Can’t leave a buyer a Negative, or even a Neutral !
This is idiotic. . .Even on Amazon a Seller can leave negative feedback for buyers to warn other sellers about potential scammers and hard to deal with customers.
No buyer needs perfect feedback.
I love when people say they are being held hostage by the seller, if they are a shitty seller then simply take the chance they might leave a negative, who cares? You don’t need your perfect 100% ! A few negatives will never hurt the buyer, us sellers are smart enough to know retaliatory feedback and real deserved negative feedback. However your seller needs near perfect 100%, and this policy will only help scammers. And now us sellers will have no way to be forewarned of these people.
My policy is that I don’t leave a positive until I know the transaction is satisfactory,either by feedback or an e-mail. And guess what? I get feedback on almost 90% of my Ebay transactions. Before I started doing this I was hovering around 40%.
Why did I start waiting to leave feedback?
I’ve received just below 3000 positive feedbacks, and 6 negative feedbacks. Every negative I have, the buyer never e-mailed me first to let me fix the problem .
1 feedback is because the person felt that they paid too much! Yes, I came to their house and held a gun to their head and said please buy my overpriced item!
2 feedbacks are for slow shipping–both packages got there in less than 6 business days– one of them 4 business days and this packages was also paid for 2 weeks late. My listings clearly state delivery time, and that I will not ship until paid.
1 negative came from an item damaged during shipment. The 2 others were from Half.com transactions in which I overlooked a flaw.
You know who this policy really hurts? Any New sellers or buyers or INTL buyers.
New sellers are going to have to have to refund even the most blatant scammers. If someone is truly dissatisfied with a product, they won’t even have to return it to the seller, as a new seller won’t be able to take a negative feedback.
New buyers? I already see tons of auctions that state “Do No Bid unless you have 100 Feedbacks.”
I won’t take this approach, but, I will close my store and only run auctions, and for expensive items, I will cancel bids of anyone without a proven track record, or even the slightest spottiest record-where as before I would ship to those people on the edge and just take extra precautions. A proven track record to me means a couple years of buying on Ebay, at least 100 positive feedbacks preferably in the past year, and the purchase of other expensive items.
I will also not being doing International transactions through Ebay anymore. INTL transactions usually take a couple extra steps of communication, and there is all sorts of room to get threatened with a neg before the seller has any chance to work things out. I think I don’t need to elaborate here-as one can read my post about International shipping.
It’s true that if I think that someone is scamming, I don’t have to refund, I can send all my proof to paypal, etc. I can absorb a negative, as many sellers can.
Some sellers simply won’t be able to do this without really damaging their feedback percentage, these people will truly be held hostage to feedback, and will lose sales in the short term, until other sellers feedback percentage even out with theirs. I’m guessing that 99.7 and up won’t be considered excellent a year from now, it will be more like 98.7 and up.
People are quick to point out that buyer feedback doesn’t count on Amazon-as I’ve said b4, one can still leave a negative to warn other sellers.
Also, negatives don’t hurt as much on Amazon, and for many of us, we do much more volume on Amazon and can still hold a 99 or 100%.
Also it’s the way the feedback is viewed. Customers on Ebay see a percentage number, and are leary of buying 99.6 and below, on amazon the feedback is viewed dif, as stars, one can have 5 full stars and only be 4.9 or 4.8, when one clicks through -which they rarely do–they see 99%, 98%, etc, there are no decimal points, and generally it seems that people start to avoid sellers around the 4.6 mark–i forgot what percentage that figures out to be and I will fix this when I wake up more and get my work done.
So bottomline. I will closing my store and only be doing Auctions on Ebay, and only for those things that I know to be Ebay gold. Of course I’ll still have to put up with jackasses that need to get an unpaid item notice to actually pay–with buy it nows I always check the must pay immediately box, but with auctions, one can’t force people pay right when the auctions over–hmm something that we don’t have to deal with anywhere else.
New Ebay Slogan:
Welcome to Ebay where you pay more than ever to have your customers jack you around.
For more Ebay nightmare stories which illustrate how wrong this policy is, please see my previous thread : Aggratiing Customers
Bitch With Books 