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"But what most irritated veteran eBay merchants was the site's decision to block sellers from leaving negative feedback about buyers."

They got this part right. Sellers have no moral right to hold buyers hostage to good feedback, a formerly common practice, now prohibited. The buyer's sole responsibility is to pay in a timely manner. Having accomplished that, the seller is morally obliged to immediately leave positive feedback, as the buyer owes him nothing more. But they wouldn't do it, and would say something like "Once you leave good seller feedback for me I'll leave good buyer feedback for you". That is extortion.

I'm not sure why I should get so exercised about, as I rarely use eBay, but I don't like scams or cheating or extortion.

One other thing: Those earnings numbers look pretty damned good, considering the economic environment. Mr. Wonderboy isn't doing such a bad job.

As a ebay seller I disagree with you about sellers leaving feedback immediately after payment is made. Paypal holds the payment and will refund it for many buyer scams. For example, a buyer buys 10 items and decides they don't want them. Then they beat these items up with a hammer to damage them, take photos as proof the items are damaged and Paypal refunds the money. As a seller you can't go back and change the feedback.

There is a new class of buyer that sprung up when sellers could no longer leave negative feedback - the buyer that leaves 100% negative feedback to cause disruption. A seller can also open a new account and buy a large number of items from compeating sellers and then leave a large number of negative feedbacks to damage the reputation of competitors. We now have to scan for buyers that leave a large number and 100% negative feedback for other sellers that we believe to be very honest. Then we block these buyers from bidding on our items. Then, sure enough we will often get a profanity laced e-mail from them wondering why they can't bid on our items.

But the buyers feedback has never mattered! How silly. I sold on ebay for years, and ended up not leaving feedback until 2 weeks after I mailed it. I figured, if there were any problems by then, I would have heard about it from the buyer.

I only got screwed once or twice out of thousands of transactions, but once they changed the seller pricing tiers, I decided to switch to 2x/month FB.

I rarely sell, but still buy a lot. I have yet to care whether I get FB as a buyer. It means absolutely nothing.