Seller Ratings for seller qualification is certainly problematic, partly because of the ambiguity of the English language and partly because not everyone pays attention to what they are doing when they fill out survey-type information. If you ask 100 random people to rate anything on a 1 to 5 scale, you will probably get at least 10 non-sensical answers -- such as picking a "1" to indicate "best" when you should pick "5". Nevertheless, sellers who are really doing a bad job in terms of service quality or inflated shipping charges will tend to have significantly lower DSR's over the long term, and eBay probably has an idea what ratings the main population of decent sellers are getting. So even if the ratings don't correspond very well to reality, and are occasionally skewed by off-the-wall responses, the system probably works reasonably well for the intended purpose.

Edited to add: as a buyer, if I am basically happy with how a transaction went, I will just click 5 stars for all the DSR's and move on. I will occasionally give less than 5 stars if the shipping was noticeably slow or the shipping charges were clearly above the actual cost. I pretty much ignore the rating descriptions such as 'very reasonable' and so on.