Re: [FWDLK] Those of you who sell on eBay

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.