On 18 Oct 2005 at 20:16, Tom C wrote: > I may be asking this out of total ignorance Paul, I hope not. As far as > reliability of ratings goes, what makes them reliable?
Seller validity can be reliability ascertained by looking at the period over which the seller has been operating, how many times they have changed their names over that time and by reading the comments left by buyers, the good sellers shine through. > What's to stop me from conducting a series of BIN auctions on e-bay and > having my wife create multiple e-bay accounts with different e-mail > addresses from multiple locations, and then having her make the 'purchase' and > leave positive feedback? Little I suspect. I've seen it done in-fact then I've seen eBay do the clean sweep and suspend all the suspect accounts from the system. Generally it's pretty easy to tell if the rating is fraudulent or not by looking at the feedback ratings of the buyers too. > The one time I got ripped on the guitar, the seller had a rating of over > 99.5% with 1000's of transactions. I am inclined to believe that the vast > majority of transactions go smoothly, but a seller who decides to be > occasionally unscrupulous is easily able to hide the fact in the numbers. The > more successful transactions a seller may have, the easier it can get to hide > the stinkers. If you had 1 in 200 chance (0.5%) of winning cash in a lottery I guess they would be pretty good odds (in context). I personally wouldn't deal with a volume seller with only 99.5% feedback rating, I'm not that much of a gambler. Cheers, Rob Studdert HURSTVILLE AUSTRALIA Tel +61-2-9554-4110 UTC(GMT) +10 Hours [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://members.ozemail.com.au/~distudio/publications/ Pentax user since 1986, PDMLer since 1998
