The situation with feedback on ebay is not one that can be defined in terms of black or white. There are a lot of gray areas and it all has to do with the integrity or proficiency of either the buyer or seller or both.

I tend to agree that the sale is never complete until both the buyer and seller are satisfied. I have a 100% positive feedback rating (almost 2000 positive feedbacks) and got most of my positives prior to deciding to only leave feedback once I KNEW THE BUYER WAS SATISFIED. What do I mean by this? It means that ask my buyers to let me know how things went either by posting feedback OR by emailing me. In either case, I do leave feedback. I actually started this policy because it was taking me entire days to leave feedback and one third of my buyer's were not reciprocating. If you research unfavorable feedback though, you'll see that a lot of it is left from buyers that did not take the time to read through the auction description and that many never even contacted the seller.

The one unfavorable feedback that I did get (a neutral) was because the seller felt that the shipping was too slow. The fact of the matter was that I shipped out his item the next day and mailed it directly from the post office so the date of mailing was evident on the envelope. It also only took 14 days for his item to arrive from the East Coast of Canada to California, which is within the normal shipping time (not that I have any control over that anyway). When he left his feedback, he had all kinds of red flags pop up from eBay to consider postal delays, to contact the seller, etc. etc., but he CHOSE to ignore them and left his unfounded neutral anyway.

I know I'm a good seller and for me, it's not about pulling something over on the buyer, it's about encouraging my buyers to be responsible with their feedback and to contact the seller if they are not satisfied. All of my items are sent out with a nice professionally written thank you note asking my buyers to let me know if things were not as they expected and telling them that I am committed to making the transaction a success. I will not vouch for other sellers but my reputation is solid and I make every effort to resolve any issues to the buyer's satisfaction. Unfortunately, some buyers are not responsible. They fail to read the auction details carefully; they fail to take note of emails the buyer sends (like shipping notifications); they fail to take note of the postmarks proving when items are sent and they fail to recognize that postage should also include the cost of packaging materials.

Now that's not to say that there are not some bad sellers out there. There are enough bad sellers that do not accurately describe their items, that give poor communication, that package terribly, charge too much for packaging and take too long to ship. They most definitely deserve their negative feedbacks but likewise, good sellers don't deserve negative feedback from buyer's that are not responsible with their purchases and don't take the time to email the buyer to resolve any issues prior to leaving bad feedback. Also, I would argue that even though the buyer's payment has passed through the seller's Paypal account, there's no guarantee that it's going to stay in the seller's hands. There are a lot of buyers who are scammers too.

Whether or not the seller leaves feedback first should not be the deciding factor whether or not to buy from them. I buy just as much as I sell on eBay and lots of terrific sellers follow the practice of only leaving feedback once positive feedback is received. A lot of them also use programs to do this freeing up the time they need to serve their customers better. What I would suggest if you're worried about "false positive feedback" is sticking to buying from sellers that specialize in what they do. Sellers that specialize are more interested in building repeat business and are more likely to be strongly customer oriented. Looking for positive feedback from repeat buyers too is also a good way to gauge how good a seller is because buyers do tend to stick with sellers they've had a good track record with.