05.15.07
Repost from old blog: EBay Feedback Ransom
I’m noticing a trend on EBay, and I’m not happy about it. It seems an increasing number of EBay sellers are withholding their positive feedback until the buyer sends theirs.
For anyone (is there anyone left?) who isn’t familiar with EBay and it’s feedback system, it’s designed to allow buyers and sellers to rate each other so that the EBay community can see how trustworthy and fair they are.
Historically, the buyer has always been the one who has to “beware” and has more at risk than a seller. The seller always waits until he/she gets paid before shipping the merchandise, so there is little risk for them at all. This means that the fair way to do things is to have the seller leave positive feedback upon receiving payment, since that is a fulfillment of the buyer’s obligation.
Why has this flipped? Enter the coveted high feedback ratings for the sellers and a few buyers that don’t know what they’re doing. There are a certain percentage of buyers out there who will purchase an item and then not know how to use it or simply overlook something in the description and feel that their only way to communicate their dissatisfaction to the seller is to leave negative feedback. The sellers don’t want their feedback percentage to drop, because buyers use that as a gauge to choose which seller to purchase from. In order to curtail this problem, the sellers think that if they wait to give feedback they will have a chance to reply to that negative feedback with a negative against the buyer. If a buyer has too many negative feedbacks, he/she won’t be able to bid on a lot of items.
How do we fix this?
One solution I’ve come up with is to only give positive feedbacks to sellers who send one to me without asking. Of course, if you have little or no feedback on your account you might want to send them just hoping that you’ll get some back.
The other thing we can do in addition to the solution above is to make a note in the feedback comment whether or not the seller left feedback first. I tend to look at the comments before I buy from a seller, although I’m sure most don’t.
Please feel free to leave a comment.