@sylviebee wrote:
My point is that if eBay now eliminates the ability to see buyer’s FB left for others that this would serve to tighten things up even more.
I’m not saying that sellers should or shouldn’t check out buyer’s FB left for others. That’s a personal choice and the urge can be irresistible . I’m saying that doing away with that feature would add another level of safety for buyers because buyers would be more likely to leave honest FB.
Most buyers are unaware that sellers are checking them out this way, but experienced buyers are very much attuned to the fact that they are being judged by the FB left for others.
If you couldn’t do it sales would increase and you’d have one less thing to worry about. As long as that feature is available sellers will continue to burden themselves with it.
I'm having difficulty making sense of much of this. It seems like unnecessarily over-thinking the subject.
For example, how could doing away with sellers' ability to see buyers' FB left for others "tighten things up" or "add another level of safety for buyers because buyers would be more likely to leave honest FB"?
Are you trying to say that you believe buyers would leave more honest FB if they knew no one could see it (except their own seller), or if they knew no other sellers could see it? If the former, there would be little purpose in FB at all, honest or not. If the latter, we'd end up back in the days a decade or so ago when FB on eBay was a free-for-all mud slinging arena. We know how that worked out. I think it's good that buyers may be aware other sellers might see their comments -- that's more apt to keep them honest and reasonable.
"Most buyers are unaware that sellers are checking them out this way, but experienced buyers are very much attuned to the fact that they are being judged by the FB left for others.
If you couldn’t do it sales would increase and you’d have one less thing to worry about. As long as that feature is available sellers will continue to burden themselves with it."
I honestly doubt anyone who is justifiably upset with his or her seller over a bad transaction will be worrying about the opinions of other sellers when leaving negative FB. Conversely, I doubt a truly problematic, raving buyer is going to be stopped by such a concern either. I fail to see how not having these comments visible would have any effect at all on sales, or how being able to see buyers' FB left for others is a burden for sellers. Quite the opposite, I'd think.
As an experienced buyer, I would not hesitate to leave negative FB if a transaction, a product, or a seller's service was truly terrible. It would never hinder me to think that a seller somewhere might target me for it, because it would be a rare incident amongst many, many transactions. The same goes for neutral FB for a lower scale of disappointment. That's not to say I've left much of either in over 15 years, but I think we also have to remember the value that a truthful, honest negative comment can have to other buyers. It may, incidentally, also actually sellers to understand errors and/or change attitudes.
The whole point of FB originally was to give eBay users some means to judge who they would be dealing with. With fewer and fewer buyers leaving FB, the system is less important than it once was, but I'd argue that it's not quite irrelevant. As a buyer about to purchase from a seller I've never previously dealt with, I always take a look at FB left by other buyers, and I hope my own buyers will do the same.
And I think an experienced buyer will easily see when negative comments are unwarranted or unreasonable (both the FB of buyers and -- just as, if not more, significant -- the responses of sellers to negative FB). Frankly I think I can get a pretty good "snapshot" of what sort of treatment I can expect from a seller by perusing FB left by others before making a purchase.
On the other side of the equation, as a seller who uses Best Offer quite frequently, I always check a buyer's history before accepting an offer. It isn't a question of an irresistible urge to snoop, but of trying to make some sort of reasoned judgment from the information that is made available by eBay. I consider it a helpful feature, certainly not a burden. Taking that away entirely would be removing a fairly valuable tool for sellers. I'm often surprised at what kind of overall picture I can glean from scanning through a few pages of not only buyers' FB left for others, but also the type of purchases they make (and the sellers they buy from). I would definitely not want eBay to hide that information.
As someone mentioned above, a lot of people will buy what they want at the right price anyway, regardless of bad FB or reviews. And a lot of sellers will sell to anybody, as long as it's a sale, and deal with the consequences later. That's part of the inherent risk of online selling. On the other hand, if you're a thoughtful seller or buyer, the FB left for others can be quite useful information to others.
In any case, online selling is always going to have a certain percentage of the "engaged" and the "enraged", both on the buying and the selling side. Overall, I think it's a pretty small ratio on both accounts, and that the vast majority of transactions are uneventful and more or less anonymous.
w~~_7.JPG "pjcdn2005"){kind=avatar}
