The Black Friday campaign will start on the 1st Friday of November and will last for nearly a month: what can you do to make sure you are ready for the “biggest event of the year” in order to make the most of this period of increased traffic (since much more customers are using Jumia and checking on the available offers, products & vendors) and sky-rocketing sales?
The importance of Seller Score
Your Seller Score is the best indicator of your current operational performance and is used by:
- Customers who see it on your product detail pages (it is thus an extra-incentive for them to buy a product from your shop if your score is good or on the contrary it might prevent them from buying from you if your score is poor)
- Jumia to decide if your products deserve increased visibility (because we know you will fulfil the extra-orders you will receive thanks to this “boosting” and that you will ship quality products that meet customer expectations) or reduced visibility (because you tend not to ship all the orders you receive and/or ship products not meeting customer expectations so we need to reduce the risk of disappointing them)
- You to see what you should improve in order to have a perfect score (5/5)
Why should you care about your Seller Score now?
Your Seller Score is refreshed on each Sunday and is calculated based on your operational performance of the past month so, in order to have the best Seller Score possible when Black Friday starts, you need from today until then to ship on time 100% of the orders you receive & make sure none of those orders have quality issue (wrong product, used product, counterfeit product…) that would force customers to return it.
If you do so, your Seller Score will be at its best for Black Friday which means that, on top of your potential promotions during the “campaign of the year” your whole catalog will get an extra boost online and all your product pages will display your operational excellence, which again is an extra-incentive for customers to buy your product when they land on its page.
In so many words, below are the main ingredients of a successful Black Friday:
- Interesting Black Friday promotions/deals = price incentive for customers
- Great Seller Score = fulfilment & quality guarantee for customers
- Good product ratings & reviews = word-of-mouth guarantee for customers
- Detailed product pages (description, images…) = clear expectations for customers
Your Seller Score changed recently: how come and how to improve it?
1st level answer (if seller only wants to understand why his score has changed)
Based on feedback received from many vendors since we launched Traffic as a currency and the new Seller Score, we re-balanced a few weeks ago the weights between the seller cancellation rate & the quality return rate so they have an equal impact on your overall Seller Score. This is good news for you since the cancellation rate – whose weight was lower previously – depends entirely on you and your ability to fulfil all the orders you receive.
2nd level answer (if seller is not satisfied with 1st level answer or wants to have more details)
In order to become an even more trustable marketplace, we decided a few weeks ago to raise the bar regarding the operational excellence of our sellers by changing the calibration of the Seller Score.
This means that sellers performing poorly in terms of cancellation and/or product quality now have a score even lower than before.
On the contrary, sellers performing well operationally are not impacted by this re-calibration.
Tips to improve your Seller Score:
- To make sure your cancellation rate is as low as possible, you need to fulfill all your orders and do it fast (within 48h). Please note customer cancellations are of course not impacting your cancellation rate.
- To make sure your quality return rate is as low as possible, you need to make sure:
- i) You don’t ship products with inherent defects that will frustrate your customers.
- ii) You have detailed product pages that set the right expectations for your customers.
iii) You pay attention to your product ratings and customer reviews to enhance the quality of what you sell.
I am (sometimes) charged with a “contribution for low Seller Score”: why?
This means that on the same week this contribution was applied to your account statement your Seller Score was below 3. Thus this amount was for you to contribute to the extra-operational costs generated by your mistakes (e.g. not shipping an order, shipping a bad quality product) which force Jumia to step in each time you don’t fully deliver on your customer promise.
Please note that this contribution is always proportional to your sales of the same week (the higher your sales the higher your contribution) and proportional to your Seller Score of the same week (the lower your score the higher your contribution). Since your Seller Score is refreshed every week, this contribution is also applied on a weekly basis.
Also this contribution replaced the penalties we were charging our sellers before each time they were having an order out of stock (OOS) or a product returned for a quality issue: if you are an “old” seller, you can compare the amount you are paying with this contribution vs the total amount you would have paid with all the old OOS & return penalties and you will realize most of the time that your contribution is lower than your old penalties.
