After years of having pioneered reciprocal feedback and reputation management between buyers and sellers, eBay wants to abandon that system in favor for one where only buyers can leave negative feedback on sellers.
eBay’s reasoning is this: buyers who receive negative feedback are less likely to go back to eBay to shop. Why? Because sellers don’t want the business of buyers who have slighted other sellers in the past. eBay makes money on a transaction, whether it’s a deal ‘gone sour’ or not, thus they don’t want the seller to have a reason to cancel bids.
This ‘customer is always right’ model is more in line with how traditional retail works both online and offline where the merchant is the only party being scrutinized. However, this is a radical departure from the peer-to-peer roots of eBay, where the small, independent seller would be protected against buyer fraud or misbehavior.
Regardless of eBay’ s spin, this is not a win for them or the consumer. Well-behaved buyers will only suffer from this change as their reputation, just like a seller’s reputation, can be used as a valuable currency that brings in savings and efficiency to the market.
- A buyer with a good reputation is not at risk of having their bid for a product canceled, whereas a buyer with a bad reputation will.
- When dealing only with buyers with good reputation, the seller is able to offer products at a lower cost because they don’t have to factor in the cost of potential frivolous complaints, returns or buyer fraud.
As a former power-seller on eBay, I found that one of the most time consuming, and profitability-challenging parts of selling on eBay was to deal with customers who exploited the already ‘sacrosanct’ status they enjoyed on the site.
This new direction will cause many eBay sellers to look for alternative outlets or stop selling altogether. The ability to know and qualify your customer was a key advantage that the eBay platform had over other outlets. Adding this to eBay’s recent increases in the transaction costs from sellers, sellers are finding that eBay is turning into an undesirable venue to do business.
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February 3, 2008 at 4:36 am
I figured you were an ebay seller. Most of the articles I’ve read are stamped out with the exact same facts and do not understand buyers and sellers problems on ebay. With this newest farce of disguised fee raise, taking away the seller’s ability to give necessary negatives…and holding back pay for 21 days, we may well be seeing the beginning of ebay’s downfall. After 9+ years of constant selling on that site with 100 percent feedback, for once I’m going to join the others who will be striking from Feb. 18 to Feb. 25. I have never seen this bad an uproar in all those years. I have closed my ebay store and now have stores on Etsy, dPier, Blujay, eCrater and have beefed up advertising my website. I’m desperately trying to get out of ebay’s grip as are a multitude of other sellers. I’m thinking the best that could happen to ebay is that it gets bought out by another company. They never had decent leadership and now it seems to have gone completely insane.
February 3, 2008 at 3:12 pm
I think you’ve missed eBay’s intention. The point is that a buyer who has received a negative comment is themself put off eBay. They are less likely to come back. One seller giving them a negative costs the rest of the eBay community that buyer’s business.
I think it’s time eBayers stopped seeing buyers and sellers as two armies on the point of war, and started remembering its about earning money and getting stuff, not playing childish games with feedback.
February 3, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Sue, you’re absolutely right that feedback from ‘irresponsible’ sellers can cause damage to the system as well – yet another systemic weakness of eBay’s rating implementation. However, sellers (who make a living off eBay) have a lot more to loose than buyers with respect to negative feedback.
I think the rating system needs an overhaul, but that eBay has not figured out what. Their Community Court idea that almost got launched in the UK, could have offered some checks and balances and restored ‘order’ in the market (although eBay would probably execute that program poorly as well).
February 23, 2008 at 8:32 pm
“I think you’ve missed eBay’s intention. ”
It doesn’t MATTER what their intentions are. They have thrown out the baby with the bathwater.
They have made eBay an unsafe place to sell. I’ve had enough. I am moving all my listings to OLA.com.
eBay is the Titanic and their moronic new CEO is the captain heading for an iceberg. I’ve found a lifeboat and I will not come back to the “unsinkabke ship”. It’s going down but the capatin hasn’t figured that out yet.
November 3, 2008 at 2:57 am
The eBay feedback system was (Pierre’s words) intended to “expose bad sellers”. But that only worked on a small scale and soon sellers learned to move negatives off the page with dozens of $.01 auctions they began running for each other’s benefits.
eBay executives became corrupted by the Gigadollars; refused to allow “sort by negatives”. Then tried to make money off feedback anger with SquareTrade (Pay $25 to have it removed).
Then they tried to certify sellers as “good” with the POWERSELLER logo. Another scam that backfired. eBay never fixed the underlying problem–instead thought that a fancy logo would make buyers trust the sellers.
But Powersellers became the most aggressive tricksters on eBay. You’d buy a $4 item then find out shipping was $19.95!
Again and again eBay executives have tried to gold plate rusted iron. You can’t scale up systems to 50,000,000 users when it was designed for a small trusted community.
Every technology is inspired at first by a genius; then advertising takes control of it. TV became a wasteland of the 90 IQ public. The Internet became a cesspool of pornography, SPAM, and hard drive erasing viruses.
It is not simply eBay that is bad–it is the basic greed in humans. Alan Greenspan was recently grilled by Congress for destroying the US economy with cheap credit–and there was the financial guru admitting in public he had a “flaw” in his model. He though people would act responsibly. Now he knows that was a wrong assumption.
Pierre thought that feedback would “expose bad sellers” but eBay thwarted that (not allowing sort by negative). Many people became millionaires from those bad sellers using eBay as the greatest fraud tool of the ages.
eBay was about making millionaires out of those with hands in the money drawer; they hyper-inflated an inherently un-scalable system. Today it is out of control, a runaway train of sorts. And Meg Whitman sold her stock all the way to the bottom (look at that on Insider Trading website).
Like the housing debacle where yuppies flipped and flipped homes until, like musical chairs, the music stopped and there were not enough chairs for everyone to sit down. Greed, fraud, human aggression and self interest have taken us into a financial mess that will sober up the entire world population. The demise of eBay is very much like the tip of that iceberg that sank the Titanic.
January 10, 2009 at 7:04 pm
Back in the 1970s, everybody seemed to hate “the telephone company”. Those were repressive, arrogant monopolies with unchecked power and usually inferior service. Today, that same antipathy is directed at “eBay”. Can’t think of any other private company that now evokes such instant disdain just by mention of its name as “eBay”.
Had eBay accounts, one for buying and the other selling for about ten years, but finally quit selling in late 2008. During nearly a decade, I’ve seen the auction eBay site change from being mostly enjoyable to a general money losing annoyance. For a time back around year 2000, I was pulling in over $1,000 a week in profit from eBay auctions selling odd smaller items such as vintage photo images, old LIFE magazines, antique books and small collectible pieces. It was actually fun and in selling, many online friendships developed. There were lots of eager auction buyers then with all payments in check or money order form. With over 6,000 sales transactions there were just a couple of problems involving small amount checks.
Selling and buying back then was quite simple too without myriad complex, confusing and useless added enhanced features. Within the past five or so years, eBay has been transformed through gross mismanagement into a politically correct, money losing, authoritative monstrosity.
All of my auctions were cancelled by eBay twice for “inappropriate content” in year 2004. These occurrences both involved old photographic prints. One picture showing the zeppelin Hindenburg in 1936 had use of the term “nazi airship” within the descriptive text. That and 40 other auctions were all wiped out by eBay with my account being at once suspended for 14-days as punishment.
The other episode was a few weeks later involving another photographic print taken in 1942 showing a wartime scrap metal drive having a sign within the picture displaying “All this Scrap to Lick the Jap”. Not only were all other ongoing auctions wiped out, but also there was a barrage of nasty gram robot Emails from eBay that followed. I was threatened with being banned from eBay forever for “racist” content in my auction sales. It was ordered that before being “allowed” to again become a “ full member of the eBay community”, that I complete an online tutorial with follow-up quiz related to “social tolerance”. Only after carrying out that task would I be “considered” for full reinstatement to eBay.
In passing, I have noticed that eBay messages are usually signed by some anonymous person with a likely contrived name such as Crystal, Lance, Tiffany or Moonbeam. Anyway, in response to a demand by some flunky named “Todd” that I submit to an eBay indoctrination entitled “racial tolerance”, my reply was sent. The response was simple and brief, “Go and blank yourselves you a–holes!” “enough is enough!” Within less than a week, my eBay account mysteriously was reinstated as if nothing had happened at all. So much for the eBay diversity doctrine. Might add that I am married to an Asian woman and find eBay’s careless and callous treatment to be outrageous. Following that episode, my selling and buying through eBay acutely diminished.
By fall of 2008 with increased fees, few sales, more oppressive policies such as “PayPal only” accepted payments, as a small seller, I finally dropped out. eBay is in financial trouble due to intensely poor business practices and the overall lousy attitude towards customers. Seems too that eBay like many other “sales” outfits today, have gone completely off track. Corporate attitude seems more like that of a government social service agency rather private for profit business. Alienating both it’s seller and buyer base, eBay is headed for the rocks.
The hard dollar cash economy with millions of small auction transactions created and sustained eBay. Tons of Beanie Babies moved back and forth through eBay in the early years providing steady fee and final value revenue. In recent times eBay’s policies are geared to drive out modest sellers while pulling in mass marketing retail dealers. As we know, that paradigm has collapsed. General retail went bust with markets flooded full of cheap foreign made goods. Fact is, commodities found in stores are now cheaper in price, more expedient to acquire and easier to purchase than through eBay. By way of ordinary greed, common arrogance and base stupidity, eBay managed to cut the throat of it’s own golden goose. Ripping off and abusing probably hundreds of thousands of cash producing mom and pop auction sellers has been a total disaster. The salad days of eBay are over. Time to move on to something better.