<VV> eBay Feedback - is it about the product or how fast someone ships or pays ? Tell me about the product !

[Alan and Clare Wesson]

Charles wrote:

> Try emailing the customers from the seller's feedback list and ask them
> their honest opinion.  I have done this and found that some actually hated
> the product but didn't want to say so because they were too nice to leave
> "Negative" feedback !

Don't you mean 'were afraid of getting negative feedback in return'? I have
certainly refrained from leaving neutral or negative feedback in the past
because of fears of retaliation - and as eBay doesn't/won't moderate the
comments, even if undeserved, people can use this method of retaliation if
they want. Makes you kind of cautious about leaving negatives. My own
'self-defence' strategy is NEVER to leave feedback until the other person
has left it for me (and so to avoid the possibility of retaliation!). Of
course, that wouldn't work if everyone did it, because no-one would ever
leave any feedback!! It works for me, though.

The other way to deal with this is to leave no feedback at all if you aren't
happy. This is less damaging to the other person, but it at least avoids
being two-faced and telling favourable lies about an unsatisfactory
transaction!

I have always felt, though, that a much bigger flaw in eBay's feedback
system is that they don't make the value of the sale clear in the feedback.
What on earth is there to stop someone from selling / buying 150 small items
like matchboxes, decals or similar for 50 cents each, and then starting to
sell 'dodgy' high-value items on the back of that positive feedback record?

You could, for instance, if you had a couple of really nasty cars that you
wanted to misrepresent and sell for $10000 each, spend a few months selling
worthless items for bargain prices, shipping them on time and being nice
with the buyers - and then pounce, and make $20000 on the back of the
positive feedback.

O.K., you'd get a couple of negatives for them, but your feedback rating
would still be 98%, and you could wait a few months, sell some more cheap
stuff, and build up another 100 or so positive feedbacks, and then do it
again.

As the details of the sale are only visible for 3 months, after this time it
is completely impossible for the feedback reader to know what item the
feedback was about.

How have I worked this out? Simple - my own feedback file is 100% positive,
and comprises almost exclusively items valued at under $5. But one of the
items in the file (the Kaiser) was valued at $1500.

You can't tell the difference, though.

Weird!

Cheers

Alan