Just got the eBay email earlier tonight with all their glowing claims about reduced fees and such. Not quite what they’d have you to believe.
Imaginary item, listed today, auction style, beginning bid of $1, which sells with a closing bid of 25. Listing fee of .40 + $1.31 final value fee ($25 x .0525%) = $1.71
Same item, listed after 20 Feb 08, same listing and final selling bid. Listing fee of $.35 (holy crap, a whole nickel?) + $2.19 final value fee ($25 x .0875%) = $2.54
So the net change on this modest transaction is *only an almost 50% increase * to the seller.
The other item which popped out at me is:
:eek: What are you folks smoking? I’ve read stories by you fellow Dopers of your ‘Buyers from Hell’. How else can you warn the rest of the selling world if someone simply shouldn’t be trusted or dealt with?
I’m afraid we’re dealing with the lesser of two evils here. The only thing that a buyer has to do is to pay in time (and not be a jerk when it comes to delivery times, descriptions etc). Nothing else. The current system is that, most of the time, the seller won’t leave feedback until the buyer has. If the buyer leaves negative feedback, the seller often will too - even if it’s completely unjustified. So the buyer is effectively held to ransom. This has been an issue for some time.
I agree that if you get a buyer from hell this is a problem; but so is the current system. Take your choice.
Or they could have actually fixed the system, like so:
Both the buyer and seller should only have 1 week to leave feedback – during that week, the feedback cannot be seen by either party, but they will be alerted that feedback was left (unless the buyer/seller chooses to hide this fact as well, via an optional checkbox). After the one week period expires, the feedback will then be posted for all to see.
This method prevents being held ransom, and retaliatory action.
The only time I became pissed at a buyer was when he broke my balls for not wanting to ship USPS parcel post to save him approximately a dollar. I ship all packages FedEx, advise buyers of that in listings, because the drop point is really convenient, I don’t have to stand in line, and the only time a package was damaged, FedEx made it right within 2 weeks-all accomplished online. He expected me to alter my schedule to save him a dollar, and I told him to not bid, if it was that important to him. He won, and left negative feedback.
Whatever you do, do not suggest anything like this on the Ebay feedback forums. The posters there will immediately start a dogpile and rip you limb from limb, suggesting that you must be in favor of/in league with scammers because you don’t want people to be able to “warn the community” (read: leave a single negative feedback) the very instant they suspect foul play.
The idea, of course, makes perfect sense, and would solve 90-100% of the complaints on the front page of that same forum immediately at the price of delaying feedback display by a couple of days at maximum, but the people there are adamant (and frighteningly so) about wanting none of it.
eBay feedback is a joke today anyway. Sellers practically have to be criminals before people would admit that non-positive feedback is appropriate. Maybe now that the threat of retaliation is gone, buyers can honestly rate their buying experience. Instead of being held hostage by a seller who totally dorked up your transaction, you can actually tell people what happened. As it is, buyers can’t even leave a neutral without risking retaliation.
I see this change resulting in a lot more negatives and neutrals for all sellers, which removes the stigma of having a few negatives, and actually lets us separate the good sellers from the aggressively protective sellers.
Worried about problem buyers, check the feedback they’ve left for others, that’s still an option isn’t it?
Stupid thing is, buyers don’t really need feedback. With certain exceptions for very low or negative feedback ratings, anyone can bid on anything.
If they make it so that buyers can only receive positive feedback, what’s the point of having it at all? You can say anything you like, as long as it’s positive?
Yes, I’m predominantly a seller on eBay and no, I don’t leave feedback immediately upon payment - leave it when the transaction is fully complete (but I don’t hold my buyers to ransom for it - if they tell me they’ve received the item and are happy, I’ll leave feedback first, and they all receive the invitation to do it that way) - and yes, the feedback system as it currently stands, is prone to abuse (what system isn’t?). But solving the problem bu imposing automatic positive feedback is like curing dandruff by cutting off the head.
If they’ve received the item and are happy, you’ve basically confirmed that you’d get positive feedback, so leaving feedback then is no big deal. The big question about ransom is what happens when you’re not assured of a positive.
Let’s go for a hypothetical here, customer buys something from you, and you mess up and put the wrong product in the box. Let’s also say that the customer is willing to work with you in returning the first product, while you send out the correct one. This hypothetical is set up to clearly indicate that the seller messed up and the buyer actively takes steps to assist in fixing it.
Does he get a positive, or is that dependent on what feedback he’s going to leave you? If he says he’s leaving you a neutral or negative, what is he getting? I’m sure there are a whole lot of sellers who would be apoplectic if this buyer dared to call this buying experience neutral or negative, even if it was terribly stressful and unpleasant for him, due entirely to the sellers error.
I’ll agree with you though, that all positive feedback is silly. May as well do away with buyer feedback, and simply make it all seller feedback and seller responses. Link the buyer to the feedback he leaves, a buyer who leaves tons of negatives is clearly a difficult person to please.
It would actually be pretty cool if you used this concept the same way college football uses “strength of schedule”. In other words, a buyer giving a negative feedback would affect the seller by (total feedback given / negative feedbacks given). That would mean buyers who have given a lot of positive feedback would have more influence than buyers who have given a lot of negative.
eBay should have no public viewable comments. They should take the number of registered complaints that proved out true, and compare it to the number of sales by the seller. They then publish a seller rating of below average,neutral, good, and great. Any seller that rates bad internally is not listed as so, they are just banned. Customer’s are rated and treated in a similar way. Selling and buying shouldn’t automatically be treated with the same scale.
Only positive feedback for buyers? Then what do you do about the buyer who never pays after winning an auction? I had this happen when I first started selling, and it turned out that this buyer already had a -1 feedback because he had done this before. I no longer sell to buyers with negative feedback because of this, but under the new system what warning will sellers have about these people?
I usually don’t give feedback until I get it, but it’s not because I’m “holding the buyer at ransom”. I’m waiting for the buyer’s feedback to confirm that the received the item, and are satisfied with it.
Oh, and I agree that the new pricing system sucks. I like the free gallery pictures, since I consider them a good selling point, but even including that with the OP’s calculations the seller is still being charged more.
If they’ve not received their item, or have received it and are not happy, then it means I have more work to do in order to restore their happiness - in effect, it means the transaction is not complete and it is not yet appropriate to leave feedback. If I have done everything in my power to resolve the problem and the buyer still feels a neg or neutral is appropriate, then that’s entirely fine by me.
And if I receive a negative in such circumstances, but feel that I have been dealt with fairly and squarely, I’ll still leave a positive for the buyer.
But it’s just not right to leave feedback about the whole transaction until the whole transaction is over.
I believe the proposed changes to the feedback system will provide a safe haven for a significant increase in the activity of dishonest buyers - I do believe most buyers are honest and upstanding, of course, it’s just that I think these changes will unbalance the system in favour of the small number of dishonest ones.
I’m deeply dismayed about this - solving the relatively trivial problem of retaliatory feedback while other problems such as the widespread sale of counterfeit goods and the ease of account hijacking go unaddressed (or addressed by token gestures).
I don’t really think I can continue trading on eBay in the face of yet another erosion of seller rights - sure, the buyers are waving the cash, but it’s the sellers that actually hand money to eBay - but yet again, they’re treated as second class members.
The eBay sellers shouldn’t be the ones complaining. These new fees are akin to corporate taxes, rent increases, et al. which get passed off to the buyer (usually with a mark-up). In eBay’s case, that “almost 50% increase” is all but guaranteed to work it’s way into the nebulous half of the seller’s shipping and ‘handling’ charges.
