Ebay to ban sellers leaving negative feedback for buyers

[completerookie]

what about this for a brilliant idea, Ban any seller from leaving negative feedback about a buyer -
The new system (from may onwards) will allow the buyer to leave negative (or neutral) feedback, but as the seller, you will not be able to put your side of the story and leave bad vibes about the buyer.
seems ebay reckons you'll get a true picture of what the seller is really like -If you don't like the feedback, then you go through the mediation service they provide and they will "ban the buyer" if need be.

It was bad enough before, but this hairbrain idea really takes the p*ss

Once again, they are loading the dice so heavily in favour of the buyer it makes you wonder if its worth bothering now.

artical on the bbc

[Kultya]

It isn't worth the bother any more, the bubble burst on ebay around mid 2006 for sellers. For the asshole buyers that expect the earth but don't want to pay more than 99p for it, they'll just say what they want with no fear of it affecting them. The only good thing is that it will show up some of the 'really bad' sellers like the ones that sell fixed at 99p with delivery of £15.

I used to do well on there, in the 5 days since my own site opened I've taken twice as much revenue at higher profit and without the fees and no dumb feedback to worry about either! I've not even told my past customers about my site yet!

[Mark H]

This is potentially bad for decent sellers, for whom poor feedback is usually from someone out to cause trouble or get a refund/replacement even though they've got the goods. However, most people will probably look at the high number of good feedbacks and spot the odd unreasonable comment/scam. For poor sellers it probably won't make much difference - buyers will see a string of bad feedback and form the correct opinion regardless of the seller's response.

PS my favourite seller's response was from a Chinese retailer who simply replied "ridiculous person!!" to anyone who left bad feedback of any description......

[Luddite]

That could be just the kick up the ar*e I need to stop selling on ebay. Fed up of being a slave to the post office for a relatively low margin anyway.

[Kultya]

Yup, its an arse once you've taken out the fees and however many times you've listed it. I had an item that I listed on ebay 4 times since October at a low start £14.99, then gave up and stuck it on my site at a fixed price including postage of £35. It sold today and I did a comparison. Had I sold it on ebay for the same amount I'd have made approx £3 less, then take out all the times I listed it plus the other stuff that listed and didn't sell etc etc.

Will keep ebay shop open though and a me page, just a few fixed priced ads running, good advertising for roughly a tenner a month!

[completerookie]

ebay tends to be a loss leader for us, just a way of pointing surreptitiously to the shop.

[Stereo Steve]

We've actually turned ebay around and are now making a good wage out of it again after 6 months of rubbish. We put our prices up and our postage down and allowed combined orders with a maximum postage price per order of £6.99 regardless of how much you buy (we've had customers buying a load of stuff and asking 'are you sure this is OK!').

We stocked up the shop and promote it heavilly in the listings. The result is a few huge shop orders a day which really bring up the average profit. The one big plus with ebay is that most orders are jiffy bag jobs, single items and quick to pack. I used to be up to 100 per hour when I was packing them myself. So, if you can average 2 or 3 quid profit per sale it pays well.

I actually heartilly applaud the changes. It'll make it harder for the seller which means more barriers to entry, always a problem on ebay. Plus, they have brought in lower fees for powersellers and business sellers if they perform well.

I've also found that since we abandoned the low price / high postage game we are getting far less idiot emails per day. I guess the morons just ignore our listings now as the item price is too high for them.

[Stereo Steve]

Oh yeah and it's 300 or so customers a week which I can promote the site to with a flyer in the package and also invite them to join the mailing list which many do. That in itself is worth a lot. I can name many of our regular customers who found us through ebay.

[pnagames]

completely agree with Steve

our ebay is getting better by the minute. we use our fixed prices and we have a standard delivery charge. only on odd items like keybpoards etc we raise the delivery but still to a reasonable level.

we dont get rougly any negatives. we always leave feedback first so if they leave feedback we can only reply.

if our customers want a refund they have always contacted us which is good.

we get the odd question here and there and we get customers outside EU asking questions whether we deliver.

we have done a promotion in the past (include discount voucher in pack) and it brought some results.

[Mark H]

Sorry Panagiotis, didn't fully understand this bit:

"we always leave feedback first so if they leave feedback we can only reply"

[Stereo Steve]

You can set up Selling Manager Pro to leave feedback automatically on payment or once the buyer has left positive for you. If you leave it first then you leave yourself open to a negative with no chance of retaliation. It's a personal choice. We leave it after the buyer but may well switch to leaving it first now as it may give you a little more cred with the buyer.

[freakmode]

Has anyone ever managed to get eBay customers across you their site?

We stick in a 15% discount code that they can use and almost no one ever uses it.

eBay customers tend to only buy from eBay to the extent that many of them ask us to list products from our website on eBay at a higher price. FFS

[completerookie]

we get a lot of purchases from our website that we know has come from ebay.

we put a selection of goods on ebay (like I say, loss leaders) but then point to many more on the web site - need to do this carefully but one way is to point to terms and conditions held on our website - nobody seems to object to this link to the website then

[Mark H]

we get a lot of purchases from our website that we know has come from ebay.

we put a selection of goods on ebay (like I say, loss leaders) but then point to many more on the web site - need to do this carefully but one way is to point to terms and conditions held on our website - nobody seems to object to this link to the website then

Anybody tried something similar on Amazon?

[acompton]

Most sellers on Amazon have a standard 'condition' text which is really a closet advert for their shop. Amazon prevent any links being put in there, so I suspect they would block links in the Ts & Cs paragraph as well, although I haven't tried it.

I send an automated email to Amazon buyers with a suggestion that when shopping in future they might like to look at our website. It has brought some conversion, but Amazon buyers are very loyal (to Amazon).