Mighty Bargain Hunter

Easing into the new eBay seller feedback policy

March 20th, 2008 | by mbhunter |

In case you haven’t heard, eBay soon will be making a big change in its feedback policy. Sellers will not be able to leave negative or even neutral feedback for buyers starting this May. The new motto for sellers: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Buyers will still be able to leave positive, neutral, or negative feedback for sellers.

The main reason for this change is to make the feedback system more honest. Sellers have used the threat of negative feedback to strong-arm the tone of the feedback given to them. Even a seller withholding feedback until a buyer leaves feedback first is a tool to sway buyers.

I’ve used this tool myself as a seller. I’ve waited until my buyers have left feedback until I leave mine. I’ve never left anything but positive feedback for anyone, but waiting encourages them to come to me first to resolve issues before panning me on feedback.

An offshoot of this, though, is that I had become lax with communication, even though I shipped immediately after receiving payment. One woman was wondering where her item was two weeks after buying it. I had sent it out the day after she paid, and it arrived there two days later, and had the delivery confirmation to give to her. But she had to come to me to get this information. If I had told her that I had shipped, she might have been looking for it more closely.

Since my feedback mechanism as a seller will be essentially impotent in less than two months, I’ve started to get into practice. I try to leave feedback at the time of payment or at least at time of shipment. I let the buyer know that their item has shipped and that I’ve left positive feedback for their quick payment. (I’ve even made an e-mail template in eBay to streamline this.) Doing this now will give me the chance to tweak things before I’ll be depending on it.

What’s a little embarrassing is that there are lots of sellers that have been doing this even when they really didn’t have to! It’s “safer” as a seller to withhold feedback, but giving feedback immediately after purchase is more in the spirit of what is intended.

But in any case, this new feedback policy is going to happen, and sellers bellyaching or going elsewhere or boycotting isn’t going to change it, so I might as well embrace it.