Thursday, January 31, 2008

More Thoughts about eBays New Feedback System

In the long run, it seems like the new change in feedback is making eBay work a lot more like Amazon.com. It is similar in that the feedback does not count toward your score after 1 year, and that you can not give bidders negative feedback.

What everyone is afraid of is that this is going to make it so that you can not retaliate against bad bidders. But at Amazon it is normal for great sellers to have about 97% - 99% positive feedback rating. Everyone comes across a bad bidder, it is a universal experience.

The feedback changes won't just affect some sellers, they will affect all sellers. The only way these random negative feedbacks will negatively affect you is if your only way of keeping 100% positive feedback is to hold feedback hostage (giving negative tit for tat).

However, if you have good selling practices, and work hard with your customer service, you should not experience any problems. A great seller might get some bad feedback, but a bad seller will get a lot of bad feedback, and will be forced out of the competition!

This is actually a good thing, as sellers that try to please their customers will shine (even with a lower than 100% feedback rating).

Remember, now all of the honest sellers will be getting unwarranted and impossible to avoid negative feedback, so even though you might get a negative feedback you will not be able to respond to, you will still be on a level playing field!

Good luck, focus on customer service, and you will be fine.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree with you that the feedback will probably end up like Amazon's feedback situation. I've sold on both Amazon and eBay, and Amazon buyers simply tend to leave less feedback. I think I get Amazon feedback on less than 20% of transactions. On the other hand, I get feedback on probably 90+% of eBay transactions because buyers want feedback too.

I think once buyer feedback is eliminated (which changing to positive-only basically is the same thing), buyers will be less motivated to leave feedback and feedback rates will drop.

Anonymous said...

Hilarious!