Buyers not leaving feedback!
Summary: In a discussion about eBay's feedback system, treasur75 criticized buyers for not leaving feedback, suggesting eBay should penalize non-feedback-giving buyers to maintain trust, as feedback was more common and crucial 20 years ago. Several participants, including eburtonlab and mrdutch1001, stressed that feedback is voluntary and its value comes from being optional. eburtonlab argued against making feedback mandatory, warning it would lose its usefulness. Others, such as recped, noted feedback's limited value and byto253 shared strategies for new sellers to increase their feedback count. Overall, there is a recognition of the changing landscape of online selling and the varying opinions on the importance and method of collecting feedback on platforms like eBay.
Ebay needs to do something about buyers not leaving feedback. Ebay chose to make the feedback the prominent method of judging users because 20 years ago when I was selling on here everyone left feedback. Ebay was a place where people sold valuable antiques and collectibles. Feedback was critical for the seller and the buyer because you had to trust someone was going to send you a money order in the mail after purchase and they had to trust you to ship it. Now they seem to be more about trying to compete with Amazon and while feedback is still critical for the seller the buyers couldnt care less. They treat it like it's optional, like an Amazon review.
Ebay needs to ding these people somehow. If they don't leave feedback then erase the one they recieved after a month, or put an asterix next to their username that says "This buyer does not leave feedback"! Or even just have some kind of checkbox when creating an auction that allows a seller to choose to not accept bids from buyers that have a history of not leaving feedback. Then when they go to buy something and can't they'll have to go leave all the feedback they ignored.
Or Ebay could just automatically leave positive feedback for the buyer if they haven't. Something that shows it's automated but still adds to the tally.
The feedback system is just too lopsided now. Buyers used to want the feedback as much as sellers.
byto253
·1 year ago20 years ago there were not the multiple online buying platforms there are now. Amazon is the big one, and IMHO a lot of people pattern what they do from Amazon and feedback is a not something folks really worry about there.
The cost of an item is the price listed, plus shipping, plus tax - it does not include a feedback obligation. I am happy when someone lays down their cash and happy to see the bit of feedback that does come in.
If you want to get your feedback count up, which I suggest for new sellers, buy some small cheap items like cotton swabs or elastics or whatever, from a large overseas seller. 90% of the time their feedback is automated and you will get the count up quick.
To get your seller feeback up, it will take some volume as maybe 20% of buyers will leave it. When I started I had a number of lower priced items that I sold below market value to get it built up and let the algorithms know I was there and closing sales!
I do think that as a new seller getting the feedback count up is important to indicate you are for real. But as the count grows the incremental benefit to higher feedback is neglibile after a decent base is established. e.g. 100 with no negatives vs. 500 with no negatives will not make a differenece. I am more concerned with keeping the % of positives at 100% or as close to that as possible.
mrdutch1001
·1 year ago"Ebay needs to ding these people somehow."
N-O!
There are just some folks who should NOT be sellers as they are TOO demanding and expect TOO much from their buyers...
Feedback on either side is voluntary and eBay does NOT need to "ding" buyers for not leaving feedback!
If YOU want it any other way, best that YOU find another selling platform where feedback is compulsory!
brettjet38
·1 year agoFeedback is a product of another century, so yesterday, and overasked by everything, apps, sites, calls...
...and be careful what you ask for.
hansatrade
·1 year agoExactly! An old rule applies here: NO NEWS (FEEDBACK) IS A GOOD NEWS! 😁
brettjet38
·1 year agoExactly, I always leave FB for repeat Buyers and Buyers who leave FB.
The rest I look at their FB if they never leave FB, I will leave none, because they do not use it...
hansatrade
·1 year agoI do not really care ....maybe 20 years ago, before I got my first "1.000".
However, it's still a valuable tool to me as a SELLER.
Before I accept an offer, I always check the feedback left by the buyer to other sellers.
I refuse to accept even a good offer from a prospective troublemaker.
recped
·1 year agoAcross all my accounts I have have about 50,000 feedbacks...........even with that amount I can't get a small coffee from McD's....that's how much feedback is worth.
eburtonlab
·1 year agoFeedback is voluntary. No one has to leave feedback. No one is owed feedback.
To the extent that feedback is valuable, it is valuable because it is voluntary. Make it obligatory or automatic and suddenly it just becomes a mechanical count of transactions rather than any sort of useful measure of satisfaction.
reallynicestamps
·1 year ago@eburtonlab
A mechanical count of transactions as a seller and as a buyer would be useful in my opinion.
hansatrade
·1 year agoIt would transform my main supplier from Europe into an Ebay monster - he has 20.000 feedback, but his transaction count shows 160.000 ... 😎
But why not? I fully support the idea! 😎
They did a similar change many years ago. Earlier, all feedback left buy a buyer - no matter how many transactions were made - counted as one. As a result, my feedback went from 4.000 to 4.500 in one night...
recped
·1 year agoThe number of sales made by a seller are shown on their profile
The number of purchases made by a buyer are nobody's business.
reallynicestamps
·1 year ago@recped I have followers? I thought I was just paranoid. Can I stop the meds now?
eburtonlab
·1 year agoA mechanical count of transactions as a seller and as a buyer would be useful in my opinion.
I am not opposed to eBay offering that in addition to feedback, but it would not be good if that replaced feedback entirely.
Buyers can already see how many items a seller has sold by looking at the top of the seller's profile page, as recped indicated.
A purely mechanical count of items sold is subject to gaming. Sell a hundred or so keychains, wait for the listings to expire, then list a few luxury vaporware goods and suddenly the account looks like that of an experienced and trustworthy seller.
With the current feedback system, buyers can see what sort of items sold and at what price the seller has received feedback for, at least, and draw some conclusions if past feedback is for doll clothes or fishing lures and current listings are for bitcoin mining rigs.
Looking at a user's total feedback received as a buyer or seller will already let you estimate about how many transactions that user has been involved in, if you multiply by an appropriate conversion factor to account for the percentage of users that actually leave feedback; for older accounts, multiply by two or three; newer accounts, multiply by five if you think about twenty percent of users leave feedback on average now. Not a perfect measure, but within an order of magnitude as accounts with similar numbers have likely been involved in similar numbers of transactions.
brettjet38
·1 year agoreallynicestamps
·1 year ago"....20 years ago...."
I had a long paragraph about how things have changed since the 20th century, but actually those three words sum it up.