Brad Ideas - Fix some eBay feedback problems - Comments

Ebay feed back

Anonymousebayer's — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 07:59:16 -0800

I agree that the Ebay feedbacks are bullshit.

You are in a way obligated by the sellers to give them positive feedback.
Even if you have been a perfect buyer, They won`t give you a positive feedback right away.
Instead 97% wait to see the feedback you will give them before giving you your feedback.

So if you are not happy with their product and mention it (they will revenge you)
regardless if you are right or wrong
for them a `good ebayer` is someone who buys from them, pays them fast and is satisfied with what they bought.

If you are not happy they automaticaly revenge you (you are a bad customer)

Are you sure?

Anonymous — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 08:48:07 -0800

Are you sure about that? PayPal holds the sellers' money for specific reasons: low-feedback sellers, sold an high-priced item, etc.
How to they get their money before the 21 days? Buyer leaving positive feedback or upload a tracking number showing the item has been shipped.

That's a patent lie. Ebay

Anonymous — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 16:31:39 -0800

That's a patent lie. Ebay encourages the seller to leave feedback at payment. http://pages.ebay.com/services/forum/changes.html#o1
It is true that the transaction is not over when the buyer pays, but the buyer's part is over. That's what they agreed to do, so leave fb. If you don't, then don't expect pleasant results with your manipulation of fb.

You speak for yourself.

Azadb — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 10:43:20 -0700

I used to leave immediate positive feedback after receiving payment and the buyer leaves negative for no reason what so ever. Ask them to describe the problem and they cant. You have obviously not sold enough items on ebay to know buyers sometimes suck. I now leave feedback after they do. Holding your feedback as ransom seems to work out better for you. You will learn after dealing with some of the obnoxious buyers that I have dealt with. I appeal all my negative feedback.

EBAY HAS FAILED TO EDUCATE BUYERS ABOUT FEEDBACK

Anonymous — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 22:37:13 -0700

Major failure on eBay's part: hasn't been interested in strongly telling buyers what the Negative and Neutral Feedback is for. As a result,we constantly see idiotic and irrelevant feedbacks left by buyers that say things such as 'I don't want the product anymore'-and leaves a Neutral. Or, 'Have not opened package yet'-leaves a negative, or, 'This movie was not as interesting as I expected'-leaves a negative.

So eBay allows the abuse of the system by new,ignorant or simply mean buyers, when it can very well help the buyer make the distinction between 'Seller's service' and 'Product', because the seller is penalized for all these undeserved feedbacks:

Feedback is for Seller's service to the buyer.
Product can be refunded, or replaced.

I am a Power seller, and have several other Power seller friends, and we have started reading negative and neutral feedbacks that have been left unfairly for various sellers, and we block those Buyer IDs from ever bidding and buying our items, and from being able to communicate with us.

We know that this narrows the pool of buyers and lowers sales, but it's better than suffer eBay's consequences.

eBay doesn't take care of us in the feedback system, so we take care of ourselves.

What a stupid policy to

John — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 22:49:03 -0700

What a stupid policy to have. It was policies like these that made ebay make it so sellers can't leave negative/neutral feedback.

@Kevin: I can see why

John — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 22:45:57 -0700

@Kevin: I can see why sellers would be frustrated at not being able to leave negative feedback to buyers, but sellers only have themselves to blame for this. Take for example what a seller said just a few replies up (it was from '06 I believe), saying they'll only leave feedback after they receive it and will leave the same feedback they receive. Sellers started holding feedback as ransom, and a lot of buyers just stopped bothering with it because they couldn't be honest and didn't care to abide by any silly terms the seller tried establishing in order to have feedback left. The bottom line is if sellers didn't try taking control of the feedback system than ebay would have never stepped in to "fix" it in the first place.

help with negative feedback

andrea — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 14:58:21 -0700

I honestly shipped this buyer's item after 1 business day of receiving cleared payment. I keep a close watch on all items I ship to ensure they arrive safely. I use usps delivery confirmation and after sufficient time had lapsed and the tracking info did not indicate it had been delivered, I contacted the buyer first about the item's delivery--asking if she had received it. Before I could refund her for an item lost in the mail, she leaves negative feedback. Ebay won't remove even though I have the proof it was mailed. Tracking info indicates it left Missippi on July 22 and arrived in Philadelphia, PN on July 25th. No further information is available. The buyer would not revise her negative feedback about the shipping even though it wasn't my fault. What more could she have asked of me. Why can't this negative feedback be removed?

Ebay System

Rosemary — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 17:28:51 -0700

I just had this same problem. Seller would not respond to my emails telling him about the problem. I was told to work with Paypal since I paid through them. The seller finally responded in Paypal and said he would reimburse me for the return shipping plus give me a refund on the sewing machine. Never happened! He turned around and sold the machine 2 days after receiving it back. Even with this proof, Ebay or Paypal would not make this seller refund the return shipping to him. Needless to say I left negative feedback.

Paypal holds the sellers

Anonymous — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:33:26 -0700

Paypal holds the sellers money for up to 21 days or until positive feedback is recieved.

Wow, when was the last time you checked paypal policies?

Devils Reject — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 09:00:41 -0700

*lolz* I think i should register here as an admin, with all these crap assed stories going around. Do any of you sell on ebay amazon or have an e-commerce of any kind?

I do.
Up to silver powerseller on Ebay. 14285 positive.
Promerchant on amazon. 9827 Positive.

Why would you push Escrow. when was the last time you used paypal.
They guarantee your money, they will take it back from the seller.

and as you say...
"there is nothing the seller can do about it"
Get a search engine buddy, you're so 2005...
fool

C'mon... DOA item, fraud? Really?

Devils Reject — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 08:56:01 -0700

Okay, Mr. NotVerified.

An item arriving DOA, constitutes fraud?
*lolz* How many items are purchased through mega sellers such as; walmart zellers futureshop and others.
How many are returned defective. Well if you worked in liquidation/salvage you would know a good %25.
Okay sometimes the item is returned not DOA, but the buyers remorse forces him to claim 'defect'.

With your solid legal stance on fraud, maybe we should together open a class action law suit against every major retailor in the world. As you say, if somethings wrong, it must be fraud.
*lolz* or a counterfeit!

LMAO, you sound like every other noob buyer on ebay. great, great you worked for ebay live chat.
But what we're talking about here is buying/selling, fool.
not how live chat never directly answers any questions, or never has a solid stand on so many issues.

Go to the forum for X-LiveChat Reps, who still don't know nothing bout nothing....
fool.

I used to leave feedback as

Anonymous — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 10:40:49 -0700

I used to leave feedback as soon as a buyer paid but I started getting an ungodly amount of messages asking for partial refunds for things that were the buyers fault. One guy misread the listing and even stated that in his message to me but was still demanding a partial refund and wrote "I would like a partial refund or negative feedback will follow". Another buyer returned an item that he had damaged and wanted a refund for his cost and shipping. This buyer wrote "refund my FULL purchase price and shipping or accept my feedback." This is NOT fair to sellers and it is why sellers wait to leave feedback. Most buyers are honest but there are a handful out there who will try to get their way by using negative feedback. I of course have reported these examples and others to ebay but it is awfully time consuming to deal with threatening buyers like them.

If you buy something with

Anonymous — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:36:39 -0700

If you buy something with paypal and you get a shipment, paypal wont cover you. they will only cover you if the shipper does not have a tracking number and you said you didnt get the item. If they ship you a box with nothing your our of luck, i got brakes from someone and they sent me the wrong ones, paypal said they are only there to protect or payment info. i was lucky the guy sent me the right ones after awhile, but paypal closed the case before he had even reshipped the right ones, they didnt care.

The transaction is over not

Anonymous — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 04:00:52 -0700

The transaction is over not when the buyer pays, but when the buyer acknowledges having received the package and that it was as advertised. Since 2008, the seller has not been able to give negative feedback. Even eBay encourages buyers to leave feedback first. Secondly, feedback is not something that is required of either the buyer or seller. All of these facts indicate that if the buyer wants to receive feedback, it should first be left for the seller indicating that the transaction has been satisfactorally completed. As the seller, getting paid is most important. I like to receive positive feedback as much as any seller but if the buyer does not let me know that the transaction is complete, I cannot very well leave any comments can I?

Fix some eBay feedback problems

brad — Mon, 19 Jan 2004 09:56:21 -0800

Like many, I am interested in reputation systems, and eBay has built the largest public reputation system. Many have noted how feedback on eBay is overwhelmingly positive — a 97% positive rating would be a reason to be wary of a seller.

It’s also noted that people do this because they are scared of revenge feedback — I give you a negative, you do it back to me. One would think that since the buyer’s only real duty is to send the money that the seller should provide positive feedback immediately upon receipt of that money, but they don’t.

Some fixes have been proposed, including:

letting you see the count of total auctions the party has been buyer or seller in, so you can see how many resulted in no feedback at all. Right now only eBay knows how large that number is.
double-blind feedback. That is to say that feedback is not revealed until both parties have entered it, or if only one party enters it, after the feedback period has expired.
Marking revenge feedback, ie. putting a mark next to negatives that were a response to an outgoing negative.

Thus you could have very low fear of revenge feedback and there would be no argument about who should go first.

This idea’s fairly obvious, so like many other obvious ideas about eBay one wonders if eBay doesn’t feel some benefit to themselves from not doing it, though it’s hard to see. I’m also curious as to why eBay doesn’t offer a “going, going, gone” auction where the auction closes only after 5 minutes with no bidding. That seems to be in the interests of sellers (and eBay which gets a cut of the selling price) and it’s certainly not something they are unaware of.

The only proposition I’ve heard is that eBay has decided that there is a positive value to itself (and possibly sellers) from bid-sniping, the process of bidding preemptively in the last minute of an auction to not give other live bidders (who didn’t use the automatic rebidder) a chance to come in with more. The only way this could be good woudl be if Snipers deliberately overbid in order to trump anything. Any research or thoughts on this? It may also be the case that the sniped auctions are more “fun,” or more of a contest. And finally having fixed closing times does facilitate participating in multiple auctions for the same thing.

I have also posted updated eBay thoughts and an even simpler system which eliminates revenge and in fact now have an eBay tag for all eBay related posts, including thoughts on eBay’s solution to all this.

Please Note: This thread is for discussion of philosophical or abstract aspects of the feedback system. Please do not post stories of your own particular problems from a particular seller or transaction. Keep it abstract.