Suzy Jagger and Jonathan Richards
Posted on 02/06/2008 8:42:06 AM PST by Stoat
All buyers and sellers are equal in the virtual auction world of eBay, but buyers are about to become more equal than everyone else.
From May, eBay, the world's biggest online auction house, will block sellers from posting any negative or neutral comments about buyers who purchase their goods to coax more of them on to the site.
The move means that anyone selling an item will have little recourse to complain that the purchaser of their Britney Spears T-shirt or antique Whitby egg-timer had been a late payer, or had become a persistent troublemaker, grumbling unfairly about their acquisition.
At the moment, eBay buyers and sellers are encouraged to give a rating about their counterpart on the auction site's feedback system, which alerts other customers about bad experiences and helps to self-regulate the auction site. A buyer or seller with a bad rating is effectively blacklisted. At present customers can scroll through several months of comments about both buyers and sellers to decide whether they feel comfortable doing business with them. Frequent gripes include a seller over-charging for postage, a purchased item delivered late or one party being generally dishonest.
EBay has defended the move, claiming that buyers need more protection than sellers because they have to send money to a counterparty they do not know.
A spokesman for Ebay said yesterday that the auctioneer wanted to stamp out an increasing practice where sellers who had received a bad rating would retaliate by posting a poor rating on the buyer. "Some sellers are gaming the system. And some buyers in turn have been turned off," the spokesman said.
The group added that it is rare for buyers to renege on payments. But sellers have claimed that the new system leaves them vulnerable to extortion with buyers wielding the ability to blacklist them without the opportunity to defend themselves.
A week ago eBay - which makes the bulk of its revenue from commissions - announced that it cutting the amount it cost to list an item on the site by a third, but increasing the commission it charged on completion from 5.25 to 7.5 per cent.
For the vast majority of sellers, this had the effect of increasing the overall cost of shifting goods on the site. For instance, to sell a £100 camera now costs £6.70, where previously it would have cost £5.85.
The higher commission means that sellers of high value goods now also pay more.
Sellers have claimed that the new system leaves them vulnerable to extortion, with buyers wielding the ability to blacklist them without the opportunity to defend themselves.
A week ago eBay - which makes the bulk of its revenue from commissions - said that it was cutting the amount it cost to list an item for sale on the site by a third but was increasing the commission it charged on completion from 5.25 to 7.5 per cent.
The new pricing structure unleashed a torrent of complaints on eBay's message boards, where its sellers - who have long been a vocal community - vented their anger.
One said: “The fees are deceiving: lowering the front-end cost, then adding it to the final fee. Anyone who can do the math can see that they are not lowering the fees, they are increasing them.” Another said: “As a seller, I have been kicked in the head.”
The latest upheaval comes at a difficult time for eBay. Its core business has struggled against slowing growth rates and it is trying to combat issues such as fraud, as well as increased competition from vendors, such as Amazon.
Last year it said that it was taking a $1.4billion (£712 million) charge in relation to Skype, the telephony service that it bought for $2.6 billion in 2005 and for which it admitted it had overpaid. Analysts have also expressed concern at the failure to increase the number of users, which remains static at 83 million.
Welcome to an ever-growing list of people who have been screwed around by PayPal.
E-bay should figure out how to track late payments directly, and do their own “rating” for the buyers that way. Buyers should not be rated subjectively.
A better system would to be to prevent any feedback for a given transaction from being publicly posted until both buyer and seller have left feedback. Eliminates the retaliation phenomenon, while keeping information about both buyers and sellers available to prospective buyers and sellers.
Usually sellers indicate what the shipping charge will be on the listing's page, and eBay also provides a shipping charge calculator. When neither of these are present for a listed item, the potential bidder can ask the seller what the shipping charge will be before any bid is made.
Given all of these opportunities to learn what the shipping charges will be, I confess that I never understood why so many people go ballistic over shipping charges after the purchase at eBay. If the shipping charge is of a concern, there are all sorts of ways of determining this ahead of time.
There have been several times when the shipping charge has not been stated or was unclear to me when I was purchasing a heavy item, and in all cases the seller replied promptly and politely when I asked via email.
I think this is a decent idea. As a buyer, I was once HIGHLY unsatisfied with my purchase, and wrote so. The seller responded by writing a highly negative review of me, then immediately offered to retract it if I would do likewise... in other words, their ability to leave negative comments was used as blackmail. The sellers have FAR less risk on eBay, since they do not release the goods until the money has cleared. As such, they should not also have the ability to abuse the comments feature simply to retain falsely high ratings. Buyers risk getting shafted by inaccurate photos and descriptions, poor shipping, late shipping, etc. The comments feature is really the only tool that they have, and giving sellers equal power there is unnecessary.
That is typical.
I had an account for a long time as both seller and buyer with one negative comment in over 300 from a person whose money I refunded when they said the item did not work (immediately).
My account was hacked after not using it for almost a year by some kid in Spain selling a non-existent $9,000 jetski. I cancelled the auction but not before two people had wired money orders to Spain through Western Union for $5,000 deposits. Luckily, Western Union in Spain was onto him and did not transfer the money.
I learned of the fraudulent auction using my username when questions to buyers started to arrive. I immediately contacted ebay and all bidders to inform them of the fraud and did everything they said to do.
After doing all of that and contacting them numerous times they still suspended my account and I have not been back since. I felt their customer service was horrible and I spent hours trying to fix it. They did not even cancel the auction so I had to modify it so people would stop bidding on it. I did all the legwork and mailed it all to them and they did nothing but suspend my account.
Have not been back since and use amazon.com or yahoo shopping now.
As a buyer, I’m happy with this new change. Now, I can honestly rate the seller without retaliatory feedback.
Sellers are FINALLY going to have to give good customer service, not over charge on shipping, and actually give good descriptions.
The big thing for sellers is this:
When will PayPal release the eBay item hold?
PayPal will release the hold when the earliest of the following occurs:
* the buyer leaves positive feedback, * 3 days after confirmed item delivery* or * 21 days without a dispute, claim, chargeback, or reversal filed on that transaction.
* This applies to US domestic transactions that are shipped by USPS or FedEx and either (i) use PayPal shipping labels to ship items or (ii) upload tracking information to PayPal via the transaction details page.
The only non-positive feedback I've ever received was a neutral from a buyer not happy with the guitar she had bought. Just one problem, I hadn't sold a guitar. It was an error by a newbie who had left a feedback for me that was intended for another seller. Getting that corrected was like pulling teeth despite the buyer writing eBay several times confessing she had left the feedback for the wrong seller.
eBay cares about nothing but the money.
Your idea sounds interesting.
I'm strictly a buyer on Ebay, and I have a rating of 69/1. The negative came from a seller who misrepresented a computer screen. It came in a box with one part #, which he listed it under. The item inside did not match the box.
I went through dispute resolution, which I won; it involved having a professional third party examine the screen. I would normally just conclude that it was a mistake, but the seller was wielding "strategic ignorance."
I left a negative rating with a pretty harsh comment. I got retaliatory feedback. I added a comment which described it as retaliatory feedback, and that PayPal dispute resolution had supported me.
Interestingly, he re-listed the same item, and sold it; the comments from the buyer were, "Screen not as represented...one part # on box, another part inside."
My only option was to agree to withdraw my negative feedback if I wanted him to do the same.
This move, IMO, is long overdue. Another I'd like to see? Sellers refuse to leave feedback until I as a buyer leave feedback. BS. If I send prompt payment and leave contact information, I've done my part. Require that sellers leave prompt feedback.
That said, feedback should be limited to those buyers who have actually paid for the merchandise in a timely manner.
In a way, I would hate to shut down since I have such a good feedback rating (mostly as a seller).
Not necessarily. I think it’s a effort to promote listings of offbeat items that have an iffy chance of selling at all. As a fairly frequent buyer of such items, I’d like to see more of them listed. E.g. I’ve bought a number of items related to a small midwestern town where my mother’s family has roots. To most prospective buyers, they’d look like worthless junk, and a seller has little way of knowing whether there may be an interested buyer or two hanging around looking for an item with an obscure feature. But the more such items are listed, the more occasional/casual searchers will find an interesting hit on their obscure interests, and the more occasional/casual searchers will become regular, systematic searchers and frequent buyers.
The timing of this is probably perfect for the economic cycle. More people will be finding themselves in financial difficulty, and with time on their hands due to unemployment or under-employment. Perfect time to scour the attic and basement and shed for items they don’t want, but which might bring in a few bucks if sold on eBay. But they’re less likely to list them if it involves a larger upfront fee with no guarantee of any return at all.
A related benefit to eBay from bringing in new buyers of obscure stuff is that many of these people are probably not in the habit of online shopping, or at least not on this type of site. Once they start hanging around eBay looking for obscure items, they’ll soon start to notice that you can get just about anything on eBay, and start shifting some shopping that they used to do in bricks-and-mortar stores, or the online sites of bricks-and-mortar store chains, to eBay. I definitely fit that category. I originally got into eBay when looking for items that were unlikely to be found anywhere else, but now buy new mainstream merchandise there fairly frequently.
I just closed my ebay store. The listing is invisible unless you also have an item on auction. I don’t want to mess with auctions, that’s why I opened the store, dammit. What crap.
I’ve sold may things; selling is probably 2/3 of my feedback. I sold a tool to someone who had used a stolen credit card to buy it. They did so through PayPal. PayPal launched an investigation and froze MY account taking the payment from me until their investigation had concluded. The investigation revealed this scammer had used the stolen card to buy from many sellers before me YET PAYPAL HAD YET TO FREEZE THE BUYER'S ACCOUNT! They allowed him to purchase additional items victimizing others while the investigation I was involved in was going on! They later charged me $10 to pay for the investigation even though I had been cleared of any and all wrong doing.
They got my $10 but have lost out on hundreds since because I no longer use them.
I debated for hours whether or not to give a negative rating, but in the end decided to give that seller some feedback to think about, so maybe he wouldn't treat another buyer the same way.
I gave positive feedback on other sellers where the package never arrived or the item was totally defective and useless, but the seller was not technically knowledgeable enough to know that, like a Collins mechanical filter with the resonators rattling around loose in the housing. I gave them all the benefit of the doubt except in the one case where pure laziness and indifference put useless junk on my doorstep.
Almost. Some buyers can be wrong in what they expected from the sale due many times to their error is reading the listing. But for the most part you are right. I hate it when I pay immediately for a purchase but have to wait until I leave a positive feedback for the seller before I get the positive feedback I've already earned. It's tantamount to extortion.
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