eBay bans negative feedback for buyers, cuts listing fees
eBay announced some huge changes today, the summary is below.Nobody will have a problem with the reduced listing fees, but a lot of sellers are going to be outraged that they can no longer leave negative feedback for buyers. I don't see how the seller has any leverage to prevent buyer fraud without the ability to report bad buyers via feedback.
eBay honcho Bill Cobb said there's "a lot of passion" among sellers about the feedback policy change. That's got to be the understatement of the decade.
- Reduced Listing Fees
Lower Insertion Fees and adjusting Final Value Fees, which reduces the up-front costs of selling on eBay. Free Gallery picture on every listing, and some additional feature discounts.- Lower insertion fees
- Free Gallery picture with every listing
- Lower fees for Gallery Plus, Picture Pack, and Feature Plus
- Rewards for seller performance
There will be discounts and incentives for sellers with the best customer satisfaction rates according to the anonymous five-star Detailed Seller Ratings (DSRs).- More search exposure through Best Match
- Fee discounts for PowerSellers
- Increased protection for PowerSellers
- Feedback Changes
The strategy is to "increase buyer confidence" and "showcase good sellers."- Buyers will only be able to receive positive Feedback.
- Positive repeat customer Feedback will count and Feedback more than 12 months old won't.
- Negative and neutral Feedback left by the buyer will be removed for transactions in which a buyer doesn't respond to the Unpaid Item (UPI) or if the member is suspended.
posted by Steve Weber at 1/29/2008
17 Comments:
Wow, 5 cents lower for insertion fees for $25 or lower starting prices. What a joke. The feedback changes are just jaw dropping.
eBay may have lowered insertion fees but they're more than making it back on the final value fees.
For an item listed at $9.99 that sells for $25.00, total fees will rise from $1.71 to $2.54, an increase of 48.5 percent.
Bill Cobb's letter this morning announcing this is pure BS to cover up what amounts to a very hefty fee hike that impacts sellers of lower priced items the hardest.
Reading over the Ebay forums, sellers are furious over this, many threatening to leave. I've already moved to other selling venues, so this won't affect me any more. But it really hits the folks that sell items priced under $25 - that's just brutal. Add the Paypal fees to that high FVF and there's just nothing left in the way of profit.
Oh well, things change - time to move on.
eBay feedback has long been a "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" system. Time constraints and other considerations have forced sellers to leave postiive (or negative) feedback based on nothing but reciprocating the sellers feedback, making the whole process, in my opinion, worthless.
eBay has continually taken steps to chase its sellers away and Amazon has benefited a great deal from eBay's anti-seller policies!
I agree the feedback system has long been worthless at eBay. Horrible sellers get positive feedback because buyers don't want the seller to reciprocate with an undeserved retaliatory negative.
I've encountered sellers who wrote right on their item description they have software that leaves the same feedback the buyer leaves for them.
As frustrating as this will be for sellers who encounter a bad buyer, it will make poor sellers accountable on some level.
Besides, sellers have long dealt with the inability to leave meaningful feedback for bad buyers on Amazon, and though Amazon's feedback system is as flawed or more so than eBay's, most good sellers can deal with it without too many problems.
That's the last straw for me! I'm going to try eBid for awhile.
Im not to happy with the fees but feedback has needed fixed for a long tome. More than once I have been told I would get positive feedback when I left positive feedback no matter how bad the product and how slow the service. Lots of sellers with high positive feedback and lousy service. Or maybe I just expect honesty when Im buying something. Good thing I stay away from used car lots.
I am primarily a buyer and have sold just a few things on eBay. Recently I contemplated selling 10 boxes of stuff on eBay but the high listing fees dissuaded me and I just gave the stuff away instead.
As a buyer I am happy about the feedback in some respects. I used to buy more from eBay but have cut back on it. I have an excellent buyer feedback rating so am disappointed that feedback over 12 months won't be counted. I feel that years of being a good buyer is good to know.
I have had three really bad experiences with eBay sellers (not much in total) but the sellers did threaten to leave me negative feedback if I didn't give a positive feedback on them which was coercion if you ask me. Out of not wanting my own feedback history ruined I chose to not leave any feedback at all about the seller which is a shame for future buyers of that seller.
This all comes down to the fact that we're dealing with people and people sometimes don't care, don't have integrity, sometimes are not honest and sometimes are outright nasty and bullies. I don't know if a company can fix all these issues by having policies.
Even on Amazon in the Vine community we are finding and suspecting that some people are intentionally giving "not helpful" scores on customer reviews and Vine reviews in order to boost their own review up as having a higher number of "helpful" votes cast. I myself also have some very well written reviews containing both fact and opinion and a summary, that would help a customer decide if the product or book is for them or not yet I'm getting "not helpful" votes. It is very suspicious to me.
Since Amazon Vine is based on inviting customers with review ratings at 500 or higher it would serve the interests of some to try to boost their own rating by slamming their 'competitors'.
Anyhow back to eBay I will have to check out the listing fee changes as I have some stuff that I could list instead of giving it away on Freecycle, on Craig's list, to friend and relatives or to local consignment shops.
Seller's who want to protect their own feedback will rarely leave a negative on a buyer. Particularly now, with eBay's new policies, seller's have to protect their feedback score, so I doubt this will have much effect.
Also, buyer feedback is mostly ignored. Very few seller's review their bidder's feedback.
I wonder if 'feedback' on either eBay OR Amazon is really useful. It really gets down to being offered an 'as is' item and one hopes it is properly, honestly described in the offer. Since one does not know the seller you have to take a chance on bidding on the item. What would happen if they dropped the feedbacks? Would it really change anything or be a good thing?
As a very unhappy Ebay buyer, I'm glad they are doing away with buyer feedback. Ebay sellers have been abusing it - striking back if someone justifiably gives them negative feedback. For example, I bought a pair of women's pants. The ones shipped to me were girls -not women's as ordered. The seller refused to refund my money so I left negative feedback. She then retaliated and gave me negative feedback and warned other sellers to cancel my bids. She then sent me a mutual release form. This is actually the 2nd time this scenario happened to me with Ebay sellers. They abuse the system to retaliate and force buyers to remove warrented feedback. Additionally, when you give sellers such feedback - they do such a high volume of business that it might take their feedback rating down a tenth of a point - whereas it may take my down 5%! It is an outrageous system where sellers no longer need to resolve problems and can bully buyers into removing feedback. I am an Amazon seller myself, and I think the Amazon system is much more reasonable.
I used to be a somewhat regular buyer on Ebay...until they started helping so many sellers turn into shills. On thousands (or millions) of items for sale Ebay assigns a "code" like:
a***b for an ALLEGED bidder or c***c, etc. In Ebay motors many buyers are being taken for a ride, so to speak. For instance, the starting bid is $2,000 and the first bid by someone is $8,000??? What kind of idiot would that be.
Then if you watch the auction the price will escalate very fast and in seconds sometimes. I wrote to one car dealer and said I was reporting him to a local TV station and his auction came down the same day. Also, 95 percent of those
A***B, etc. have feedback of zero to maybe five. I've stopped buying.
Only the new and naive will continue to buy from those auctions.
I'll be closing my ebay store at the end of the week, and only auctiioning items that I know won't sell elsewhere.
BWB
I'm a bookseller in Australia, selling on Ebay and my own site. In Oz, we're getting slammed with the new Feedback system but none of the other changes .... yet. The Ebay discussion boards in Australia are full of threads and posts about the Feedback changes, I can't even imagine the meltdown if or when we get the fee hikes as well. Why is Ebay making such a big deal of their pathetic insertion fee cuts, when the Final Value Fees will increase by quite a lot in some cases. Oh, I'll answer my own question - 'cos it's a smokescreen and they're hoping sellers won't do the maths and realise they're getting shafted by Ebay ... again.
Good luck US Ebayers, I hope it's better than I think it's going to be.
I get bullied from buyers on Amazon who say the condition is not exactly how they pictured it. They leave negative feedback and say they will remove it if I give them a discount. I don’t allow this and ask them to send the book back for a 100% refund. It never works they never send it back they just do that trying to get a discount. With all the stuff that sells on eBay I know this is going to be even more of a problem.
ebay was so good to me in the beginning. I have had my store up and running for nearly 4 years now. I reached an inventory list of hundreds of items but the monthly fees kept going up. In sertions fees, pic fees, sales fees, then of course Pay Pal fees... the price tag began to hurt me. So, I have reduced my inventory to only 12 items and have opened a website and added pay pal buttons. I think I have to say good bye to eBay no matter their new discounts and such. Too, bad cause eBay has such a large amount of traffic but the overhead is killing me.
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