Rubber Tangents

karmcity:

“In addition, when buyers receive negative Feedback, they reduce their activity in the marketplace, which in-turn harms all sellers.” Uh, no shit. Bad buyers reducing their activity in the marketplace is a GOOD thing, because it keeps other sellers from being hit by an awful buyer. (dalasverdugo)

 Dont get me wrong. The great eBayosaurus Rex is a demon - owning paypal and coming up with a plan that if everyone uses pay pal to pay for items then ebay legally embezzels money from people… genius indeed…

 And I’d love to be able to agree with dalasverdugo in the sentiment that the issue is prety cut and dry, but I’m afraid it is not. 

See, a bad buyer skips on payment and get negative feedback - which is fair - I’ll agree, but what isn’t fair is when the seller comes under retalitory fire. Ebay allows you to follow up on feedback, so if someone leaves a shitty remark, you can go back and leave shitty remarks (but jsut once), and there is no clear way to clarify what or how the problem started.

What eBay has done is try to silence sellers from talking shit and therefore removing the temptation from buyers to talk shit in return. The idea is somewhat sound, but the execution is poorly played out.

Where the idea fails is that a seller can’t really choose to NOT sell the item if a buyer won the bid. that makes them a bad seller.And, this setup is to now include no way for negative feedback to be left for buyers…which means that other sellers ahve to do research on particular buyers to correlate the number of positive feedback and the number of purchases - adn THEN have to assume that either a seller didnt leave feedback becuase they were lazy OR because they were a bad buyer… generalizing isnt a good thing,is it?

There’s a simpler way for this to go down and it surprises me to no end that it has not been implemented and above all gone through user suggestion prior to being just thrown as ebay users to ‘jsut deal with’.

 See, part of the feedback system allows buyers to rate certain criteria of the seller: Item description, packing, communication, and shipping cost. If the ratings for this were A.) done PRIOR to leaving the actual verbal extent of feedback and B.) listed at the top of the page as an average (already done) but also as part of the viewable feedback  per buyer, then anyone can see if a remark is retalitory or not. 

A seller can’t leave rated feedback in the same fashion (and they don’t need to) so this procedure would by default sidestep the retalitory dilemas. Of course you’ll get people who would start to premeditate thier negativity, but chances are these people already do.

 The nice thing about a system is that it allows for a pattern to show up quickly, and these people who would hypothetically be premeditating their actions would show up on the radar very fast for everyone to see - and buyers would still keep their good standing and sellers could still live without fear of negative retalitaory feedback.