Ebay recently made a ton of changes to the system, which include increased fees, and some changes to how feedback works. One of the most significant changes is that buyers will only be able to recieve positive feedback.
This of course has gotten sellers up in arms, they are upset that they will have no recourse against deadbeat buyers, and will get bitten by buyers who don’t pay for items (although there’s a process in place for sellers to recoup all fees when a sale doesn’t go through).
I think that this decision is a bit extremist, but I have to say, the majority of sellers on eBay have this coming.
I buy and sell on eBay quite a bit. When I sell here’s the process:
I list an item.
Someone buys the item.
Buyer pays for item.
I submit positive feedback for buyer (because the buyer has done their part of the deal)
I ship the item
Buyer recieves the item.
Buyer posts positive feedback for me if they liked the item
The majority of sellers on eBay will not post positive feedback for a buyer until after the buyer has posted positive feedback for them.
I am pretty fed up with this “feedback hostage” situation, and when I made a recent purchase, I confronted the user “distributionmm” about what he was doing.
Hi there;
I paid for this a couple of days ago and I don’t see feedback from you. Was there something wrong with the PayPal payment that I promptly sent? As far as I know, I upheld my part of the bargain, so why no positive feedback?
His response was that he doesn’t submit feedback until his user is satisfied with the product.
I responded that this wasn’t what was intended with eBay’s feedback system, and that he should reconsider.
I ordered this on February 5th, figuring that I’d get it well before I left for Vegas on the 14th (Quebec to Ontario is 5 days max by letter mail), so when I didn’t get it by the 14th, I emailed him. No response.
I got back from Vegas and emailed him again saying that I still hadn’t received my package.
His response was this:
“Hi Briand games have been send last week. For information paypal don’t protect sellers in the 3 business days who pass the transaction (I’ve been scammed 2 times now this month). Than we ship after this delay and please don’t count week-end on your total because post don’t work thoses days. Normally you will receive your item by this week.”
Nowhere in his auction does it say that he’s going to wait 3 days, and speaking as someone who knows PayPal intimately, his excuse is BS, because PayPal doesn’t hold payments when they are made from an account with a back-up credit card source as a funding tool.
So now here I am with an auction which has been handled horribly, this guy has lied to me, he’s hardly a “prompt shipper”, and he’s being a jerk about feedback, which means that when I post a negative feedback comment on him (because he is slow to respond, withheld feedback, and delayed shipping my product by 10 days just to “clear a payment” which was already cleared), he will post retaliatory feedback.
As a seller on eBay who plays by the rules, it annoys me to no end to know that it’s guys like this who have ruined the system for the rest of us, and in a way I’m kind of glad that eBay is initiating the new rules against sellers leaving negative feedback.