The rules have just changed at eBay. The list of changes is long, tedious, and can be found in this WordPress blog post. The upshot is, sellers can no longer leave negative or neutral feedback for buyers, giving the buyer complete unchecked feedback power.
I personally know several major sellers who are packing up and leaving eBay because of this. eBay sales have come to a virtual standstill for now. From my perspective, these changes seem like a major and possibly unrecoverable mistake.
Several articles about this new eBay policy make mention of third party services, which try and mitigate the flaws in eBay’s system. See the following Wired Blog post. But in all honesty this sort of thing should not be necessary.
What eBay needs to figure out, is what the hell they are doing to ensure a healthy marketplace for both buyers and sellers. I have a suggestion toward this goal.
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If eBay really wanted to correct their broken feedback system, they should make it entirely anonymous. And data should be added, to both the buyers and the sellers, regarding not only the percentages of positive and negative feedback received, but also about how much of each they have given, and how often they fail to give feedback at all.
This would take away the fear of negative feedback retaliation, without providing any opportunity for scammers. At the same time it would show who the unreasonable people that often leave negative feedback are, which would discourage giving it without reason.
In order to avoid making it obvious who is leaving the feedback I would advise a feedback posting delay. The system should wait for a certain number of feedbacks to come in or for a specific length of time to pass, before posting all of relevant feedbacks at once, in random order.
Additionally, feedback for a given sale should never be posted until both the buyer and the seller have each left feedback for the other, and they should have sixty days to do so.
Lastly, in addition to the visible statistics about failure to leave feedback, there should also be a small monetary penalty by eBay for not leaving feedback. Of course, if either the buyer or the seller fails to leave feedback, only the one who fails to do so should be penalized.
All feedback should be final and unchangeable, and that should be made very obvious on the feedback page. It should be stated clearly and forcefully that feedback should be left only after completing the transaction entirely.
Although I have more to say, I will leave it at that for now.
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Update: The following WordPress blog post describes eBay’s new ‘report a problem with the buyer’ page. The optimist in me almost believes that this might work. But if the response time and interest by eBay is going to be the same for this as it is for other customer interaction, it will be utterly useless.
Tags: buyer, buyers, ebay, feedback, policy, sales, seller, sellers
