What’s the point of having a good buyer reputation on Ebay? If you win an auction or buy something outright, and then pay for it, does the seller care about your buyer reputation?
I ask because I had to return something for the first time. The seller and I had some back and forth messages, and he agreed that I should return it, based on my description of the problem. If he doesn’t give me a bad review, is there any other possible repercussion against my reputation? I feel like I’m probably worrying about nothing.
It’s a holdover from the beginning, when it actually meant something. Before the dark times. Before PayPal.
Buyers could be flaky, just like sellers. No one wanted to risk sending an object to someone and then have the payment be a forgery.
Now that ebay has become a glorified swap meet with vendor booths rather than P2P selling, combined with the expectation from ebay that every transaction is five star, feedback really has become nearly useless. To be fair, I haven’t been ripped off as a buyer in a decade.
Sellers can’t give negative positives, either. So if you had one leave a positive, but it said: “Buyer’s a thief! AVOID!!” or something like that, you can contact eBay and they’ll remove it.
I can understand why this seller might not want brand new bidders (apparently they have had bidders fail to pay in the past) but how does this happen? In the flurry of last-minute bidding it seems the only way this could be done is some automated setting the seller can check, like “disallow any bids from bidders who have no feedback yet” and with an option to include exceptions for people who have contacted the seller in advance.
Any sellers here can confirm that this is something that a seller can do?
Sellers can cancel bids for any reason, but there isn’t an automatic setting to do so from bidders with zero feedback. eBay’s afraid of driving off buyers. I think there’s a way to block bids from buyers with unpaid item strikes. It is possible to have zero FB and still have UPI’s. It probably depends on what people sell, but while I’ve had a couple zero FB deadbeats, for the most part, newbies are pretty enthusiastic.
Wow. I remember when you could leave feedback to anyone, regardless of whether you had any business with them or not. I have long had a bookmark for one individual who used to leave random (and I mean random) feedback to strangers.
There definitely used to be a setting in the sale options for excluding new accounts at least. And I think requiring X number of feedbacks. I’ve been selling on and off since 1998 (woah!) so I can’t tell you when that changed.