This fuckin' eBay guy, again.

The BBQ Pit
1

So, back around Xmas, I posted this in the pit.

Now, one thing I didn’t mention in that pit was that the pictures were labelled “ready to hang” and they showed up without hangers on them, and one of the mats was cut crooked.

I gave the guy a negative review, saying something to the effect that the package didn’t arrive by Xmas and that the good weren’t delivered as promised in the auction.

We were not able to give someone their present, had to put hangers on ourselves, and had to go through the hassle of getting the gift to them later.

So, the guy responds on the feedback page saying, “Now, Trunk, you know it was late because of the weather.” This is a complete lie. The weather was fine at that time. Besides, the goods were ordered on the 12th. On the 20th, after I emailed him, he told me he had sent them, and they didn’t show up in the FedEx system until the 21st.

So, about a month ago, I get an email from him and from “squaretrade” wanting to resolve the matter. I told him “No thanks, I want to leave the review”.

Now, today I get another email from squaretrade, and the guy saying,

I told the guy “please stop hounding me. . .not only did blah blah blah but you ALSO disparaged my name in your feedback response, and if you had any ethics at all you would remove that.”

It seems like this might be par for the course for this guy. He has 25 negative reviews in the last month (out of about 7000 sales), but only 37 in the last 6 months. :dubious:

Sorry, eBay sellers, but negative feedback is the only recourse we got. I don’t care about the money. I don’t care about “free stuff”. I had a negative experience with you, and I’m leaving feedback to indicate it.

I should mention this is the ONLY negative feedback I’ve ever left. I’m not an eBay vigilante, slamming people for minor slights.

2

I just wanted to say that I like the sound of being an EBAY VIGILANTE!

Okay, done now.

3

After reading stories like this and many others posted in different places, I have NO confidence in Ebay’s feedback system. Buyers are afraid to post negative feedback because the seller will retaliate. Sellers try to buy the removal of a negative feedback.

What was the purpose of feedback?

4

It can still be useful if you just take the “feedback inflation” into account. I can’t recall ever being cheated by a person who had 100% positive feedback and a reasonable number of entries. But if someone has, say 90% positive feedback, I’m gonna think twice. You’d think 90% would be good, but with feedback inflation, you have to screw up pretty bad to even get 90%. If they have 80% or less, forget it. I can’t even recall seeing anyone with less than 70%. I wouldn’t even look at their auction twice. So yeah, sucky eBayers don’t get as many negatives as they deserve, but if they’re around for any length of time, they’re gonna get at least some negatives. You just have to adjust for inflation. I also steer clear of new users who don’t have a solid profile built up yet. Let them get their feet wet first. The times I’ve been cheated are when I foolishly dealt with new users who didn’t have a proven track record.

5

Feedback Inflation - that is good and descriptive. I had one seller email me and ask what problem I had with her. It turns out that the feedback I left her only said ‘the item arrived quickly and as advertised’. She was upset that I didn’t leave a trail of 20 A’s and 100 +'s.

6

When you think about it, it’s an interesting ethical dilemna. If you leave negative feedback, it benefits the system, but doesn’t benefit you individually. And you risk having the person retaliate, which hurts you individually. So you’re faced with the question of whether the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.

7

Gee, and here I was thinking that if he was selling stuff cheap enough, a few of us could buy stuff and leave negative feedback regardless of how the transaction went. When he asks why, we could say “Don’t fuck with Trunk, man!”.

8

It’s also useful to read the feedback, even the positive ones. For example, I went through a four-month ordeal trying to get a seller to send me a couple DVDs. Three times in a row, they got “lost in the mail.” Once, I could accept. Twice in a row, I guess there’s an outside possibility. But three? No way.

Her feedback rating was 96%, so I gave her the benefit of the doubt - until I actually read all that “positive” feedback, that is. I went through several hundred feedback entries over the course of six months of sales. I kept a checklist by my side to work out which positives really were positive. When I finally finished, I calculated that a full THIRD of her customers had shipments get lost in the mail. Most of the positive feedback said something along the lines of “Item lost in the mail, but seller refunded my money promptly! AAA+++++!”

In my book, that’s an inconvenience, not a positive experience. When I used my (negative) feedback to point out the alarmingly high percentage of customers with lost shipments, the seller’s response was to make her feedback private until she had enough new feedback that my comments slid off the first page.

9

What I do is select “200 per page” and scroll through til I find the negatives, because they often tell the story. Reading the positives is good too.

Yeah, see - even 96% sounds alarm bells for me. The inflation is so bad that I rarely see anyone who doesn’t have either 99% or 100%. I agree with you, 96% would cause me to take a closer look at the individual feedback entries.

Wow, you mean people can hide their feedback? That’s really lame.

Now I’m torn - I just bought something on eBay, and they sent the wrong item. But they were really accomodating about trying to fix the mistake. I was considering leaving a positive but still mentioning the error. But now I’m thinking maybe that’s misleading.

10

I’ve never left a negative though I was tempted occasionally. The one time I left a neutral, it was because the seller said the Chihuly-style bowl had broken before he could send it.

He sent me an angry e-mail saying that a neutral was the same thing as a negative. Silly me. Here I was thinking a neutral meant I had no opinion one way or another. Besides, I did not get the piece so why would a positive be appropriate?

I did write him back and explained that I was perhaps a bit hasty and should have discussed the matter with him. I was fairly new then and had never had to leave anything but positives before. He responded by giving me a negative and making it sound as if I were the tempermental one.

Let me explain that I know it wasn’t a real Chihuly bowl but the quality was such that I knew I was getting an excellent bargain. I’ll always have a tiny bit of doubt about whether he lied so he could sell it later for a bigger profit. His behavior hasn’t done anything to assuage that doubt.

11

I would have emailed him back and said, “Then next time, don’t break the bowl, dumbass.” :smiley:

12

Here’s a good website that filters out the neutrals and negs for you:

http://www.toolhaus.org/cgi-bin/negs

13

Cool!

14

No, I think that’s about right. I’ve done that before. I mean, it sucks that the system is so screwed up, but making the best of a bad situation, leaving a positive (because even a neutral seems to get taken as being a virtual death penalty) while qualifying that so that astute buyers can see the real story is a reasonable compromise, I think.

15

Agree.

If someone makes an honest mistake that they make a good-faith effort to correct I always leave a positive.