eBay starting to fix feedback system
Posted by The Technocrat | Filed under Web
eBay is rolling out a new feedback system. The trouble with buying on eBay has always been that sellers can hold your feedback hostage until you give them a good rating. eBay’s partnership with PayPal should make this automatic – PayPal sees you paid for the item, and you get positive feedback for paying for it. Instead, what mostly happens is that the seller will either not give feedback to you whatsoever, or they will demand you leave feedback first, so they can leave bad feedback in retribution if you do the same.
Feedback for buyers is important. For those who may want to sell someday, buying has been one way to establish a good reputation to the eBay community. When they’ve established themselves as reputable, they usually have no problems getting people to trust them as a seller.
This system is completely flawed. The idea of feedback is to attest to a seller’s quality of service and product. The buyer has already taken the first step of trust in paying for an item they don’t yet have, it should be their right to control the situation. Not surprisingly, it is quite difficult to build up enough feedback as a buyer so you’ll be trusted as a seller, and this may account for the dominant sellers on eBay who are able to hide frequent bad feedback either by the intimidation listed above or simply by drowning the bad feedback with a flood of positive feedback from small transactions.
eBay is hoping to address some of these issues with the introduction of a Detailed Seller Rating. It doesn’t fix the situation of sellers intimidating buyers into good feedback, but it does provide buyers with a way to leave more detailed feedback that might not be so unilaterally damaging as a whole to the seller.
From eBay:
We have made a number of significant changes to the current Feedback system, specifically to the Leave Feedback flow and Feedback Profile page, in order to increase transparency, improve a buyer’s ability to accurately rate a transaction, and enable our best sellers to differentiate from others.
Detailed Seller Ratings add a new dimension to eBay’s premier online reputation system, allowing buyers to rate transactions based on item description, communication, shipping time, and shipping & handling charges.
In addition to the current positive, negative or neutral comment, buyers rate the sellers on these specific transaction aspects based on a 1 to 5 scale, with 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest rating. The average of all ratings is displayed on the seller’s Feedback Profile page.
Additionally, the transaction’s item title and price will be visible below the Feedback comment on the Feedback Profile page for 90 days after the Feedback comment is left.
New header: We changed the page name from Member Profile to Feedback Profile to more accurately describe the page’s function. An updated Header enables members to easily find the most important information about the member, while providing important links to Contact Member, Items for Sale, and the member’s Store.
Detailed Seller Ratings module: We added a new module that provides the average of each Detailed Sellers Rating left by buyers for the seller in the past 12 months. A seller must have at least 10 Detailed Seller Ratings to have an average displayed. In addition to the average, we display the total number of ratings left for each Detailed Seller Rating in the past 12 months.
New tab names and order: We changed the tab names to more accurately describe the underlying Feedback comments associated with the tab. We also changed the order of the tabs, placing the “Feedback as a Seller” tab first because data showed that the majority of people viewing the Feedback Profile page are looking for information on seller performance.
Item title and price: We added the item title and item price to the new Feedback Profile page, just below the Feedback comment and User ID. This information will remain available for 90 days
90-day separator: We added a separator within the Feedback Comments area to explain that items below the separator do not have the item title and item price since the Feedback comment is more than 90 days old.
The price listing is something I like, but most of it (except for the new feedback module) is just a page re-design.
In the end, I think it’s the right idea, but eBay still has a long way to go towards providing a fair and comfortable environment to buyers on the site. Whether or not they are interested in doing so may be a different matter, as sellers are the ones that eBay profits from. It seems that because of this, sellers may always have the upper hand in eBay transactions, which doesn’t seem fair.
I just can’t help but wonder how far it would go for them to make the tranactions a little more even for all parties. After all, sellers would be plenty happy to have a greater number of happy eBay buyers to sell their products to.
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July 29, 2007 at 11:43 pm
Absolutely right. Nice observations..
September 2, 2010 at 1:32 pm
We just like this website given and it has presented me several sort of inspiration to have success for some reason, so thank you.
December 23, 2010 at 12:44 pm
As a or was a top rated seller, I would like to offer some input.
I get about 1200 to 1600 feedback left per month on average.
Item as described :- All my items are described as best that I can, the only time I think that i get marked down for this, is when I send the wrong item out, if I do this, and I am notified, I always correct this whit sending the right item out 1st class, the buyer always gets to keep the other item, so why get marked down for this?
Postage & packaging:- A sore point a year ago, you could buy an item for 99p but the postage was £9.99, 99% of people that saw this, looked at the big picture, added to the two together and that’s what they were prepared to pay as it was still cheap, as the knew that it would never cost 99p any-were on Gods earth and also that it would never cost that to send, it was the 1% that lived in cloud cuckoo land that complained, but it was fee avoidance. Most of my items are on free post so I now make less and ebay make more, but i still get 1 or two people leaving 1′s or 2′s per month, because they have asked to combine items, I have emailed them back said I can but will cost more, now this is all to do with Royal Mails Newish PPI, sizes & weights.
But here are the best two:-
Communication :- Most is automated, emails are, you won, please pay, thats two, they then get a dispatched email (we will get to that one in a moment), they also get a feedback reminder, total 4 emails, normally this is enough, but when this go wrong, say an item is late, I’ll email or and phone the person to find out the problem. I still get 2 or 3 people leaving 1′s or 2′s for this, Why?
This is the best for last.
Dispatch:- What a joke, All items that are paid for before 3.30pm on a working-day leave here that day, if after this time they leave here the next working-day, Royal Mail pick up all our items, parcels are different, if you pay for your parcel before 11am on a working-day, it leaves here that day, it is picked up by DHL if after this time, it leave here the next working-day, this is made clear on all listing, as soon as the items leave here, I then email all to let them know they have been dispatched, so why do I get 6 or more every month marking me down with 1′s or 2′s for this, because they mark it down as delivery time, one I control, the other is out of my hands, from the 26th November when it started to snow here in the north east of England, I informed ebay by phone of the problems that we were having, I was taking my items to RM & DHL Depots, everything was dispatched on time, but because item were either stuck at depots of in the system with all the Christmas mail, I had over 24 people leave 1′s or 2′s because of this, I was also left the same 1′s & 2′s in the communication as well, I was being inundated with “where is my item” all I could say was Royal Mail has it, or give the tracking number for your parcel for DHL, you then get the second dose, ” I still do not have my item” and then 20 people try to open a case, which ebay then say is too early, so they wait a day or so then open one, all the time the snow still falls, now the rail and airports are being affected, but where is my item. I don’t know is all I can say, so now I am starting to give refunds, but every thing has a return address on, so far nothing has come back, but we will wait and see.
I have phoned ebay but they can do little about this, I have still lost my top rated seller, and looking at it, I am still well over the 50% mark, even after losing it, so will not get it back even on the next evaluation on the 20th of January.
I have talked to a lot of top rated sellers about this, some have lost theirs as well, we were thinking, that if a buyer leaves a 1 or a 2, they should have to justify it in a drop down box, that can not be seen by the seller, but if the seller contact ebay, to question why they have a drop in DSR’s then the person at the other end can look in to what the buyer has left in the explanation box as to why they left a 1 or a 2, then they can make their mind up was it total justified, or was the buyer just a little peeved because it the weather delayed their item.
Their should be a better way for dispatch, if RM were held accountable with DSR’s on dispatch and would lose the contract, they would have lost it by now, but as this is the only viable way to send large letter and small packets, we are stuck with them.
My fees to ebay are 12k + per year, please sort this out, every-time their is a bank holiday or it snows, why should I be penalized for dispatch time, when item leave her as stated.