There's a part of me that understands the new feedback concept... after all (until now at least) eBay was one of the only marketplaces that allowed sellers to leave feedback for buyers at all.
We're not (as retailers) supposed to be able to "rate" our customers.
It's simply a case of eBay moving away from the whole "trading partners" concept in which buyers and sellers had an equal stake in the success of a transaction, into the more common transactional marketplace (or retailer vs consumer relationship). The fact that many eBayers are not actually "retailers" doesn't seem to matter. The fact that this creates a "vs." relationship doesn't seem to matter either.
In general, positive feedback for buyers means nothing, as there is no rating system, so why bother with it. I find it odd that they went this way and even bothered to keep the buyer feedback system at all.
Add to that, the MAJOR downsides to this "New and Improved" feedback feature, which will all be ignored by eBay for many months and maybe - someday - might be addressed (but I'm not holding my breath) including...
- It means that my "automated blocking" rules are now useless, as the ability to block people with a -1 feedback score or lower was helpful to keep the bad buyers at bay. So, we're all going to end up with a bunch more non-paying bidders, which means more work filing and following up on the unpaid item reports, and difficulty getting or fees refunded.
eBay should automatically "Negative" a non-paying bidder for every strike they receive... so that sellers are at least aware of these strikes. Or, we should be able to set our automated blocking rules to block people who have received a certain number of non-paying bidder claims in their history (not just a 2 in the last 30 days).
eBay should also automate the non-paying bidder process, as they've now established a system that is going to be ripe for abuse by these kinds of buyers.
- The way feedback scores are generated now adds as much "weight" to a neutral as it does a negative, so everybody's scores are going to plummit (your score is now all postives divided by all feedback left, including positives, neautrals and negatives... giving neutrals as much impact on your overall score as a negative).
They might as well just get rid of the whole "Neutral" concept as the point of it - previously - was to comment without impacting the score.
- Even though buyers will be able to leave more negative an neutral feedbacks (warranted or not) as designed by eBay, I haven't seen a change to the PowerSellers qualification requirements, even though those levels are much harder to achieve than before.
- With the exception of newbies, who haven't had enough sales to generate a neutral or two, sales are going to drop, as it will take a while for buyers to become trained to the fact that what used to be a 99.9% feedback score is now a 98.7% feedback score (based on new calculations) or a 97.7% feedback score (based on ease to abuse feedback system).
In the real world, a 97.7% success rate is pretty darn good. But, we all know (when we're buying) that on eBay, expectations are higher and there's a cut-off point where we don't "trust" a seller outright anymore. It's going to take a few months for buyers to realize that that "cut off" needs to be dropped by a few percentage points.
In general, we are now paying more to sell on eBay and going to have to work harder to keep unreasonable customers happy in order to keep our scores up (Reasonable customers are not an issue, as most PowerSellers are pretty good at keeping their customer's happy).
Plus, they have removed the ability to have feedback mediated and removed through Square Trade... even Amazon allows for feedback removal.
eBay used to be a unique marketplace because of the way it treated buyers and sellers as "trading partners." That uniqueness has slowly been chipped away at over the past couple of years, and now it's pretty much gone for good.
Oh well, six months or so from now, I probably won't bother selling on eBay anymore anyway.... the way it's going, I might as well post my stuff on Craig's List instead. It's way easier.
