Ok, i know this post is not quite relevant to our main site, but as a part time ebay seller i had to post something, and would welcome responses from other ebay sellers. Ebay, if you didnt know has just introduced their most stupid plan yet, to remove the ability for sellers to leave bad feedback.

Is this the final nail in the coffin for ebay? As decent honest ebay sellers desert the site in droves, we take a breif look with the following posts about what people are saying about this, the most stupid thing ebay has done to date……………………….

EBay’s Feedback Changes Are Bad News For Buyers

Posted by Alexander Wolfe, Feb 7, 2008 11:27 AM

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Whatever happened to Web 2.0 openness at eBay? That’s what many sellers are wondering, now that the online auction powerhouse is killing its longtime policy of letting sellers leave bad feedback about buyers. Sure, there are abusive sellers who vindictively post bad ratings, but warts-and-all feedback is eBay’s one market-policing mechanism, Now, as Ars Technica correctly puts it, eBay will have “no real feedback.” Here’s the deal.

As eBay explains it in its “Upcoming Changes to Feedback” write-up: “Sellers will no longer be able to leave negative or neutral Feedback for buyers. This change will occur in May, 2008.”

Why on earth would they do this? According to their explaination, “sellers will be protected from buyers who violate our policies without risking a cut in good buyer activity.”

OK, I’ll grant them that. There are some disreputable sellers who believe a strong offense is the best defense, and haul off unnecessarily at good buyers. It’s also true, as eBay writes, that “buyers will be more honest when they leave [seller] Feedback since they will not fear retaliatory negative Feedback.”

On the other hand, the inability of honest sellers to post honest feedback on bad buyers means that buyer fraud is likely to increase. I’d submit that this will happen without any concomitant reduction in seller fraud, which is what you’d hope to achieve if this policy had any meaning.

Clearly, then, this isn’t eBay’s purpose in making the change. One can thus only assume that eBay is doing this in some misguided attempt to prop up the site’s sagging performance. Carrying this thread forward, I’m forced to point out that eBay only got into a mess in the first place when, a few years back, it screwed the very buyers which made it popular in the first place by raising its fees.

Those fees, incidentally, were reduced recently. So the feedback about-face comes as the second leg of a strategy to get eBay back on the fast-growth path. But eBay was never broken in the first place, and it’s still not broken, if only its executive team would stop trying to squeeze it beyond all reasonableness.

What eBay really needed to do was crack down on fraudulent buyers. But that’s something they’ve never seriously attempted. (Ebay is making one other small change in its policy, which will actually help in this regard. It will limit to one the number of feedbacks per week anybody can get from the same trading partner. This will reduce fraud; though the fraud it will reduce is obvious to all but the most naive eBay user.)

Anyway, my point is that eBay needs to leave the current feedback system alone, because “bad” feedback from sellers is just as much of a tool for buyers looking to weed out the bad sellers as it is for sellers hoping to avoid deadbeat buyers. If you’re not an eBay user, you’re probably confused. But if you are, you know just what I’m talking about. (That is, you have to subjectively scan feedback, to get a sense whether a seller is “OK.”)

Caveat emptor — and vendor — indeed.

For more, directly from the keyboards of eBay’s users, check out the “Ebay changes feedback policy” thread on eBay’s own forums. Currently, 5,238 pissed-off posts — “this could be one of the worst decisions eBay has ever made,” writes one commenter — and counting.

Fix some eBay feedback problems

Submitted by brad on Mon, 2004-01-19 10:56.

• Technology
• eBay

Like many, I am interested in reputation systems, and eBay has built the largest public reputation system. Many have noted how feedback on eBay is overwhelmingly positive — a 97% positive rating would be a reason to be wary of a seller.

It’s also noted that people do this because they are scared of revenge feedback — I give you a negative, you do it back to me. One would think that since the buyer’s only real duty is to send the money that the seller should provide positive feedback immediately upon receipt of that money, but they don’t.

Some fixes have been proposed, including:

• letting you see the count of total auctions the party has been buyer or seller in, so you can see how many resulted in no feedback at all. Right now only eBay knows how large that number is.
• double-blind feedback. That is to say that feedback is not revealed until both parties have entered it, or if only one party enters it, after the feedback period has expired.
• Marking revenge feedback, ie. putting a mark next to negatives that were a response to an outgoing negative.

Thus you could have very low fear of revenge feedback and there would be no argument about who should go first.

This idea’s fairly obvious, so like many other obvious ideas about eBay one wonders if eBay doesn’t feel some benefit to themselves from not doing it, though it’s hard to see. I’m also curious as to why eBay doesn’t offer a “going, going, gone” auction where the auction closes only after 5 minutes with no bidding. That seems to be in the interests of sellers (and eBay which gets a cut of the selling price) and it’s certainly not something they are unaware of.

The only proposition I’ve heard is that eBay has decided that there is a positive value to itself (and possibly sellers) from bid-sniping, the process of bidding preemptively in the last minute of an auction to not give other live bidders (who didn’t use the automatic rebidder) a chance to come in with more. The only way this could be good woudl be if Snipers deliberately overbid in order to trump anything. Any research or thoughts on this? It may also be the case that the sniped auctions are more “fun,” or more of a contest. And finally having fixed closing times does facilitate participating in multiple auctions for the same thing.

I have also posted updated eBay thoughts and an even simpler system which eliminates revenge and in fact now have an eBay tag for all eBay related posts, including thoughts on eBay’s solution to all this.

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