I took this very question to ebay Canada staff at a recent Board Hour http://community.ebay.ca/t5/Weekly-Chat-Session/June-22nd-2016-Weekly-Session/td-p/341358/page/3. The blue boldface is mine to highlight the response:
@mjwl2006 wrote:
raphael@ebay.com wrote:
@ight.coin wrote:How about Negative Feedback.
How will ebay protect against negative feedback from buyers that may be upset about what they will perceive as 'poor service'?
Sellers will be blamed for long delivery timelines. As everyone knows ebay's system is not able to handle removal of negative feedback without a (hours) long phone call to ill-informed customer service reps.
Since negative feedback doesn't bear any effect on a seller's performance rating anymore, we wouldn't remove those as part of the seller protection in case of a postal disruption. I understand that receiving negative feedback can be upsetting, but now more than ever before it is nothing but an expression of the buyer's opinion, whether it is founded or not. If a buyer was to leave a seller negative feedback because of longer than normal shipping delays due to a postal disruption, despite eBay's and the seller's best efforts to warn the buyer about it, the seller's best response would be to post a reply to explain why there was a delay and so that other buyers can see that the negative feedback was unfounded in the first place.
This I have a problem with. Negative feedback may not impact a seller's metrics any longer, but it certainly impacts their reputation and drives away future purchasers.
Here is my case in point:
I am staying open and switching to courier service or, in certain cases, a day-trip southward to utilize USPS to support my Local Pickup payment/shipping option. In preparation for any hurdles I may encounter doing so, I have increased my handling time to 20 days and added the following information on my listings at the end of the Item Description: Please note our temporary extended handling time and increased postage cost is due to the expected mail strike/lockout at Canada Post Corporation. McQueen and Mo Mater will endeavour to continue delivering your orders with all due haste using alternative methods. We appreciate your patience, and value your business. Thank you for choosing McQueen and Mo Mater!
You cannot tell me that a buyer should be allowed to potentially leave me negative feedback for 'slow shipping' if it is made abundantly clear shipping or delivery may be slow. It should fall under the same removable rule as buyer complaining their explicitly-stated used item was used.
Hi Maureen,
I'm not saying that feedback won't be removable under these circumstances, all I was commenting on were our proactive efforts, which as of now only cover defects and not feedback. I'll check with a colleague who specializes in defect removal (what used to be feedback removal is now tucked under the defect removal umbrella) and see if the removal rules you mentioned can apply in your example.
@mjwl2006 wrote:Furthermore, it would be nice if, since this is the second time in five years that ecommerce will come to grinding halt in Canada due to Canada Post fighting with their employees, that CPC would not be the only option available to ebay sellers like me who use Calculated Shipping. Why isn't at least one of the main couriers included? I can't go flat-rate without grossly under- or over-estimating costs and, worse, losing all my calculated shipping settings. It seems like there should be a better way to make this work for sellers.
I wish we could offer that as well, but setting up the same kind of real-time rating as what we have in place for Canada Post rates is quite the endeavour, which leans on a lot more than development resources on eBay's side, which as you know are already pretty sparse when it comes to Canadian projects. The carrier also needs to develop the appropriate systems to manage and feed rates to eBay. So far we haven't been able to make something like this happen for another carrier. We hope to be able to in the future.
