eBay to Drop Negative Feedback on Buyers

Trip Ericson writes "ArsTechnica is reporting that eBay plans to drop negative feedback on buyers. It's just one of a number of changes eBay will be making in the near future. 'eBay's data shows that sellers are eight times more likely to retaliate in kind against negative feedback, a figure that has grown dramatically over the years. In an attempt to mollify sellers, eBay will initiate a handful of seller protections to offset the inability to speak ill of a buyer. Negative and neutral feedback will be removed if a buyer bails on a transaction or if the buyer has his or her account suspended. Buyers will have less time to leave feedback, and won't be able to do so until three days after the auction ends. eBay is also pledging to step up monitoring and enforcement of its policies around buyers who behave very badly.'"

Simple Solution

[Gotung]

Keep both parties feedback hidden, until both have left feedback. Zero chance for retaliation. Problem solved.

In defense of the feedback change

[elrous0]

As someone who both sells and buys on ebay, I have to say this is a change I welcome. Most of the bad sellers out there use retalitory feedback as an essential part of their scam. I ran into one of these guys once who didn't ship the item until I started threatening him. When I looked deep into his feedback, it was clear this was his standard practice. But on the surface the guy looked golden, with little negative feedback. I finally got the item, but left him a neutral feedback to warn others. He responded with a retaliatory negative on me, and there was absolutely no way for me to respond to it (since they've apparently taken off the feedback feature they used to have that let you post an explanation). It still pisses me off to this day, as it's the only non-positive I have in almost 200 feedbacks.

You can never really be sure about who you're buying from as long as sellers can hold this Sword of Damocles over buyers' heads. They need to at least put a time limit on sellers' window to leave negative feedback, so they can't still be holding it over a buyer's head long after the buyer has paid.

I can understand why power sellers would be upset by this. But there are so many scammer sellers on ebay today, relative to just a few years ago, that something like this was probably necessary. The primary purpose of feedback is for buyers to judge the trustworthiness of the seller. And while it also lets a seller judge a buyer as well, this isn't nearly as important, IMHO.

Great change

[SkankinMonkey]

I always hated leaving feedback because the sellers made you leave feedback first. This led to things occurring like, a seller not having items to ship and having to either refund you, or in many cases, send you a similar item without any notification. When you leave negative feedback (as you should) they'd leave negative feedback as well.

If sellers are going to act like stores, then they should have customer service like one and be willing to suck up the bad comments like normal retailers do. Leaving negative feedback was a childish tit for tat response and actually discouraged me from leaving any feedback whatsoever for a long time.

Huh?

[Travoltus]

Why should a seller need to leave feedback EXCEPT when the customer doesn't pay or there is an unnecessary return (all of which can be factually documented)?

Is there some kind of "Customer was a doodoohead" thing going on?

Re:Well Duh

[jnik]

And how does this explain them dicking over the sellers with the new feedback policy?

Re:In defense of the feedback change

[SkankinMonkey]

A more interesting application they could have applied would have been to give buyers and sellers a 30 day window to leave feedback. Feedback left would stay off the record for this time period and then become magically available. This would encourage more truthful feedback and alleviate some of the fear of negative feedback from sellers issues.

Is this a good idea?

[madsheep]

I think it's obvious the data about the vindictive nature of many sellers may be accurate. However, being able to leave negative feedback for buyers is important and I think they need to find a way to make it work better. If you're selling a high priced item (or really any item for that matter) and you get some bozo that bids with no intention of paying, this can be pretty detrimental to a sale - especially if it's time sensitive (tickets, special event going on, motivated to sell, etc.). Sometimes these same people that are selling these items time sensitive or not, want to be able to look at their top bidders and know if they're serious. You might have a guy with 25 positive feedback, but when you see he has 35 feedback total with 10 negatives for not following through on his last 10 transactions, it's good to be able to cancel/block this guy.

There are obviously some flaws with the system (human flaws right?), but there should be a good remedy to make this work a little better.

Perfect Solution

[PackMan97]

I couldn't agree more.

There are times where I've wanted to leave negative or neutral feedback, but won't because I know I'll get retaliated and the negative feedback hurts me a lot more than it hurts a power seller with 10,000 transactions.

It seems standard practice these days that a seller won't even leave feedback until they see what you've written.

Re:In defense of the feedback change

[ftobin]

Interesting idea, but you have to make sure that you account for a seller who builds up a good rating, and then "spends" his rating in 30 days, scamming buyers, who don't see the updated ratings until up to a month too late. One could work around this by making the rating anonymous during the 30-day period, though.

Buyers are just as big a problem

[edwardpickman]

I've lost hundreds of dollars hanging onto my 100% because of obnoxious buyers. I had one insist on overnighting a camera back to me after he couldn't figure out how to use it. I wound up refunding everything including the overnight charges. As part of that same sale two buyers in a row bailed out on me and Ebay tried to charge me both times. The first buyer didn't even respond after running up the sale price. The second guy claimed he didn't mean to bid eventhough he bid in the last 20 seconds of the sale. When I said I'd have to leave negative feedback he agreed to pay for it but then I wound up eating the overnight shipping when he whined about not being able to use the camera. I've had other problems with buyers as well as sellers but most of the trouble I've had was with buyers. Too many people get caught up in the excitement of bidding then don't want to go through with the purchase. It's not just odd collectables that get run up beyond what people are willing to pay it's often common items that aren't common to see on Ebay. I stopped selling through Ebay because it was too hard to keep my 100% and I hate dealing with Paypal. Also when Ebay made errors and overcharged me it took three months to get them to respond and refund the money.

Re:Well Duh

[wile_e_wonka]

I'm sure eBay understands that there are no sellers without buyers. If people are afraid to purchase items on eBay because of jerk sellers, then people won't buy things, and good sellers will use a more reputable service to sell, so eBay will take in fewer fees. In order to survice, eBay needs to keep up its reputation with the end consumer, not merely the entity with which it directly involves itself (the seller, via fees).

Re:Simple Solution

[elrous0]

It wouldn't work in that form. All a scammer seller would have to do is never leave feedback for his buyers, then they're negative feedbacks on him would forever remain hidden. It might work if there were some predetermined time limit at which both the feedbacks would become visible, even if one side were missing (and after which no feedback could be given).

Re:Simple Solution

[The Cisco Kid]

I've been thinking the exact same thing for some time.

AS an ebay buyer, I don't leave feedback about shipping and accuracy of item until after the seller leaves feedback regarding my payment and communication. Often this leaves the transaction feedbackless, even if there was nothing wrong with it.

Heck, when I use paypal to make payment five minutes after auction close or buyitnow, my positive feedback should damn near be automatic, since ebay owns paypal and has everything integrated anyway.

Hiding feedback until both sides had entered it would work well. The other party could see that you had left feedback, but not wether it was +/- or what you said, until after they had entered theirs.

Re:Perfect Solution

[esocid]

It seems standard practice these days that a seller won't even leave feedback until they see what you've written.

I would definitely vouch for that. In my eyes the seller's only business with leaving you feedback is how you payed for the item. Was it timely, was it the correct amount, etc? I've argued with a seller about not leaving feedback for a purchase, and refused to leave any for them until mine was received. Needless to say, I still don't have any from that seller.
But I agree 100% with the parent about how to solve this.

I would add one more thing.

[jwietelmann]

The GP's solution allows bad sellers to avoid negative feedback by simply not posting any feedback themselves. To prevent that, eBay should also, after a period of time, display any feedback left by either party and disallow anymore feedback for the transaction.

Also, just so we're clear, neither party's feedback should figure into the other party's overall rating until that feedback is displayed. It doesn't take a genius to figure out who left negative feedback about you when your rating falls.

Reactions from a fully supportive eBay seller

[Port1080]

I sold full time on eBay for about two years - I quit because I moved on to a better job, but my father still sells on eBay part time. From my perspective this is a good change. There is no way to leave "honest" negative feedback because of fear of retaliation, so one way or another the system had to change. Buyers need to be able to see negative feedback far more than sellers do - sellers have all the power, not buyers. The buyer sends the money, then the seller sends the goods. There is no point where the seller has neither money nor goods - but during the entire shipping process, the buyer is without his money and without his goods. So, unless you're a complete idiot seller, there's simply no way to get scammed on eBay. It's very easy, on the other hand, for buyers to get scammed. The worst thing that can happen to you as a seller is to have the buyer just not pay - but if that happens, you can file a non-paying bidder report to eBay and they will refund your final value fees, so even there you really don't lose out (they don't refund the listing fees, but considering they just lowered listing fees, this is even less of an issue now than it used to be - and you're also allowed to offer the item to the underbidder if the first bidder didn't work out, or relist the item). The other difficulty you may have as a seller is that if your buyer pays with PayPal or a credit card, he or she may file a fraudulent chargeback against you. This may be something you can use feedback to protect yourself against, but it's really an imperfect system. It's always been difficult to censor buyers based on feedback anyway - what are you going to do if the buyer bids at the very last minute, and you don't have time to cancel their bid and block them? eBay did allow you to set conditions for buyers and back out of the sale if the buyer didn't meat them, but it was always a difficult thing to enforce, anyway. As a seller you simply have to realize that there are a few small risks that come with retail (such as chargebacks, returns, and the occasional cranky buyer).

Brick and mortar retailers are just as exposed (or even more exposed) to these problems. If eBay sellers want to be taken seriously, they just need to accept the there will occasionally be issues. The mantra of all successful retail businesses is that "the customer is always right". Whatever losses you take from the occasional return or other problem are more than made up for by the boost to your reputation you get by having customers view you as a fair and flexible retailer. If you want to be in retail, you've just got to have thick skin. I'm sure eBay has made the decision that if sellers can't accept selling by the terms of the normal retail environment, then they really don't need to be selling on eBay. All they will do is lower buyer's confidence and hurt the site's reputation

Separate Buyer/Seller Feedback

[esme]

I think it would be much better to have separate buyer/seller feedback. If I'm buying something, I don't care if the seller has lousy buyer feedback. And vice versa. Having the two sets of feedback in one pool is what makes retaliation really serious -- one bad seller retaliating against you can affect your reputation as a seller.

Not showing the feedback until both parties have commented is another good idea. That would help even more.

-Esme

Screw that; get rid of BUY IT NOW!

[nagora]

I came here for a goddamned auction, not to see some pathetic imitation of an ordinary High Street. It drives me up the wall when I search for something and get back 50 items all at the same price, all "Buy it Now" only, and almost all from the same bloody seller in Hong Kong.

THAT'S why I stopped using Ebay, not some stupid feedback issue.

TWW

Re:Is this a good idea?

[EggyToast]

I don't know if you use eBay for selling things, but you can't have a buyer that does that. A single non-paying charge ("Unpaid Item Claim") that goes unanswered will cause them to delete your account. If you have an excuse, you can maybe get 1 to slide, but 2?

The vast majority of negatives towards buyers are retaliatory, since those who don't pay lose their accounts pretty quickly. And as long as a buyer has a feedback rating of 1, they're generally fine as a buyer. It's the sellers where people seriously evaluate the feedback and both having a huge amount of feedback and "fake" feedback that's not accurate is useless.

Re:Simple Solution (80 day delay)

[stuartkahler]

Have a time limit of 60 days to leave feedback. If you haven't left any by that point, all feedback left will show up and you can't retaliate.
If I'm running bogus auctions to rake in money before anyone notices, this could give me an extra 80 days before new victims get any warning.

Re:Huh?

[LinuxDon]

Quote: "What difference does it make to you if you pay $12 shipping on a $5 item, or $5 shipping on a $12 item? None! I hate buyers like you."

What reason does a seller have for charging more than the actual shipping costs, other than making up for the too small selling price? (And therefore showing up more positively in the search results)
While I understand this practice very well, it remains a misleading practice which eBay should prohibit.

I don't think that charging 1200% of the actual shipping costs is realistic anymore. (Regardless of the "handling" costs, whatever that may be!)

However, I agree that if a buyer agrees to do business with a seller using such a practice (and clearly mentioned it upfront) the buyer should be prepared to actually pay this cost.
Personally, I prefer not to do any business with sellers utilizing this practice.

Re:Well Duh

[Stanislav_J]

It "dicks over" (great phrase) a seller like me because if someone bids on a high-value item, now I will have no way of knowing if they have stiffed or otherwise screwed other sellers previously. A lot of sellers have personal policies about protectively refusing or canceling bids from bidders with a significant percentage of negative feedback. Now when someone bids on my auction, he/she may have stiffed the last three sellers they deal with, and I'm clueless.

Every time eBay changes its policies, it makes it more and more of a crapshoot to try to sell anything on there. But they are the 800-pound gorilla of the online auction world, which means the hassles are still to some extent mitigated by the much larger audience viewing ones auctions. Whenever crap like this comes down from on high at eBay, you will hear sellers rant and rave about how they are going to take their business elsewhere. Most don't; a few do but quickly return when they try using the smaller auction sites and see their income plummet.

Re:Perfect Solution

[mcmonkey]

I would definitely vouch for that. In my eyes the seller's only business with leaving you feedback is how you payed for the item. Was it timely, was it the correct amount, etc?

I disagree. I mostly a buyer through ebay, although I do have the occasional sale, and the deal isn't done until the buyer says the deal is done.

The seller has the money. But only the buyer knows that the money has been paid and the item arrived and there wasn't any damage in transit and the description was accurate to the buyer's satisfaction and...

In my eyes the seller's only business with leaving you feedback is how you payed for the item.

What if the buyer complains the item isn't new, when the auction clearly stated it was used? What if the buyer claims the item never arrived, when the seller has a tracking number from the shipping service saying it was delivered? Especially given the way PayPal operates outside the normal banking system and credit card charges can be disputed, even if the seller thinks payment is in hand, the deal isn't really done until the buyer says the deal is done.

As a buyer, I don't expect the seller to leave feedback until I provide feedback indicating the transaction is complete. As a seller, I don't leave feedback until the buyer does the same.

That said, I have tempered my feedback in the past knowing the other party can retaliate. I agree 100% with you agreeing 100% with the parent. Keep feedback hidden until both parties leave feedback (or some period of time has passed, so if one party suspects he will get negative feedback, he can't just not leave feedback to keep the other feedback hidden forever.)

Looking at negative feedback

[jason777]

What I really wish ebay would do, is make it easy to just see negative feedback. I only care about a sellers negative feedback when trying to figure out the quality of their service. Instead, I can set the number per page to 200, but on power sellers, I still have to click through many pages and hunt down the negative ones.

Re:Huh?

[Sancho]

What does feedback even mean? These days, mediocre service is expected to be awarded with positive feedback. It's just like tipping in the US--15% has become a bare minimum expected tip for the privilege of taking your order and bringing you food. Get a refill on your drink? Bump up that tip.

If the seller had been interested in good service, they should have combined shipping. They were not interested in good service, so they did not get good feedback.

Combined with violating eBay policy on handling charges, I think that the buyer was in the right, and the seller was quite in the wrong. The buyer would have been justified in leaving negative feedback.

Re:Well Duh

[Necreia]

That doesn't resolve it, that just makes the buyer blackmailing the seller.

Simply put, the buyer is to bid and then pay-- the rest is the responsibility of the seller. So by being able to mark a buyer as 'non-paying' in their new system will have huge effects on their buying ability, while buyers can still rate the seller without fear of the "I'll rate you when you rate me" blackmail.

This is a great change.

Re:Well Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

If I walk into a brick and mortar store do they have the right to investigate my background and decide to tell me that they do not want to sell their goods to me because I did something they do not like in my past? No, it does not happen. Why should an online retailer have that option? I have been buying on eBay for years, and the only non positive feedback I have ever received was retaliatory because the retailer tried to screw me and I slammed them on feedback. Once a buyer gives you money, they are done and there is no need for you to rate them. There are only 2 relevant ratings, they paid or not. If eBay gives the seller some way to deal with folks who do not pay, then its all taken care of. Buyers do need to know, however, the reputation of the people they are buying from, and this does happen in real life.

Re:Well Duh

[canUbeleiveIT]

On the other hand, many/most eBay sales are auctions. Many physical auctions require that bidders be pre-qualified to bid.

Re:Perfect Solution

[Paradise Pete]

There are times where I've wanted to leave negative or neutral feedback, but won't because I know I'll get retaliated and the negative feedback hurts me a lot more

Same with me. I've had a few small problems, specifically one where something was a lot more "used" than it appeared, but I've got 100% positive feedback. The cost of leaving negative feedback for something like that is too high.

And I noticed the other day that one said proclaimed that his system would automatically post positive feedback about the buyer as soon as the buyer gave him positive feedback. That just doesn't seem right.

Re:eBay Abuses its Monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Auction sniping. As a regular 'ol bidder who doesn't install fancy sniping software, I hate that I can watch an item for 3 days, bidding reasonable amounts, then get outbid in the last 30 seconds. This has been a problem for years. Sitcoms have made fun of it. Why isn't this fixed?

"Sniping" is not indicative of a broken auction system. It's indicative that YOU didn't bid the price you're willing to pay if the item sells to a sniper for less than you would have paid.

If a sniper pays more than you were willing to pay, well, he was willing to pay more.

If a sniper wins an item for less than you were willing to pay, well, next time YOU need to bid more.

The rules of the game are known in advance. If you don't like the result then don't play.

Re:Couldn't come at a better time

[NeutronCowboy]

And this is why I don't shop from people with perfect feedbacks. Ignore the good feedback, read the negative feedback. If the negative feedback is coherent, well laid out and contains proper spelling and grammar, I will ignore any comments from the seller about the negative feedback. Haven't had a problem so far. Then again, I shop about once every 3 years on eBay.

Re:In defense of the feedback change

[Zollui]

You probably had your bad power-seller experience when trying to buy consumer electronics from a Chinese or Hong Kong seller. Avoid those. They're trouble.

Re:Well Duh

[sjbe]

Make it so a buyer cannot leave any feedback for a seller unless the seller has already left feedback for the buyer.

Terrible idea because only the buyer actually knows when the transaction is complete. A transaction is only complete when the buyer receives (paid for) goods and accepts delivery of them. A seller should never leave feedback prior to a buyer acknowledging via feedback that a transaction was completed. Otherwise the seller is opening himself to unjustified negative feedback with no means of redress. Any seller who leaves feedback first is quite simply foolish.

Re:Simple Solution

[Pentagram]

I don't know why positive feedback needs a comment anyway. All I'm interested in with a buyer/seller is the proportion of +ve transactions, and any -ve comments.

100 pages of "AAAAAAAAA++++++A+A+A+==!@£ GR8 WOULD HAVE BUYERS BABIES" just serves to hide any negative comments. I'd rather just see a list of negative comments and the user's reaction to them. Last I checked, eBay wouldn't let you just view bad reactions, though they were thinking about it.

Re:Screw that; get rid of BUY IT NOW!

[Phroggy]

While I agree that seeing 50 identical items all from the same seller is ridiculous, I usually skip anything that doesn't have a Buy it Now option, because I don't have the patience to wait around for a week to see what the price has gone up to. If the auction is ending very soon, I might bid, but Buy it Now is mostly what I use.

I understand that this means it's not an auction. But I don't want an auction, I just want to buy stuff, and eBay has the sellers.

Re:Well Duh

[WNight]

If you couldn't snipe, couldn't you still place a maximum bid? You know, decide on what you'd be willing to pay and enter the number? Then be told if you win, like everyone else? The software already has a feature for this.

What you want is to trick people who don't know about sniping and who treat eBay like a meatspace auction. As everyone else sees it, if people get "carried away", that's not "too high", it's "what the market will bear".

You say that you wouldn't bid if you couldn't snipe because prices would go too high, but you somehow think that you're helping people by staying and keeping them low (and winning them yourself.)

You've "helped" nobody except yourself. The seller would have gotten more if people had bid the item up. The buyers would have gotten more if they'd had a chance to win.

If you left eBay what would happen? People would still buy things, as people have got to have their crappy collectibles. Regular buyers would have a chance of winning, so they'd stay. Sellers would get higher prices, so they'd stay.

Maybe there'd be a problem with people skipping out, but then there'd be a way to put down a deposit, or people would really use escrow services, or you know, solve the problem without your help.

Meh, if eBay didn't suck it wouldn't be phasing out negative comments, they'd give you more ways to spot people who always reply negatively to any criticism. Frankly, they deserve people like you.

Re:Sellers need protection too

[Thalaric]

They should have another rating somewhere thats shows the ratio of positive/negative feedback LEFT by a user. That way those viewing can safely discount feedback left by those who compulsively leaves negatives.