Indeed - it certainly isn't too fragrant. I've no doubt many sellers give blood, sweat and tears in building up an excellent feedback record over many years and then have to suffer in these very cases.
My other half has recently encountered bidders who think that they can decide after they have won that they 'don't actually want the item any longer' .. and then refuse to pay. One chap in particular was completely deluded and actually appeared to be puzzled when payment was demanded. He behaved as if the whole online auction process was just a game he could play and back out of at any point.
It does seem horribly unfair in this type of situation. I know if negative feedback was left for this non-payer that he could, nay probably would retaliate by leaving a neg too.
Having a feedback system is a wonderful thing for both seller and buyer alike but when it can be 'abused' in this way, surely a re-think of the rules governing the system must be in order.
You mentioned the fact that many volume sellers don't leave negative feedback to prevent retaliation but surely they have a duty to let other sellers (both large and small alike) know that a user is a non-payer? Letting them get away scot-free just encourages the buggers to keep doing it.
Shelly
----Original Message Follows---- From: Bruce Hershenson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: Bruce Hershenson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [MOPO] MoPo: eBay's feedback system stinks! Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2004 12:35:37 -0500
I have one of greatest number of overall eBay feedbacks (88,615 and growing), and last I checked there were only around 60 eBay sellers IN ANY CATEGORY who had more feedbacks than me (and I would bet my 8 million dollars in sales exceeds all but a handful of those 60 sellers).
I also have the best feedback record of any over 50,000 feedback seller, by a wide margin. I have 11 undeserved negatives, and the other sellers with feedback totals similar to mine have mostly hundreds of negatives, some in the high hundreds.
Many volume sellers don't leave any negative feedback at all. They don't want any undeserved retaliatory feedbacks, and besides, they reason that leaving negatives only helps other sellers, not themselves (many eBay sellers are very shortsighted).
However I ALWAYS leave negative feedback on those who never pay me. I feel that if someone like me won't leave negatives, then the entire system is a joke and should be junked. So once a month I leave negative feedback on those who have not paid me on 60 day old transactions (some I can't leave on because they have already been kicked off).
I just left this month's negatives (six of them, which is pretty standard, as I don't get paid by around 15 people every month, but usually 5 to 10 of them have already been kicked off). Now I have to wait and sweat for a few weeks to see if any of those six losers decide to leave retaliatory negatives, which they are completely free to do under the eBay system! I have a real worry, since most of my 11 negative feedbacks came under these exact circumstances.
Here is the feedback of one of the six: http://feedback.ebay.com/ws1/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewFeedback&userid=jteesmith
Obviously this is a complete and total loser. And yet he can leave negatives on all he "bought" from (even though he never paid anyone) and there is nothing any of the sellers can do about it! Is there not something terrible wrong with this system? How can it be fixed?
Bruce eMoviePoster.com
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