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.'"

What about non-paying buyers?

[CmdrPorno]

Don't non-paying buyers deserve negative feedback? It sounds as if their plan would eliminate this type of feedback as a consequence. The solution I had always thought of would be to require that sellers, once prompt payment is received, post feedback before a buyer can leave feedback for them. Of course, this would create the same situation where a slow-paying buyer could leave retaliatory feedback for a neutral or negative piece of seller feedback, but I believe this would be much less prevalent than it is now.

Good Change

[zulater]

I've had issues with two sellers like this. One sent me a game without a CD key and then furnished me with the first quick google search for one. The other sent me an item that wasn't what I bought. Neither would return my emails until I left negative feedback and of course I got negative feedback and a withdrawal request the same day. The bad sellers were using negative feedback on a buyer to push for a withdrawal to keep their record clean. I have quit purchasing from ebay for other reasons but it is a good change.

There is no bad buyers?

[Lord Satri]

From my point of view, this is a good thing to remove negative feedback for buyers. My personal experience three years ago is when I gave a 'neutral' feedback to a seller that inflated the shipping price after the bid's closing, with no mention at all of the extra fees in the item description, that seller gave me my only negative feedback. I fought for a long while, and realized eBay support sucks and they're not really helping, and then, disgusted, stopped shopping on eBay except on rare occasions (prices are generally higher on eBay than elsewhere and the purchase is somehow riskier, but sometimes you find things hard to find anywhere else).

It's hard to be a "bad buyer", either you pay the amount, either you don't. No?

Account suspension

[esocid]

So let me get this straight. If your account is suspended for any reason, any negative feedback you have or will leave will be removed? I think this is pretty ridiculous, speaking as an individual who had his account suspended FOR NO REASON. And from what I hear this is a pretty common occurrence. It does state

Feedback removal due to member's suspension is permanent and will not be reinstated for any reason, except if the member was suspended by mistake.

but how do they determine that. I complained about it until I was reinstated, but every, EVERY, time I log in I get that old suspension notice. I think they are doing a disservice by removing negative and neutral feedback. That is one way to judge whether a seller is honest and/or trustworthy to give you what you are buying. Some sellers won't send you exactly what is described, so should they be rewarded for that? I just think ebay is changing, but just not for the better.

Probably a good move.

[LWATCDR]

These days most sellers are using paypal so you don't have to "slow" buyers.
A few years ago I bought a motherboard on EBay. I paid for insurance and waited. It never came we tried to contact the seller and nothing. We contacted paypal and they said that the seller claimed to have shipped it and we had waited too long. So I contacted my bank and they reversed the charge.
All the time the seller protested that he had sent it. We mentioned that we did pay for it to be insured but that didn't seem to make any real difference.
My wife wouldn't post negative feedback because when she check this guy had a bunch of new negative feedback about not shipping stuff.
Every buyer that gave him negative feed back got negative feedback from him!

I used to like E-Bay

[Sturm]

Way back in the day, E-Bay used to be a great place to find and buy some pretty neat stuff. I bought several Sega GameGears, a complete C64 with original TV "monitor" (all in the original boxes), several "vintage" PC games and other odds and ends you couldn't easily find in other places.
Unfortunately, for the last several years, E-Bay has become a haven for scam artists and people who try to sell crap in bulk. It feels more like a cheap flea-market than an actual auction.
I hope E-Bay can turn things around by focusing a bit more on the individual buyer, but I'm not optimistic.

Re:Feedback

[KarmaOverDogma]

That's an interesting idea. Another idea could be something like what is used here on /.

Buyers and sellers could "opt-in" to a moderated rating system. Under such a system, meta-moderators could rate buyer or seller feedback as "fair" or "unfair" depending on the justification for the rating by the buyer/seller. Buyer or seller could leave the the moderated user-rating system at any time, but could not re-enter once they leave. "Fair" ratings would remain, while "unfair" ratings would not, and enough "unfair" rating would be noted in the respective accounts.

That would still leave the question of who watches the watchers, or how one could get to meta-moderate, but it's a place to start.

Just my 2 cents.

I heard somewhere

[techpawn]

That since eBay was losing the social aspect of the site to mySpace and Facebook that it had in the great long ago. It was going back to the core of it's business and that was to make sellers happy to move more stuff and generate more clicks. If people don't know they're buying from a troll they're more likely to try to buy from them and this would fit with the business of eBay... to make the Seller happy and get ad revenue.

Or am I thinking eBay is just being an evil corporation or no reason?

Re:Huh?

[macbuzz01]

I had a seller refuse to combine shipping after I had purchased two items. He said he would have if I had asked before purchasing. The package arrived with $1.00 of postage for which I had paid $12.00 I didn't think highly of this and left him two neutral feedbacks. He left me a negative and a neutral to "teach me a lesson". After a month of back and forth emails he agreed to remove the negative feedback, but never once thought he was in the wrong. This is the scenario where the feedback system falls apart.

It only get better...

[owlnation]

The joy that is 2008 continues. First we'll lose Yahoo, then AOL gets some more nails in their coffin and NOW...

...eBay is committing corporate suicide!

While admittedly this is a change that has needed to happen for a very long time -- eBay is overrun by crooked sellers -- this is sure to drive away yet more honest sellers away from eBay. You have to be really determined to sell there. You have to really need to - it's far from fun already, and it's hard to make money if you're honest.

eBay is run by marketing droids, the majority of whom never use their product themselves -- and it shows. But maybe with this change at least we'll see the end of $1 item, $10 shipping -- something it would have been easy for eBay to deal with years ago if they cared.

Again, it shows how far search needs to come to be truly useful. If search met people's needs, companies like eBay would never need to exist.

We have been a trusted company on eBay since 2001

[Anonymous Coward]

We maintain multiple powerseller accounts with positive feedback totaling almost a combined 20,000 unique positive feedbacks. This is the worst thing imaginable for sellers. There will no longer be a balanced system, and sellers will have no way of protecting themselves from poor buyers because they will simply have 100% positive feedback. Sellers depend on other sellers to leave legitimate feedback as a guide for the integrity of the bidder. eBay has begun shifting (under a new CEO) to a format of mainly new inventory with the focus entirely on the buyer. What they do not realize is that sellers are their employees, and they are consistently ignoring the needs of sellers to provide them with revenue (i.e. increasing final value fees, listing fees, removing negative feedback). I am extremely frustrated with eBay, and along with many others, will be participating in a powerseller boycott in the following week.

Re:Simple Solution

[bvimo]

>What happens with your proposition when only one party leaves feedback?

Ebay waits for a period of time - 30 days - and then withdraws the feedback option, adds a comment that they didn't bother and publishes yours.

Re:Simple Solution

[alexgieg]

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

This is how it's done on MercadoLivre, the Brazilian auction site purchased by eBay some years ago (but for some reason not integrated into the eBay ecosystem): both the buyer and the seller have 'x' days to rate each other and write comments explaining the reason for the rating; neither can see the rating received before both rated each other (or the timer has run out if one preferred not to rate, at which case the rating is automatically set as "neutral"); once both can see each other granted ratings and comments, they both have 'y' days to write a reply to their respective ratings/comments, so that 3rd parties can judge based on the whole set of rating, comment and reply (if any). IMHO, it works fairly well.

I don't know how the US version of eBay works, but if it really allows one side to see the other's rating/comment before requiring him to also rate/comment, it's utterly broken. For me, however, the proposed solution doesn't seem to make sense. Adopting MercadoLivre's system would have been better.

Re:Well Duh

[geminidomino]

How does it dick over the sellers to not be able to retaliate? TFS says they're going to replace it with other steps for seller protection, so I think you're venturing into hyperbole territory.

Oh well...

[SharpFang]

I look at a seller's negatives, skip the ones which seem dumb, then check the comments of buyers who gave negatives that sound reasonable. If they get negatives from the seller, I label the seller "vengeful asshole" and pick a different one.

Once I took the risk and got screwed by such one. He never got a comment from me. He paid up by court order, 1x the sales value for me, and 20x to a charity of the jury's choice.

Good riddance

[77Punker]

The people with 20,000 feedback are the hardest to deal with anyway. They always have the crazy descriptions that are borderline unreadable, take minutes to load, and have the shipping price buried in something that looks like a legal document.
You won't be missed by the buyers during your silly little boycott.

The only time I've gotten a bad deal on E-Bay was some "power seller" that sent me a radio with a bad tape player and then tried to take me to arbitration over the bad feedback!

eBay Abuses its Monopoly

[Doc Ruby]

The problem is that when sellers get negative feedback, they retaliate against the buyers. So eBay's solution is to prevent negative feedback? Why doesn't eBay prevent seller retaliation? Prevent a seller from posting negative feedback against any buyer who posted negative feedback to that seller in the past month. Investigate claims from buyers of mere retaliation, and stop sellers from posting any negative feedback for a month on the first violation, stop for six months on the second, suspend their account for a month on the third, suspend for six months on the fourth, and shut them down on the fifth confirmed retaliation. Or some other aggressive policy that shows everyone that mere retaliation isn't worth it.

Instead, eBay will stop all negative feedback. Which is the only feedback that I ever look at, to see what will go wrong (things going right is the expected default, until I look at feedback). That will turn all eBay transactions into uncertainty, which is bad for the entire market.

But I guess eBay can rely on its monopoly (look it up, it means "market controller", not "sole marketer") to keep business roaring. Remember that eBay also controls PayPal, the unregulated Internet global banking monopoly, and Skype, the unregulated Internet global telco (not yet a monopoly, but gaining...). While eBay was protecting the consumer, those global market dominances in retail, banking and telephony were not such a threat. But now that they're showing the corporate bias towards secrecy to "solve" problems of abuse, they need a hard look.

Someone's got to protect the consumer, even if it means just forcing eBay to allow consumers to inform each other what sellers and eBay are working against them. It doesn't have to be a government. Something like Froogle's reviews [slashdot.org] could harness people power around the world to do it even better.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Sellers need protection too

[sjbe]

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.

And what about the good sellers? Do we no longer care about them?

I made my living off eBay for 2 years and trust me when I say there are at least as many crooked buyers as there are sellers. Arguably more in fact because the way eBay is set up its easier to be a crooked buyer than a crooked seller. Yes, we left retaliatory feedback for buyers who gave us unjustified negative feedback. Nobody is perfect but there are way too many people who will try to screw sellers over if the sellers have no means of redress. Want to get something for free of eBay? Buy with PayPal and use the magic words "not as described". Send back an empty box (for proof of return) and PayPal will automatically give the money back. Happened to us multiple times. Oh, and "not as described" works for cases of buyers remorse too, even if it was completely accurately described and you have a no return policy. After all, eBay doesn't know and doesn't give a shit.

In disclosure I'm quite bitter against eBay. They raise rates every six months like clockwork. Some of their (and especially PayPals) dispute resolution policies are insane. They screw honest sellers in a variety of ways (I'll enumerate if anyone's interested) and basically make it nearly impossible to make any money selling on eBay. Being a Power Seller is nearly worthless. We sold literally millions of dollars of products on eBay, they made hundreds of thousands of dollars on our work, had a 99.6% positive feedback and eBay treated us like garbage the whole time.

Some folks have suggested that feedback not appear until both parties have left feedback. Not a bad idea but unlikely to be a panacea either. High volume sellers simply don't have time to leave honest and accurate feedback for every transaction. There just aren't enough hours in the day and the cost/benefit just doesn't justify spending the time. Plus I guarantee that some people will leave negative feedback no matter what (think "feedback trolls") without any redress if it is unjustified. At least until recently sellers could make a case that they were being unfairly treated.

Re:In defense of the feedback change

[dlemay69]

I've managed eBay accounts for large companies for years, and I've also been a buyer since the days when PayPal was X.com

eBay should just eliminate feedback altogether, or use their new DSR "star based" ratings instead.

What about the buyers who post negative feedback for a seller because the seller didn't leave positive feedback? What about the buyers who don't pay, and then when you send a non paying bidder report to eBay, they respond that they've paid, or intend to continue the transaction, AND leave a bogus negative feedback. Now theres no recourse. Also, if you were upset about a feedback rating, initiate a mutual withdrawal, and it gets removed from both. This option works out for BOTH parties involved.

Feedback is WAY more important to a seller than it is a buyer, and most buyers know this, and hold this against the seller. Having been involved with eBay for a long time, I can assure you that these type of things happen way more often than you think.

I know there are scam sellers out there, but there are way more buyers than sellers, and eBay exists today because people sell on eBay. Not only do sellers have to face the feedback change, but the final value fees increased considerably, in adjustment of insertion fees. In some cases, it can be up to 33% higher. If eBay continues to make it more difficult for their sellers to protect their selves, then they will simply stop selling. Unfortunately, there are no other auction sites to come close to the exposure that eBay has.

Re:Probably a good move.

[RareButSeriousSideEf]

So I contacted my bank and they reversed the charge.

Wait, did you actually get your bank to undo a completed PayPal transaction? ...and PayPal in turn to pass the chargeback on to the bad seller? If so, wow... I didn't know this was possible. How long after the transaction was it, and did you have to plead, beg or yell to make it happen?

Depends on the trade-off for sellers

[Pointy_Hair]

At first I was thinking this was a bad thing. I occaisionally both buy and sell on eBay. As a seller I want to be able to leave a negative on bad buyers that bail, don't pay promptly, or otherwise screw with the trade.

Now then - I could live with the change if eBay would improve the trade rules and their enforcement in addition to "automating" seller feedback (essentially what they are doing - the deadbeat buyer gets flagged by the system not by the seller). It sort of looks like that may be what they're doing but it might be too early to tell.

Too many buyers (and sellers for that matter) are far too casual about communicating after an auction closes. When I buy or sell something at a live auction, the deal is closed before I leave the property. Yet on eBay, depending on the nature of the auction, there could be a lengthy delay between auction end and any enforcement actions taken or permitted by the system. Thigs I'd like to see:

• Tighten up the timelines following auction close and enforce it with automation (automatic void/negative/suspend on deadbeats, fines, etc)
• Open up the feedback (as-in limited time after auction to perform edits/updates) and maybe a one-time response to neutral or negatives after changes are locked out.
• With the automation, tie in with both payment and shipping times (external verification versus user entered of course).

Bottom line is that the feedback system, despite it's blemishes, is the one thing that lends a tiny bit of integrity when dealing with unknown buyers or sellers. As long as the improvements come with balance it's probably going to be a good thing. Personally, I take the feedback in context when I read it. If someone has one or two bad remarks you can usually see from the comments if it's some sort of extraordinary issue or not. Ditto for tit-for-tat nastiness. More than that shows a pattern and I avoid.

Re:Well Duh

[Rich0]

Agreed - unfortunately sniping is a necessary mechanism due to the less-than-perfect market that ebay represents. It avoids putting others into a psychological bidding war against you - and since most people don't understand proxy bidding sniping basically means not giving most of your opponents a chance to bid against you. Also - sniping works better when you can group auctions - if you want 512MB of RAM and don't care which of 500 auctions you win, why put bids on only one when you might spend less bidding on another?

The proxy bidding system isn't a bad concept, but it has its weaknesses. Most are psychological in nature, and since I can't count on the psychology of my opponents I maximize my advantage...

Re:Perfect Solution

[sjbe]

I disagree. This will help rid of the bad (scammer) sellers on Ebay who use retalitory feedback to keep their ratings good.

At the cost of hurting LOTS more honest sellers who now will get hammered by irrational or crooked buyers without any means of redress. I absolutely guarantee you this will do NOTHING to combat fraud and will only hurt honest sellers. Retaliatory feedback is a useful thing to honest sellers against dishonest buyers. The scammers need to be addressed of course but this policy will fix nothing.

Re:A poor sales job by eBay

[thetheorist]

A lot of the problems generated by this have to do with how eBay is presenting it. From the official announcement:

The eBay Feedback system was designed to provide a simple, honest, accurate record of member experiences.

Hard to argue that this is a change designed to present an accurate record of all members' experiences. If eBay would just be honest and say, "We want to empower buyers to give honest feedback on sellers," some of the controversy goes away (not all of it by any means). eBay has done about as poor of a job describing and selling this change to its members as it possibly could. The failure to accurately describe and sell all the recent changes bothers me more than the change itself. eBay needs to lead its members and using smoke and mirror tactics to describe the changes only undermines what authority it has.

Re:Well Duh

[WNight]

Auctions need to be extended 5 minutes after the last successful bid. Then sniping and snipers go away.

Maximize *this*.

Read--yes, read--the feedback

[The Conductor]

Your approach is similar to mine. The points or percentage scores are too easy to game and therefore are useless. I read the actual comments with a critical eye. The credibility of the feedback comments vary by a factor of 1000 to 1, so focus on the credible comments, and follow the links to see if the buyer is a whiner or not. This points up the reform Ebay should be making: Increase the permissible length of feedback comments. 80 characters is so 1996.

The gun auction sites have a built-in resistance to many of Ebay's problems. You can ship a gun only to a federally licensed dealer, so that automatically puts an identifiable escrow agent into the transaction as a witness. Legally, he is there to see the ID, but also he obviously sees the gun actually delivered to the buyer's possession. EBay might take a lesson from this and open a counter at every Kinko's where you show can show a claim code and get the stuff. Or see the benefit of real meatspace ID's and offer a type of account verified by a notary.

Maybe someone can come up with a web-of-trust scheme to rate buyers & sellers more effectively. I doubt Ebay ever will. The most likely result is Ebay will continue to flounder about, the alternatives will never gain traction, and the world will revert to how it was before Ebay came about. Only now classifieds are free on Craig's list and middlemen are easy to find on Google.

Great idea

[sjbe]

Auctions need to be extended 5 minutes after the last successful bid. Then sniping and snipers go away.

ABSOLUTELY. This would be a great idea. After all, in a normal in-person auction they don't stop the bidding until they have reasonably determined that there are no more bids. The sale should go to the highest bidder, not the highest bidder closest to an arbitrary time deadline.

Re:Well Duh

[hurfy]

I don't think i have to go any farther than this.

As a buyer with a couple hundred purchases now it is down to 25-33% of sellers who have left feedback after paying :( Several with that explicit policy of only leaving feedback after i have done so,WTF? That includes buy it now purchases and auctions paid within 24 hrs. If that isn't good enough for them, I generally don't leave feedback at all. Luckily it has been a couple years since i found a bad seller (probably the types of things i buy). I would like to comment on some poor packaging but it isn't worth the hassle or retaliation anymore.

Unfortunately without some kind of automation, maybe auto positive after x amount of time, added that wouldn't work either as poor sellers simply wouldn't leave feedback thus not allowing the buyer to either.

What i would like is an unfavorites list to track those i don't wish to do business with again! Or a second favorites list so i could actually save my favorites since i corrupted it into unfavorites instead.

That and a way to sort for negative comments as i like to have an idea what they are and they are a pain to find for ppl with 129783452 feedback now :( Some of us are capable of determining if retalitory or a trend or whatever, so let us.

Kinda mixed feelings on this idea. Especially as i need to start selling some of the extra junk one of these days ;)

Network effects

[sjbe]

Ebay has no reason to cater to sellers.

Are you kidding me? They have as much reason to cater to sellers as buyers. There isn't one without the other. Screw either buyers OR sellers over and eBay no longer has a market and with it no longer has a business. That said, eBay makes their money primarily from the sellers so it makes some sense to be at least a little concerned about sellers needs.

As long as buyers continue to choose ebay over other auction sites...

Please study network effects [wikipedia.org] and try again. People buy on ebay because that is where the buyers AND sellers are. It's the same reason the NYSE [wikipedia.org] and NASDAQ are difficult to supplant as marketplaces. The buyers go where the sellers are and vice versa. You cannot have one without the other and transactions naturally gravitate to where the most buying and selling action is. Network effects are the ONLY reason eBay continues to be as successful as they are. It's certainly not their policies and it is certainly not their technology.

Re:Well Duh

[xtracto]

Why doesn't ebay just implement a blind feedback system. The feedback is not published until both of them have left it. If, after some time, someone of them does not leave feedback then it automatically defaults to positive.

Personally I have received retaliatory feedback from some sellers and it really sucks. In fact the 2 negative feedbacks I have is because of retaliatory actions. As someone else have said, when I buy an item and pay immediately, I have completed my side of the contract. There is NO excuse for the seller to leave negative feedback.

   

Re:Perfect Solution

[John Miles]

Who is hurt more from retaliatory feedback, the honest seller making their living on eBay who has 10000 feedback or the honest buyer with under 100 feedback who is retaliated against by a bad seller?

The seller.

If you're a buyer, your feedback is almost completely irrelevant. If you're a seller, it is quite important. That's why the feedback system needs to be weighted in favor of sellers; they're the only ones with anything at stake.

The new policy, which prevents sellers from warning other sellers about problematic buyers, is not a good move for anyone. For eBay, every solution to every problem seems to involve a reduction in transparency and accountability. This is really just another example.

Re:Well Duh

[Chewbacon]

With sellers being 8x likely to "retaliate in kind" it's not the buyer's fault. The feedback system is fundamentally flawed as too many sellers use it as a "scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" rationale. I've been repeatedly harassed by sellers in the past to leave the positive feedback before they do the same for me. It gets to the point after my inbox is flooded with feedback reminders that I wish I'd never done business with them. Leaving feedback for a buyer is to rate their performance as a buyer: sending the payment promptly.

Then there's the otherside of a coin. Years ago, I bought a drive from these jerks calling themselves ComputerGods. I used their online checkout tool three times, would receive no confirmation, then the next day get a payment reminder from their system (the days before eBay's reminders). I called them and explained my problem and they said they would call me back. I went round and round on the phones with them for over a week and never heard from them, so I left negative feedback with the brief explanation, "Online payment doesn't work, seller will not return calls." They responded with negative feedback, "our online payment is easy, this guy has a loose screw!"

I rarely leave positive feedback. A seller can forget about it altogether if they approach me with "you scratch I scratch." And until now, I'd never leave negative feedback on a seller with the fear of them making something up to justify negative feedback for me.