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eBay to Drop Negative Feedback on Buyers
Trip Ericson writes "ArsTechnica is reporting that eBay plans to drop negative feedback on buyers. It's just one of a number of changes eBay will be making in the near future. 'eBay's data shows that sellers are eight times more likely to retaliate in kind against negative feedback, a figure that has grown dramatically over the years. In an attempt to mollify sellers, eBay will initiate a handful of seller protections to offset the inability to speak ill of a buyer. Negative and neutral feedback will be removed if a buyer bails on a transaction or if the buyer has his or her account suspended. Buyers will have less time to leave feedback, and won't be able to do so until three days after the auction ends. eBay is also pledging to step up monitoring and enforcement of its policies around buyers who behave very badly.'"
I wish 2 feedback an eBay, plz send codes.
Will code for new sig.
Keep both parties feedback hidden, until both have left feedback. Zero chance for retaliation. Problem solved.
You can never really be sure about who you're buying from as long as sellers can hold this Sword of Damocles over buyers' heads. They need to at least put a time limit on sellers' window to leave negative feedback, so they can't still be holding it over a buyer's head long after the buyer has paid.
I can understand why power sellers would be upset by this. But there are so many scammer sellers on ebay today, relative to just a few years ago, that something like this was probably necessary. The primary purpose of feedback is for buyers to judge the trustworthiness of the seller. And while it also lets a seller judge a buyer as well, this isn't nearly as important, IMHO.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I always hated leaving feedback because the sellers made you leave feedback first. This led to things occurring like, a seller not having items to ship and having to either refund you, or in many cases, send you a similar item without any notification. When you leave negative feedback (as you should) they'd leave negative feedback as well.
If sellers are going to act like stores, then they should have customer service like one and be willing to suck up the bad comments like normal retailers do. Leaving negative feedback was a childish tit for tat response and actually discouraged me from leaving any feedback whatsoever for a long time.
Don't non-paying buyers deserve negative feedback? It sounds as if their plan would eliminate this type of feedback as a consequence. The solution I had always thought of would be to require that sellers, once prompt payment is received, post feedback before a buyer can leave feedback for them. Of course, this would create the same situation where a slow-paying buyer could leave retaliatory feedback for a neutral or negative piece of seller feedback, but I believe this would be much less prevalent than it is now.
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Why should a seller need to leave feedback EXCEPT when the customer doesn't pay or there is an unnecessary return (all of which can be factually documented)?
Is there some kind of "Customer was a doodoohead" thing going on?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
And how does this explain them dicking over the sellers with the new feedback policy?
I think it's obvious the data about the vindictive nature of many sellers may be accurate. However, being able to leave negative feedback for buyers is important and I think they need to find a way to make it work better. If you're selling a high priced item (or really any item for that matter) and you get some bozo that bids with no intention of paying, this can be pretty detrimental to a sale - especially if it's time sensitive (tickets, special event going on, motivated to sell, etc.). Sometimes these same people that are selling these items time sensitive or not, want to be able to look at their top bidders and know if they're serious. You might have a guy with 25 positive feedback, but when you see he has 35 feedback total with 10 negatives for not following through on his last 10 transactions, it's good to be able to cancel/block this guy.
There are obviously some flaws with the system (human flaws right?), but there should be a good remedy to make this work a little better.
I've had issues with two sellers like this. One sent me a game without a CD key and then furnished me with the first quick google search for one. The other sent me an item that wasn't what I bought. Neither would return my emails until I left negative feedback and of course I got negative feedback and a withdrawal request the same day. The bad sellers were using negative feedback on a buyer to push for a withdrawal to keep their record clean. I have quit purchasing from ebay for other reasons but it is a good change.
From my point of view, this is a good thing to remove negative feedback for buyers. My personal experience three years ago is when I gave a 'neutral' feedback to a seller that inflated the shipping price after the bid's closing, with no mention at all of the extra fees in the item description, that seller gave me my only negative feedback. I fought for a long while, and realized eBay support sucks and they're not really helping, and then, disgusted, stopped shopping on eBay except on rare occasions (prices are generally higher on eBay than elsewhere and the purchase is somehow riskier, but sometimes you find things hard to find anywhere else).
It's hard to be a "bad buyer", either you pay the amount, either you don't. No?
Animoog.org
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
These days most sellers are using paypal so you don't have to "slow" buyers.
A few years ago I bought a motherboard on EBay. I paid for insurance and waited. It never came we tried to contact the seller and nothing. We contacted paypal and they said that the seller claimed to have shipped it and we had waited too long. So I contacted my bank and they reversed the charge.
All the time the seller protested that he had sent it. We mentioned that we did pay for it to be insured but that didn't seem to make any real difference.
My wife wouldn't post negative feedback because when she check this guy had a bunch of new negative feedback about not shipping stuff.
Every buyer that gave him negative feed back got negative feedback from him!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I couldn't agree more.
There are times where I've wanted to leave negative or neutral feedback, but won't because I know I'll get retaliated and the negative feedback hurts me a lot more than it hurts a power seller with 10,000 transactions.
It seems standard practice these days that a seller won't even leave feedback until they see what you've written.
Way back in the day, E-Bay used to be a great place to find and buy some pretty neat stuff. I bought several Sega GameGears, a complete C64 with original TV "monitor" (all in the original boxes), several "vintage" PC games and other odds and ends you couldn't easily find in other places.
Unfortunately, for the last several years, E-Bay has become a haven for scam artists and people who try to sell crap in bulk. It feels more like a cheap flea-market than an actual auction.
I hope E-Bay can turn things around by focusing a bit more on the individual buyer, but I'm not optimistic.
Sorry, we're going to have to remove this negative feedback, Mr russ1337.
That's an interesting idea. Another idea could be something like what is used here on /.
Buyers and sellers could "opt-in" to a moderated rating system. Under such a system, meta-moderators could rate buyer or seller feedback as "fair" or "unfair" depending on the justification for the rating by the buyer/seller. Buyer or seller could leave the the moderated user-rating system at any time, but could not re-enter once they leave. "Fair" ratings would remain, while "unfair" ratings would not, and enough "unfair" rating would be noted in the respective accounts.
That would still leave the question of who watches the watchers, or how one could get to meta-moderate, but it's a place to start.
Just my 2 cents.
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
I've lost hundreds of dollars hanging onto my 100% because of obnoxious buyers. I had one insist on overnighting a camera back to me after he couldn't figure out how to use it. I wound up refunding everything including the overnight charges. As part of that same sale two buyers in a row bailed out on me and Ebay tried to charge me both times. The first buyer didn't even respond after running up the sale price. The second guy claimed he didn't mean to bid eventhough he bid in the last 20 seconds of the sale. When I said I'd have to leave negative feedback he agreed to pay for it but then I wound up eating the overnight shipping when he whined about not being able to use the camera. I've had other problems with buyers as well as sellers but most of the trouble I've had was with buyers. Too many people get caught up in the excitement of bidding then don't want to go through with the purchase. It's not just odd collectables that get run up beyond what people are willing to pay it's often common items that aren't common to see on Ebay. I stopped selling through Ebay because it was too hard to keep my 100% and I hate dealing with Paypal. Also when Ebay made errors and overcharged me it took three months to get them to respond and refund the money.
I'm sure eBay understands that there are no sellers without buyers. If people are afraid to purchase items on eBay because of jerk sellers, then people won't buy things, and good sellers will use a more reputable service to sell, so eBay will take in fewer fees. In order to survice, eBay needs to keep up its reputation with the end consumer, not merely the entity with which it directly involves itself (the seller, via fees).
That since eBay was losing the social aspect of the site to mySpace and Facebook that it had in the great long ago. It was going back to the core of it's business and that was to make sellers happy to move more stuff and generate more clicks. If people don't know they're buying from a troll they're more likely to try to buy from them and this would fit with the business of eBay... to make the Seller happy and get ad revenue.
Or am I thinking eBay is just being an evil corporation or no reason?
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
We maintain multiple powerseller accounts with positive feedback totaling almost a combined 20,000 unique positive feedbacks. This is the worst thing imaginable for sellers. There will no longer be a balanced system, and sellers will have no way of protecting themselves from poor buyers because they will simply have 100% positive feedback. Sellers depend on other sellers to leave legitimate feedback as a guide for the integrity of the bidder. eBay has begun shifting (under a new CEO) to a format of mainly new inventory with the focus entirely on the buyer. What they do not realize is that sellers are their employees, and they are consistently ignoring the needs of sellers to provide them with revenue (i.e. increasing final value fees, listing fees, removing negative feedback). I am extremely frustrated with eBay, and along with many others, will be participating in a powerseller boycott in the following week.
"In order to clamp down on the practice of tit-for-tat feedback, eBay will begin preventing sellers from leaving negative feedback on buyers."
I was going to summarize this but that one sentence is about as basic as it gets.
How does it dick over the sellers to not be able to retaliate? TFS says they're going to replace it with other steps for seller protection, so I think you're venturing into hyperbole territory.
I look at a seller's negatives, skip the ones which seem dumb, then check the comments of buyers who gave negatives that sound reasonable. If they get negatives from the seller, I label the seller "vengeful asshole" and pick a different one.
Once I took the risk and got screwed by such one. He never got a comment from me. He paid up by court order, 1x the sales value for me, and 20x to a charity of the jury's choice.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
The people with 20,000 feedback are the hardest to deal with anyway. They always have the crazy descriptions that are borderline unreadable, take minutes to load, and have the shipping price buried in something that looks like a legal document.
You won't be missed by the buyers during your silly little boycott.
The only time I've gotten a bad deal on E-Bay was some "power seller" that sent me a radio with a bad tape player and then tried to take me to arbitration over the bad feedback!
The GP's solution allows bad sellers to avoid negative feedback by simply not posting any feedback themselves. To prevent that, eBay should also, after a period of time, display any feedback left by either party and disallow anymore feedback for the transaction.
Also, just so we're clear, neither party's feedback should figure into the other party's overall rating until that feedback is displayed. It doesn't take a genius to figure out who left negative feedback about you when your rating falls.
The problem is that when sellers get negative feedback, they retaliate against the buyers. So eBay's solution is to prevent negative feedback? Why doesn't eBay prevent seller retaliation? Prevent a seller from posting negative feedback against any buyer who posted negative feedback to that seller in the past month. Investigate claims from buyers of mere retaliation, and stop sellers from posting any negative feedback for a month on the first violation, stop for six months on the second, suspend their account for a month on the third, suspend for six months on the fourth, and shut them down on the fifth confirmed retaliation. Or some other aggressive policy that shows everyone that mere retaliation isn't worth it.
Instead, eBay will stop all negative feedback. Which is the only feedback that I ever look at, to see what will go wrong (things going right is the expected default, until I look at feedback). That will turn all eBay transactions into uncertainty, which is bad for the entire market.
But I guess eBay can rely on its monopoly (look it up, it means "market controller", not "sole marketer") to keep business roaring. Remember that eBay also controls PayPal, the unregulated Internet global banking monopoly, and Skype, the unregulated Internet global telco (not yet a monopoly, but gaining...). While eBay was protecting the consumer, those global market dominances in retail, banking and telephony were not such a threat. But now that they're showing the corporate bias towards secrecy to "solve" problems of abuse, they need a hard look.
Someone's got to protect the consumer, even if it means just forcing eBay to allow consumers to inform each other what sellers and eBay are working against them. It doesn't have to be a government. Something like Froogle's reviews could harness people power around the world to do it even better.
--
make install -not war
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I sold full time on eBay for about two years - I quit because I moved on to a better job, but my father still sells on eBay part time. From my perspective this is a good change. There is no way to leave "honest" negative feedback because of fear of retaliation, so one way or another the system had to change. Buyers need to be able to see negative feedback far more than sellers do - sellers have all the power, not buyers. The buyer sends the money, then the seller sends the goods. There is no point where the seller has neither money nor goods - but during the entire shipping process, the buyer is without his money and without his goods. So, unless you're a complete idiot seller, there's simply no way to get scammed on eBay. It's very easy, on the other hand, for buyers to get scammed. The worst thing that can happen to you as a seller is to have the buyer just not pay - but if that happens, you can file a non-paying bidder report to eBay and they will refund your final value fees, so even there you really don't lose out (they don't refund the listing fees, but considering they just lowered listing fees, this is even less of an issue now than it used to be - and you're also allowed to offer the item to the underbidder if the first bidder didn't work out, or relist the item). The other difficulty you may have as a seller is that if your buyer pays with PayPal or a credit card, he or she may file a fraudulent chargeback against you. This may be something you can use feedback to protect yourself against, but it's really an imperfect system. It's always been difficult to censor buyers based on feedback anyway - what are you going to do if the buyer bids at the very last minute, and you don't have time to cancel their bid and block them? eBay did allow you to set conditions for buyers and back out of the sale if the buyer didn't meat them, but it was always a difficult thing to enforce, anyway. As a seller you simply have to realize that there are a few small risks that come with retail (such as chargebacks, returns, and the occasional cranky buyer).
Brick and mortar retailers are just as exposed (or even more exposed) to these problems. If eBay sellers want to be taken seriously, they just need to accept the there will occasionally be issues. The mantra of all successful retail businesses is that "the customer is always right". Whatever losses you take from the occasional return or other problem are more than made up for by the boost to your reputation you get by having customers view you as a fair and flexible retailer. If you want to be in retail, you've just got to have thick skin. I'm sure eBay has made the decision that if sellers can't accept selling by the terms of the normal retail environment, then they really don't need to be selling on eBay. All they will do is lower buyer's confidence and hurt the site's reputation
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I think it would be much better to have separate buyer/seller feedback. If I'm buying something, I don't care if the seller has lousy buyer feedback. And vice versa. Having the two sets of feedback in one pool is what makes retaliation really serious -- one bad seller retaliating against you can affect your reputation as a seller.
Not showing the feedback until both parties have commented is another good idea. That would help even more.
-Esme
THAT'S why I stopped using Ebay, not some stupid feedback issue.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I made my living off eBay for 2 years and trust me when I say there are at least as many crooked buyers as there are sellers. Arguably more in fact because the way eBay is set up its easier to be a crooked buyer than a crooked seller. Yes, we left retaliatory feedback for buyers who gave us unjustified negative feedback. Nobody is perfect but there are way too many people who will try to screw sellers over if the sellers have no means of redress. Want to get something for free of eBay? Buy with PayPal and use the magic words "not as described". Send back an empty box (for proof of return) and PayPal will automatically give the money back. Happened to us multiple times. Oh, and "not as described" works for cases of buyers remorse too, even if it was completely accurately described and you have a no return policy. After all, eBay doesn't know and doesn't give a shit.
In disclosure I'm quite bitter against eBay. They raise rates every six months like clockwork. Some of their (and especially PayPals) dispute resolution policies are insane. They screw honest sellers in a variety of ways (I'll enumerate if anyone's interested) and basically make it nearly impossible to make any money selling on eBay. Being a Power Seller is nearly worthless. We sold literally millions of dollars of products on eBay, they made hundreds of thousands of dollars on our work, had a 99.6% positive feedback and eBay treated us like garbage the whole time.
Some folks have suggested that feedback not appear until both parties have left feedback. Not a bad idea but unlikely to be a panacea either. High volume sellers simply don't have time to leave honest and accurate feedback for every transaction. There just aren't enough hours in the day and the cost/benefit just doesn't justify spending the time. Plus I guarantee that some people will leave negative feedback no matter what (think "feedback trolls") without any redress if it is unjustified. At least until recently sellers could make a case that they were being unfairly treated.
Have a time limit of 60 days to leave feedback. If you haven't left any by that point, all feedback left will show up and you can't retaliate.
If I'm running bogus auctions to rake in money before anyone notices, this could give me an extra 80 days before new victims get any warning.
- http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/listing-shipping.html
Unfortunately, this policy is commonly ignored. It is quite common to find an item which is $1, shipped by first class mail for under $1, in an envelope costing under $1, which took under 2 minutes to pack, but which the seller wants to charge $12 or more for shipping/handling on. $10 for stuffing an envelope is excessive.
What it is, is a scam by sellers to significantly reduce their "final value fees" by moving dollars from item cost to shipping. The "shipping and handling" is a profit maker for them, in direct violation of eBay policy.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
It "dicks over" (great phrase) a seller like me because if someone bids on a high-value item, now I will have no way of knowing if they have stiffed or otherwise screwed other sellers previously. A lot of sellers have personal policies about protectively refusing or canceling bids from bidders with a significant percentage of negative feedback. Now when someone bids on my auction, he/she may have stiffed the last three sellers they deal with, and I'm clueless.
Every time eBay changes its policies, it makes it more and more of a crapshoot to try to sell anything on there. But they are the 800-pound gorilla of the online auction world, which means the hassles are still to some extent mitigated by the much larger audience viewing ones auctions. Whenever crap like this comes down from on high at eBay, you will hear sellers rant and rave about how they are going to take their business elsewhere. Most don't; a few do but quickly return when they try using the smaller auction sites and see their income plummet.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
What I really wish ebay would do, is make it easy to just see negative feedback. I only care about a sellers negative feedback when trying to figure out the quality of their service. Instead, I can set the number per page to 200, but on power sellers, I still have to click through many pages and hunt down the negative ones.
Isn't that a problem which could be solved much easier by simply making it so that the seller had to leave feedback about the buyer first, or by making feedback invisible to the other party until both parties have left their feedback? That would protect buyers from retaliatory feedback without removing the ability to leave negative feedback where it is due.
in the future do everyone a favour and don't bother sending the accused to the article,
instead send them here www.rtfa.co.uk
Now then - I could live with the change if eBay would improve the trade rules and their enforcement in addition to "automating" seller feedback (essentially what they are doing - the deadbeat buyer gets flagged by the system not by the seller). It sort of looks like that may be what they're doing but it might be too early to tell.
Too many buyers (and sellers for that matter) are far too casual about communicating after an auction closes. When I buy or sell something at a live auction, the deal is closed before I leave the property. Yet on eBay, depending on the nature of the auction, there could be a lengthy delay between auction end and any enforcement actions taken or permitted by the system. Thigs I'd like to see:
Bottom line is that the feedback system, despite it's blemishes, is the one thing that lends a tiny bit of integrity when dealing with unknown buyers or sellers. As long as the improvements come with balance it's probably going to be a good thing. Personally, I take the feedback in context when I read it. If someone has one or two bad remarks you can usually see from the comments if it's some sort of extraordinary issue or not. Ditto for tit-for-tat nastiness. More than that shows a pattern and I avoid.
Agreed - unfortunately sniping is a necessary mechanism due to the less-than-perfect market that ebay represents. It avoids putting others into a psychological bidding war against you - and since most people don't understand proxy bidding sniping basically means not giving most of your opponents a chance to bid against you. Also - sniping works better when you can group auctions - if you want 512MB of RAM and don't care which of 500 auctions you win, why put bids on only one when you might spend less bidding on another?
The proxy bidding system isn't a bad concept, but it has its weaknesses. Most are psychological in nature, and since I can't count on the psychology of my opponents I maximize my advantage...
That doesn't resolve it, that just makes the buyer blackmailing the seller.
Simply put, the buyer is to bid and then pay-- the rest is the responsibility of the seller. So by being able to mark a buyer as 'non-paying' in their new system will have huge effects on their buying ability, while buyers can still rate the seller without fear of the "I'll rate you when you rate me" blackmail.
This is a great change.
On the other hand, many/most eBay sales are auctions. Many physical auctions require that bidders be pre-qualified to bid.
Hard to argue that this is a change designed to present an accurate record of all members' experiences. If eBay would just be honest and say, "We want to empower buyers to give honest feedback on sellers," some of the controversy goes away (not all of it by any means). eBay has done about as poor of a job describing and selling this change to its members as it possibly could. The failure to accurately describe and sell all the recent changes bothers me more than the change itself. eBay needs to lead its members and using smoke and mirror tactics to describe the changes only undermines what authority it has.
Shoestring Theory
Auctions need to be extended 5 minutes after the last successful bid. Then sniping and snipers go away.
Maximize *this*.
And this is why I don't shop from people with perfect feedbacks. Ignore the good feedback, read the negative feedback. If the negative feedback is coherent, well laid out and contains proper spelling and grammar, I will ignore any comments from the seller about the negative feedback. Haven't had a problem so far. Then again, I shop about once every 3 years on eBay.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Your approach is similar to mine. The points or percentage scores are too easy to game and therefore are useless. I read the actual comments with a critical eye. The credibility of the feedback comments vary by a factor of 1000 to 1, so focus on the credible comments, and follow the links to see if the buyer is a whiner or not. This points up the reform Ebay should be making: Increase the permissible length of feedback comments. 80 characters is so 1996.
The gun auction sites have a built-in resistance to many of Ebay's problems. You can ship a gun only to a federally licensed dealer, so that automatically puts an identifiable escrow agent into the transaction as a witness. Legally, he is there to see the ID, but also he obviously sees the gun actually delivered to the buyer's possession. EBay might take a lesson from this and open a counter at every Kinko's where you show can show a claim code and get the stuff. Or see the benefit of real meatspace ID's and offer a type of account verified by a notary.
Maybe someone can come up with a web-of-trust scheme to rate buyers & sellers more effectively. I doubt Ebay ever will. The most likely result is Ebay will continue to flounder about, the alternatives will never gain traction, and the world will revert to how it was before Ebay came about. Only now classifieds are free on Craig's list and middlemen are easy to find on Google.
>>> "do they have the right to investigate my background and decide to tell me that they do not want to sell their goods to me because I did something they do not like in my past?"
Yes actually. It's called a credit reference check. Of course if you pay cash for most transactions you're fine. There are other restrictions like having age ID, having a driving license (hiring a vehicle), etc..
Also displaying goods is known (IIRC, in the UK) as an "offer to treat" and doesn't obligate the retailer in anyway to sell you the goods (but if they do sell them then they are obligated to do it in the proper manner, eg at the right price, etc.). This issue often arises when selling to children - no matches and paraffin, no eggs and flour, you get the idea.
If I don't like the look of you I won't let you in or will quickly usher you out of my store. If I've just seen your picture in the paper associated with anti-social behaviour then I'd be even more inclined to do that. Larger stores in most cities have a "store watch" or similar that bars people who have been caught shoplifting or which ensures suspected shoplifters are escorted around the store. So, this sort of thing does translate from/to the web/traditional retail environments.
Buyers of course have ample opportunity too to know about who they are buying from. There are lists of registered companies (with details of directors and other personnel). Also there are established mechanisms (trademark law and other consumer rights laws) that protect buyers at traditional retail outlets.
Basically I think your whole argument is pure bunkum.
I consider myself to be a good eBay buyer and seller. I always leave honest feedback. Most has been positive, but some has been negative.
I've received no negative feedback as a seller, despite several disputes that I eventually resolved with the buyers.
The biggest problem I've had with eBay is that they don't enforce their policies on the seller. I've won several no reserve auctions for high value items at a fraction of the items' value. Just as a winning bidder has an obligation to pay, a seller has an obligation to sell to the winning bidder. Lame excuses abound when the seller finds that the item didn't fetch what they were expecting. I've heard "my apartment was robbed, sorry" or "I can't sell for such a low price" despite winning auctions.
Aside from sellers to bid up their own auctions, sellers who refuse to sell at the close of the auction are the worst part of eBay. I've filed complaints with eBay in each instance, and then nothing. eBay won't discuss the complaint with me for privacy reasons. I doubt the seller even got a slap on the wrist. I've never won an auction and refused to pay, but my guess is that there are much more serious consequences for buyers in this situation than for sellers who refuse to sell.
I don't think i have to go any farther than this.
:( Several with that explicit policy of only leaving feedback after i have done so,WTF? That includes buy it now purchases and auctions paid within 24 hrs. If that isn't good enough for them, I generally don't leave feedback at all. Luckily it has been a couple years since i found a bad seller (probably the types of things i buy). I would like to comment on some poor packaging but it isn't worth the hassle or retaliation anymore.
:( Some of us are capable of determining if retalitory or a trend or whatever, so let us.
;)
As a buyer with a couple hundred purchases now it is down to 25-33% of sellers who have left feedback after paying
Unfortunately without some kind of automation, maybe auto positive after x amount of time, added that wouldn't work either as poor sellers simply wouldn't leave feedback thus not allowing the buyer to either.
What i would like is an unfavorites list to track those i don't wish to do business with again! Or a second favorites list so i could actually save my favorites since i corrupted it into unfavorites instead.
That and a way to sort for negative comments as i like to have an idea what they are and they are a pain to find for ppl with 129783452 feedback now
Kinda mixed feelings on this idea. Especially as i need to start selling some of the extra junk one of these days
As frequent buyer on eBay, I heartily agree that it seems the new trend is sellers will only give positive feedback if I give them positive feedback first.
I use paypal on 99.9% of the auctions I win - so I have usually paid for the item before the seller even knows it has sold.
What really gets me though, is on eBay "neutral" is a dirty word - and in most peoples eyes the same as "negative".
If I win something on ebay, promptly pay, and it takes 4 weeks of me asking via email where my item is - and finally having it arrive way later than promised - why the heck should I give that seller the same degree of feedback (positive) as I give someone who is very prompt with his packages - and is quick to reply to email queries.
I feel that NEUTRAL feedback should be the most common type given out on ebay - and POSITIVE or NEGATIVE reserved for the extreme cases.
Why bother giving feedback at all - if the seller demands positive in order for you to receive positive?
First they burn books, then they burn people.
If you couldn't snipe, couldn't you still place a maximum bid? You know, decide on what you'd be willing to pay and enter the number? Then be told if you win, like everyone else? The software already has a feature for this.
What you want is to trick people who don't know about sniping and who treat eBay like a meatspace auction. As everyone else sees it, if people get "carried away", that's not "too high", it's "what the market will bear".
You say that you wouldn't bid if you couldn't snipe because prices would go too high, but you somehow think that you're helping people by staying and keeping them low (and winning them yourself.)
You've "helped" nobody except yourself. The seller would have gotten more if people had bid the item up. The buyers would have gotten more if they'd had a chance to win.
If you left eBay what would happen? People would still buy things, as people have got to have their crappy collectibles. Regular buyers would have a chance of winning, so they'd stay. Sellers would get higher prices, so they'd stay.
Maybe there'd be a problem with people skipping out, but then there'd be a way to put down a deposit, or people would really use escrow services, or you know, solve the problem without your help.
Meh, if eBay didn't suck it wouldn't be phasing out negative comments, they'd give you more ways to spot people who always reply negatively to any criticism. Frankly, they deserve people like you.
Why doesn't ebay just implement a blind feedback system. The feedback is not published until both of them have left it. If, after some time, someone of them does not leave feedback then it automatically defaults to positive.
Personally I have received retaliatory feedback from some sellers and it really sucks. In fact the 2 negative feedbacks I have is because of retaliatory actions. As someone else have said, when I buy an item and pay immediately, I have completed my side of the contract. There is NO excuse for the seller to leave negative feedback.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
With sellers being 8x likely to "retaliate in kind" it's not the buyer's fault. The feedback system is fundamentally flawed as too many sellers use it as a "scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" rationale. I've been repeatedly harassed by sellers in the past to leave the positive feedback before they do the same for me. It gets to the point after my inbox is flooded with feedback reminders that I wish I'd never done business with them. Leaving feedback for a buyer is to rate their performance as a buyer: sending the payment promptly.
Then there's the otherside of a coin. Years ago, I bought a drive from these jerks calling themselves ComputerGods. I used their online checkout tool three times, would receive no confirmation, then the next day get a payment reminder from their system (the days before eBay's reminders). I called them and explained my problem and they said they would call me back. I went round and round on the phones with them for over a week and never heard from them, so I left negative feedback with the brief explanation, "Online payment doesn't work, seller will not return calls." They responded with negative feedback, "our online payment is easy, this guy has a loose screw!"
I rarely leave positive feedback. A seller can forget about it altogether if they approach me with "you scratch I scratch." And until now, I'd never leave negative feedback on a seller with the fear of them making something up to justify negative feedback for me.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.