I made a suggestion
once to eBay.
- To
prevent retaliatory negative feedbacks, once the buyer posts feedback, the
seller can no longer post feedback. The seller should only post feedback
based on the buyer’s payment. The seller has plenty of time for feedback
while the part “is in the mail”. I hate it when the seller withholds
feedback until he gets a positive from the buyer.
- Also,
the sellers and buyers feedback scores should also show their feedback as
a “buyer” and as a “seller” separately.
- Sellers
should be able to restrict buyers with a “buyer feedback” score below a
certain percentage from bidding, say 98%.
Dave
Homstad
56 Dodge
D500
-----Original
Message-----
From: Forward Look Mopar
Discussion List [mailto:L-FORWARDLOOK@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Bill K.
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2008
1:03 AM
To: L-FORWARDLOOK@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [FWDLK] Those of you who
sell on eBay
May be
interested to know eBay's planning major changes besides the fee increase that
starts on the 20th. (yes it's an increase, the fee they charge when your
item sells was raised as much as 60% of what it was before, while the fee to
list it drops very little).
The
subject of eBay is a huge can of worms in itself, but I did want to pass on
that a lot of people are boycotting this week 2/18-2/25 mostly because they
plan sometime in May to remove the ability to leave negative or neutral
feedback for buyers. It seems that they've deemed "retaliatory"
negative feedback by sellers a problem - even though if anything it's more a
problem from bidders, particularly those who choose not to pay for the items
they win.
They
will also change how things show up in searches - everything will go to what
they call "best match" and be sorted by who has the best DSR rating -
those stars that you see now on the feedback page. Except that when
you click on them as a buyer, it comes up where 3 = acceptable, 4 = excellent,
and 5 = beyond excellent - those aren't the exact terms, but they all work out
in that manner, so as to lead the bidder to mark someone with 3's or 4's on a
perfect transaction. But the standards they hold the seller to don't
match the ratings scale - if your average rating as a seller is less than
4.5 in any category, you're considered bad and will drop to the bottom of
searches. Which can only take one ticked off bidder mad because he got
a speeding ticket this afternoon or whatever else, if you don't sell enough
things over a 30 day period.
And,
they already have a deal going where if your feedback stats are less than 90%
positive over 30 days they can restrict your ability to sell things.
Neutrals count against that percentage also - only on eBay is neutral the
same as negative. But the stated goal of John Donahoe, the new CEO, is to
eliminate the flea market nature of eBay - they seem to want to turn it into
another Amazon.com, only a half-assed version, rather than remaining an entity
with virtually no competiton. If I owned any stock in eBay, I'd dump it
now, the way this is going in 12 months it will be more valuable as toilet
paper.
Since a
lot of us on this list use eBay, I just wanted to share in case their
announcement email never made it to you, into a spam filter or just never
turned up. There's lots of places on and off eBay you can check out to
find out more about it. So far about 98% of the people who've become
aware of it are pretty upset by it all. When you get into the
details of it, it's mystifying to try to understand why they would do
this. It would sort of be like if in the early 80s Chrysler had started
building mid-60s Imperials, New Yorkers, Furys and Monacos again instead of the
K-car and minivan.
If
anyone needs to know more, drop me a note off list and I can send you some
links to visit to check it out, along with some alternatives to
try listing things with -
Bill K.
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