I have noticed something in general with regards to leaving feedback in ebay, and it bugs me a bit.
Granted I’ve only had 50 transactions, but without exception it seems that the seller will not leave me positive feedback until I have left positive feedback.
To me this is really wrong.
There are two parts to a transaction that can be thought of (as I see it) as
individual unrelated items:
Buyer pays the seller in a timely fashion with PAYPAL or money order (I’m leaving personal checks out of this because they can bounce, and I don’t send them).
Seller, when satisfied as to having been paid (payment clears), sends out item.
Now, I maintain that after the seller is satisfied that they have indeed been paid, they are morally obligated to immediately give positive feedback; after all my only job is to pay timely and I have done so.
Now if they send me crap or the item isn’t as advertised, and I can’t work it out with the seller, I may leave negative feedback. The fact that I paid in a timely fashion still stands and I still deserve my positive feedback.
How do you feel about this? Any ebay sellers out there care to share their views?
Thanks.
I think one of the reasons why sellers do this is because some people don’t bother to leave feedback at all. I’ve had this happen. It’s frustrating to take the time to leave someone positive feedback, and then they don’t leave you any. For this reason, I now wait until I receive feedback to leave feedback for a buyer.
I think it also cuts down on the amount of negative feedback people leave on a knee-jerk reaction. It encoruages buyers to contact the seller with a problem and work it out between the two of them rather than just leaving negative feedback when the seller wasn’t aware there was a problem.
That’s just my take on it anyway.
While I understand Yellowval’s point, I (as a person who sells a lot more on ebay than she buys) always leave positive feedback within a day or two of getting paid. The only exception might be if the payment comes on a Friday. In order to put boundaries on my work at home, I don’t do any ebay over the weekend. At all. It gets much too easy (for me) to “just do this one more thing”. So, if they payment comes on a Friday, I might not get to leaving feedback until Monday or Tuesday. As far as the idea that, if I leave feedback first, the customer might not leave feedback, to me that’s not a big deal. If they don’t, they don’t. YMMV.
But my point it that even if I were a jerk buyer, the fact that I paid and in a timely fashion is all that’s required of me to merit positive feedback.
To wait for positive feedback from the buyer sounds like a circle jerk, and ruins the credibility of the rating system.
A few examples with what I believe should happen:
I win a $10 old magazine seller listed as mint. Seller wants payment in 10 days.
I pay immediately, he gets it immediately. I should get positive feedback - I am a good buyer. Seller sends me the mag, it’s beautiful, and I extol the seller in positive feedback.
Same as 1 but I took my time paying and he gets it on day 11. He leaves me neutral or negative feedback saying I was a late payer. He still sends me the magazine and it’s mint - I leave positive feedback because he sent me what was advertized.
Same as 1. Seller gives me good feedback, but he sends me a urine stained magazine. I contact him and he tells me “sorry, but that’s the item”. I leave negative feedback.
I also understand where you’re coming from, norine. I’m someone who buys much more than I sell on eBay, and I almost always leave feedback the day I receive an item. I think it’s the polite thing to do. I’ve sold very few items, but in the couple of cases when someone didn’t leave feedback, it bothered me. As someone who doesn’t sell too often, I worried that I’d done something wrong. But I also figure that if the buyer was really upset with the item, they’d certainly take the time to leave negative feedback.
What wrecks it more, I think, is the mutual removal feature.
I left one of my first neutrals on a seller (10000+ score) who shipped the package over a week after accepting my payment. Noted it was packaged okay, shipped pretty late, but it got there.
They left me a negative, a somewhat rude one, in return. I commented on it, noting I’d left a neutral, not a neg.
Forgot about it.
A few days or weeks later, I got a message. The seller wanted to do a “mutual withdrawl” of feedback. I’d lose my negative (and my rating would be 100% again) and they’d lose the neutral.
I decided it wasn’t worth it, and didn’t accept the “offer”. A long perusal of feed back left and gotten by the seller showed this was apparently a pattern - a spate of late shipments or problems, negative feedbacks flung around, then withdrawn, over 150 times.
I left my neutral, left a negative for the customer service expeirence and bullying tactics of “wrecking my low postitive feedback score”. Got another negative, of course, left my side of the situation as comments to his negatives.
If if you feel you have to leave a comment “first”, remember you can always do a follow up comment to it should the situation change.
I’m the owner of an eBay store, selling prints of my photography.
The problem is that some customers don’t reveal themselves as jerks until after they receive the item. I ship my prints in very sturdy, sealed mailing tubes. One guy complained that the print arrived with a huge tear in it, although the tube was intact - something that is not possible. He spewed forth all kinds of threats to me if I didn’t send a replacement print. I did send him one, which I would have done anyway, without the threats. I won’t do business with him again.
It really doesn’t matter if the buyer is a jerk or a saint. If I’m selling something and I receive prompt payment, the positive feedback goes in right away, since the buyer has lived up to his end of the deal. Any problems subsequent to that are a separate issue from the payment and are just the bumps in doing online selling.
Some sellers actually state in the ad that they will leave the same feedback as the buyer. I avoid these like the plague. I don’t know why someone would buy from these people.