As you may remember about two months ago eBay drastically changed their feedback system in the following ways:
· eBay sellers no longer have the capability to leave neutral or negative feedback for a buyer under any circumstance. This put sellers in a very disadvantageous spot where there was a ton of risk and little reward, all of the while unpaid buyers could run the eBay community amuck without consequence.
· Neutral feedback counts toward the overall positive rating of a member meaning for example:
If “member A” has 10 blatantly negative feedback's and 10 positive feedback's their rating would be identical to that of “member B” who has 10 neutral feedback's, 10 positive feedback's, and 0 negative.
· These changes also came at the same time eBay significantly raised the percentage taken on final value fees.
As a result of these changes many members lost their Power Seller status because their overall positive feedback percentage dipped below 98%. eBay’s phone support was drowned for weeks with questions that could not properly be answered, and many members closed or threatened to close their accounts.
Today part of this system has been reverted, and though not admittedly I’m sure this is in response to the eBay community’s downright hatred for this among other policy changes. As a result of this change in policy our overall positive feedback rating increased from a mediocre 98.7% to a 99.9% immediately. I thought this was an interesting development that should be shared in light of our recent problems with eBay. I am not surprised really that the system has been changed back, however it makes the original question of how a clearly flawed system was ever put into place even more pertinent. It is always quite a task when trying to exist in a community that lacks on every level the ability to communicate and reason but today can certainly be counted as a victory for the little guy in the magical land of eBay.
To be continued……………………………………………..
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I agree Kiel and have been greatly surprised by how badly Ebay is managed. Had someone told me the things we have learned the hard way, I probably would never have believed them. The amount of problems we have encountered, and the inability to resolve these problems, or even to talk to anyone at Ebay about them, has been amazing. You mention only a few of the problems in your blog but there have been many many others. All of these problems and yet they still continue to raise the fees.
I might feel better about Ebay if there was some level of service available for the amount of fees we have to pay. But when we reach some unknown, arbitrary limit on some cretin few items and there is absolutely no one to talk to at Ebay about it, I just find that unacceptable. What if we ran our business that way? Maybe we should call it something other then "The Magical Land of eBay". How about, “The Mine Field of Ebay”?
Thank goodness for our clients… they are isolated from all of these problems and having to deal with them on their own!
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