Consequences of Upcoming Feedback Policy Changes
April 11, 2008
Most of the boycotters have talked about how it would be a disaster when sellers can no longer leave negative feedback to buyers. There will be scammers coming out of the woodwork trying to extort goods from honest buyers. I’m sure that will be a problem but there is something else that’s almost never talked about. What about unscrupulous sellers? It is bit of a touchy subject to talk about crooked sellers because there is a risk of making all sellers look bad but everyone know there are bad sellers out there. You know the type. They steal item pictures and descriptions while charging exorbitant shipping charges. Of course they have no compunction about creating a bogus account and then buying up competitor’s items and then leave pile of negatives. Now the honest seller is frantically trying to repair the undeserved negatives while rest of his items disappear off the best match search results because of wrecked DSR and potential customers flee. The net result is damage to seller’s reputation, loss of sales, loss of listing fee since eBay doesn’t refund listing fees and loss of valuable time that he could have spent on his customers and improving his business. The unscrupulous seller can repeat this over and over again until basically run the honest seller to the ground. Are you scared yet?
April 16, 2008 at 3:48 pm
One thing that is not being addressed is that one of Ebay’s solutions to the problems of bad sellers has been for other sellers to police their site. Well this has not worked and yet Ebay has had this policy for a very long time. If a seller for instance is charging high shipping and another seller reports this to ebay, the auction may or may not be pulled and the offender will get a canned email stating the auction was pulled for whatever reason. But this has never been a given. Now ebay is calling every seller bad by their decisions and never ending solutions that make no sense at all. So in short if Ebay makes their decisions one can count on them being short sighted and just plain wrong because the sellers did not take care of Ebay’s problems for them. Ebay will have a very rough road this year.