Comments on: Buyer sued for eBay feedback

A man who purchased a scratched phone is being sued by the seller, who claims comments he left on eBay's feedback facility hurt his business.

[karthurs]

This kind of massive over reaction to "non-positive" feedback to Ebay sellers is not uncommon. I had a similar experience myself recently. I think this is somewhat caused by Ebay's new policy this year of Seller's lossing the right to reciprocate any negative feedback. Ebay discovered that the feedback process was somewhat corrupt. The reason being that buyers were being scared into leaving either only positive feedback or none at all, due to the fact that their own rating could be damaged by an angry seller. Ebay has taken some steps to help sellers in that the feedback form limits length of the comments to very short causing you to focus on the point. a good thing.

So my recent experience was just a concern about shipping charges on an item I purchased. My Neutral Rating (not negative mind you) comment:

"Understand S&H fee. Handling valid-but actual USPS $5 paid $33 bought 10 units"

He was more than a little miffed. In fact sending me a vitriole filled email about my ungrateful nature. LOL Oh yeah and he informed me I was now on his "Don't Sell to" list. A crushing blow to my commerce life. But honestly this seller has a near perfect rating. I am his only neutral rating and he has one negative from over a year ago. So he has another year to go now to get back to perfect. But somehow I will live through the shame.

[Heebee Jeebies]

People have to remember that the cost of shipping is not just what UPS, USPS or FedEx charges. The cost of shipping for someone that doesn't ship millions of items a year (like Amazon.com) is the cost charged for the shipping by the shipping company, any insurance costs, any tracking costs, the cost of the box or boxes, the cost of packaging materials in the box or boxes, the time to package everything up, the time and expense of taking it out to be shipped (gas isn't cheap you know) or in the case of shipping service pickup any cost involved with that, etc.

Shipping isn't cheap. At least if you want it done right so that what you buy arrives in one piece. This is not to say that some on eBay don't gouge you, but people need to keep in mind the true costs of shipping and not just their narrow idea that is it simply what the shipper charges to ship it the cheapest way possible.

Companies like eBay and PayPal don't help matters when they require you to do certain things in order to be protected by the protection guarantees. This is the big reason I don't deal with eBay or PayPal it just costs way too much. Well, that and eBay is now more like a Latino flea market than a place for people to sell used items they don't want. It went too commercial with too much of the same cr@p.

Robert

[ChrisMatyszczyk]

It is always hard to deal with shame, karthurs, and I think you are an inspiration to many people out there in these difficult times.

Thank you for telling your story.

Chris

[Vegaman_Dan]

If you are afraid of negative feedback, then you should provide a positive experience to your customers.

[Sternlight]

If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

[formermember1]

I also had a recent 'altercation' when I didn't leave positive feedback on a buyers account...he contacted my company and complained that I was ruining his perfect feedback score that he had attained on over 1000 transactions on Ebay. I replied that one transaction with NO feedback statistically could not possibly hurt him but he assured me that it would ruin him. So, he contacted Ebay to find a way to rectify the situation and we promptly got a fax with a Feedback retraction form included in which we had to state that we were fine with them removing any record of any transaction with the guy that would be public facing...thus keeping his perfect rating.

GET A LIFE!

[ChrisMatyszczyk]

formemember1,

Yours is an extraordinary story. Did you HAVE to fill out the retraction form? Why did you HAVE to fill it out? What would have happened if you refused? Has the concept of the customer always being right, or at least some of the time, disappeared?

Did the fax actually come from eBay?

Chris

[BtmnHatesRbn]

I've dealt with eBay for over a decade on three different accounts. It's amazing the amount of liars and thieves that're on the site. I also have a 400+ rating, with only one negative left by a thief that the City of San Jose sent me legal forms for to use a evidence against these fraudsters. I won't get into it, but they were running a scam that was sending money to al-Qaida. Go figure.

Recently, I bought an iPod on eBay. The fellow already left me feedback. I went ahead, at the delivery of the item, discovered the iPod is defective, and I left him negative feedback, as did somebody else for another reason. Before I did, I sent this idiot a good number of e-mails asking him to help me. First, he tells me it's for "Mac", which is useless, as long iTunes is on any PC (I use the 1979 definition of PC, and not the incorrect lumping of all Winblows computers into a model of an IBM computer) if working, the iPod will be seen by the application. Also, it didn't matter if it was Mac of Winblows, as the 20+ PCs I use (15 Macs, 5 Winblows) the iPod wouldn't work. He e-mails me back and tells me to get the "drivers" for the iPod. Except there are no iPod "drivers", because iTunes has the "drivers" so to speak. After I told him to get a better testing process and that he can keep my money even though he sent me a defective iPod, he sent me an insulting e-mail as a response. It's that response that got him the negative feedback. I pointed out to him two things: (1) The date my account was opened on eBay, and (2) My 400+ positive rating. His rating was under ten at the time.

Bottomline: He should've been a better seller to work-out the defective problems of the products and should've thorough tested the product.

[pjk0]

What you are missing with this article is one key fact: eBay recently changed their feedback policies in a major way.

Sellers can NO LONGER GIVE NEGATIVE FEEDBACK ON BUYERS.

I put that in caps so it stands out. Buyers can give all the negative feedback they want on sellers, but sellers cannot do anything in the other direction - no matter how flaky or fraudulent auction winners are. Thus it's not particularly surprising that this type of action resulted from that strange policy move.

Regardless how justified or unjustified the seller was in the example cited in your article - you have to admit that's a rather bizarre policy.

I've been using ebay since before it was called ebay. I have many times lamented how they have become increasingly hostile to the interests of bidders/buyers. There must be many like me for them to have inexplicably created that assymetrical feedback policy.

But there needs to be much more transparency in the process overall. eBay has been increasingly clamping-down on that over the years. You cannot even see the user ID's of bidders on most items with values >$100 ($50?) now - eBay claims this is for "security" or "anti-fraud" reasons, but the reality is that this sort of loss of transparency at ebay has been progressive for years now.

They have moved recently to create a better support infrastructure - ie setting up phone support banks. But that move was years overdue - it has long been absurd that it was nearly impossible to even discover any sort of contact info whatsoever for either Paypal or eBay - forcing you to jump through byzantine mazes of web-form-based nonsense - and then wait weeks or months - in an effort to avail yourself of promised "transaction guarantees" and so forth. Well it seems that falling profits over there has finally woken them up a little.

To add insult to injury, their dealings with craigslist (after their sneaky "backdoor" takeover of certain craigslist shares) have been despicable. I only wish there were a viable alternative right now.

[Phil1985]

As a long time eBay buyer, I like the new feedback system. If a buyer gets screwed by a seller they're out actual money. If a buyer gets screwed, they just have to re-list the item. Before this new system, I have had several sellers leave me negative feedback based only on the fact that I left them negative feedback. The feedback should really only be for sellers anyway; I don't care how good of a buyer you are on eBay, just how honest and how well you sell items.
I also agree with some other comments; if you don't like the way eBay works, don't use it.

[megadupek]

Total perversion. All the rating systems are really crap. Both eBay and Amazon

[BtmnHatesRbn]

Really? Can you analyze your comment or are you "those" type of people? Prove that the rating systems are "crap".

[MorningBit]

Fun article, but your title is not what happened. You said he threatened to sue, not that he DID sue.