On 5/14/05, Paul Stenquist <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The lesson? Let the other party rate first.
One of the reasons I stopped eBaying a couple of years ago was the "politics" involved in these sorts of things. The ratings system has become a joke, because if one is victimized by a bad transaction, there's a "negative rating chill" insofar as you don't want retaliatory negatives, even though you've done nothing wrong. And, while your advice is good, Paul, what if they never rate? Then you're stuck not giving them their negative, and the world doesn't know that their dealing with a raving a**hole. Kind of defeats the whole idea of ratings, no? The ones I love are those that hit you with the "pre-emptory strike" negative. That happened to my sister and I when we were selling photographs on eBay. Someone wanted to back out of a transaction, but rather than ask us (we'd have allowed her, grudgeingly), she hits us with a negative rating, saying that we didn't answer her e-mails after the transaction closed, and so she treated the deal as dead. Of course, that wasn't true, as we in fact contacted her initially within hours of the end of the auction, and it was she who didn't contact us in return. But, what could we do? Other than stew about our first negative rating in some 70 deals? cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson
