Ebay Morality

srs5694

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jvarsoke said:
sellers don't usually give feedback until you give them feedback. This isn't correct since the buyer's half of the transaction ends before the seller's.
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That's not quite true. The transaction ends when the merchandise is received and accepted by the buyer. MikeS just posted a couple of tales of irrational (in the non-economic sense) buyers who posted unfair negative feedback. I've heard of similar tales, and even worse ones. One I recall was a buyer who didn't know how to use the purchased item, assumed it was broken, opened it in an attempt to repair it, broke it while open, demanded a refund, and then posted negative feedback. Another, and more nefarious, possibility is a buyer who orders an item, receives it, claims it never arrived, and demands a refund. Of course, if the seller ships with tracking, that's less likely to work, but the buyer could still put up a stink and claim the item was stolen off a porch or something. IMHO, it's perfectly reasonable for a seller to withhold feedback until the buyer has received the item and has said it's acceptable (via eBay feedback or some other method, like a simple e-mail).

I do agree that eBay's feedback system is next to worthless. Personally, I get slightly wary if feedback is below 99%, and very wary if it's below 98%.
 

David H. Bebbington

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srs5694 said:
I do agree that eBay's feedback system is next to worthless. Personally, I get slightly wary if feedback is below 99%, and very wary if it's below 98%.
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I really don't understand this statement. Until something better comes along, feedback is the principal means of knowing who you're dealing with. Yes there is a slight pressure on buyers to gloss over problems and give positive feedback for fear of receiving negative themselves. but you have to allow for this. Above all, feedback comments show whether sellers describe goods accurately (which is the life blood of e-bay) and are willing to resolve problems and whether buyers pay promptly and react reasonably.

I certainly wouldn't dismiss a seller for one or two negative feedbacks - I got my only negative feedback from a seller (a so-called professional dealer) who sent me 18 x 24 cm film holders instead of 8 x 10". When I called to complain (in a reasonable non-aggressive manner), the junior clerk I spoke to panicked and refused any redress. The next day I served notice of intent to begin legal proceedings on the managing director of the company, I received an instant refund, was told to keep the goods anyway and was invited to cancel the feedback, although the comments were still visible. I would not like to feel I was being dismissed as a crook for one incident like this. If you deal with the public, you are certain to meet one or two totally unreasonable crazies along the way.
 

Nick Zentena

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No if it sold for $100 it's a $100 item. If I go to bestbuy and see a DVD player that is selling for $100 and I think " I'd pay $300 for that" it's still a $100 item. Odds are most thing you buy you'd pay more for.
 

Nick Zentena

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I'll give an example on why the feedback model is worthless. If you get bad feedback what stops you from registering a new name? Some sellers do this all the time. I'm more worried about sellers with 100% good feedback. Have you ever dealth with people? Well keeping 100% of them happy is 100% impossible. Sooner or later something will happen. Your fault or just an idiot buyer. So how do these people have 100% perfect feedback?

The other reason the feedback model is worth less is because you don't know the other persons standards. Worse Ebay deletes the listing after so many days. If I'm checking feedback I'll try to check out the buyers history to.
 

jd callow

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I never changed my ID and have bought and sold more than 500 items under peachbutt and have 100% positive (actually I have 2 neutrals, one from Collect88 [do a search] and the other didn't speak english and I don't speak spanish). The way to keep positive feedback as a seller is to stand behind your product and in the worst case eat a little crap to keep the customer happy. As a buyer you need to remember that ebay is a free for all and that part of the price you pay for great deals and unmatched variety is that some products and sellers are dogs.
 

Dave Parker

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Hold on, I have a 100% positive feedback and am proud of it..

I find the whole idea of the Morality of ebay kind of funny, other than describing things corretly on the sellers side and completing the transaction on the buyers side, then what is the morality, it I get a $1000 item for $100 I am certainly happy, and if I list something and get less than what it is worth, that is my fault, not the buyers fault, except in very extreme cases, such as MikeS listed about the film, it is a seller beware, buyer beware process.

Just my .02

Dave
 

David A. Goldfarb

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Also 100% positive feedback here. To interpret that, look at how long the seller has been on eBay, how much feedback there is, and whether it's from a good range of different buyers and sellers over a period of time, perhaps even buyers and sellers you recognize.

If a seller has a lot of feedback for small items and is suddenly selling a very expensive item, or if most of their feedback is from two or three purchasers, that's a red flag. It still might be legit (like someone who normally sells one kind of item, but is legitimately selling something else for a friend or relative), but worth a closer look.
 

John Bartley

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mrcallow said:
The way to keep positive feedback as a seller is to stand behind your product and in the worst case eat a little crap to keep the customer happy. .
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I guess that everyone has a different philosophy on whether or not getting positive fedback is justification for accepting some crap. I won't argue with anyone about it as it's purely personal, but here's my opinion....when I sell something it's described honestly. When I ship it, it's well packed. If a buyer wants something else done re: packing or shipping, then the responsibilty transfers to them. When I buy something I expect the same standards. I take responsibilty for my own decisions regarding packaging and shipping and if I do it wrong, then the seller still gets a positive. If they do it and do it wrong, then they get a negative. I don't care about retaliation. I can read the feedabck history and more importantly, I can read between the lines and see who's a real risk. My only negative came from a guy in So.Cal. (other side of the continent from me), who bought a 50 year old McCulloch air-cooled 4-cylinder target drone gasoline motor, new in the crate and wanted it marked as a gift so he could avoid taxes. When I delined politely, he took me to square trade accusing me of raising the price by not telling him that he was going to have to pay tax as it came across the border. He left me the negative BEFORE he went to square trade. He got a negative back and a non-paying bidder complaint as he eventually refused to pay for it.

cheers
 

jd callow

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John Bartley said:
I guess that everyone has a different philosophy on whether or not getting positive fedback is justification for accepting some crap.
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I look at it as a big picture thing. Generally I'm right, but it is often not worth the hassel. I would rather give away a $5 item and have a return buyer ( over 1/2 my sales are repeats) or eat the return shipping shipping on an expensive one.

If someone is a jerk. I refund his/her money plus return shipping and keep an eye out for them in the future.
 

Paul Sorensen

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I am another eBay seller with 100% positive on over 1000 transactions. I have eaten something once or twice but I looked at it as if I was running a retail establishment. I heard someone say once "the customer isn't always right, but it doesn't matter." What he was saying is that the old adage that the customer is always right is obvious BS but that the reputation of the seller is worth more than the cost of the refund or accomodating the customer.

I have decided a couple of times not to accomodate a customer, one of these times I was bracing myself for a negative which never came. That was a case when a person bought a Tamrom AF lens from me. I described it accurately and it functioned exactly as designed, I beleive, but the buyer wrote to me after having received it that he had run a bunch of tests on it and it was not sharp enough for his liking. My opinion was, and remains, that anyone who is capable of running tests of sharpness of lenses should be able to understand that a 70-300 consumer zoom lens they buy on eBay for $70 is not going to be a high qulaity lens and that I didn't misrepresent it in any way. Since I am selling used product the guarantee I offer is that it is as described.

I have actually used sellers with negative feedback as a chance to get items at a bargain. I always look at the feedback, how long ago was it received, what was it for, does it look legit, and decide how much risk I am willing to take on. Sometimes a person with 95% positive is someone who has about 20 transactions and got an obviously undeserved feedback or screwed up and obviously won't do that again. Some folks won't even consider bidding on an item from a seller with 95% and I am more likely to get a good deal on it. So far I haveven't been burned, but I do recognize that I am taking a chance. If I run across a seller with a few hundred feedbacks than I am looking more for something in the neighborhood of 99% as well.
 

Nick Zentena

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I know one seller that got negative feedback because the 120 TLR he sold didn't run on 35mm film. Okay he could have eaten the shipping both ways and refunded the money but he's in the Slovak Republic. Shipping both ways would have been more then the cost of the item. Worse the idiot buyer had out bid me.

I know one seller that is very up front about thier shipping costs. They got negative feedback over the "high" shipping. Okay this shop does charge high shipping. BUT they are public about it. The items often sell for less then they would normally.

Or the people that have gotten negative feedback over long shipping around the world.

Sooner or later you'll run into an idiot buyer who leaves negative feedback. I'm more worried about some one with absolutely perfect feedback then some one with the odd blemish.

BTW Dave the glass came yesterday. Thanks -)
 

Paul Sorensen

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On a more serious note, I have made decisions based on feedback (reputation) that I felt were not warranted and based on an unreasonable customer. I also know that the local grocery chain makes similar decisions every day to protect their reputation. Part of it is a matter of choice, do you wish to be "right" and save a few bucks, or do you wish to make the customer happy and protect your reputation. For a while I was trying to really get an eBay business going. What really stopped me was the difficulty of getting things cheap enough to sell on eBay. Now that I am no longer using eBay that way, I am much more likely to take a risk with my feedback and protect myself finincially like I did with the lens. Were I still trying to run a business, the losses suffered in taking a return of the lens would have been minimal compared to the risk of a negative feedback.

That said, there are a bunch of folks who will leave negative feedback for stupid reasons and often without any warning or prior complaint to the seller. In other words, a large part of the fact that I have 100% positive feedback is luck. Absent that, I would have one or two nicks and would have 99.8 or 99.6.
 

modafoto

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titrisol said:
Well, when I buy stuff there (less and less) I put a bid and go away
I'm normally outbid by 0.50 or $1 at the last minute... it sucks i know
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Why does it suck?

You want the item and want to pay the smallest amount for it...therefore wait until the last minute with the final bid...that's the game.
 

srs5694

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That's basically what I'm saying, except that the problems with eBay's feedback, IMHO, don't qualify for the adjective "slight," unless you mean that in an ironic sense.

In the past, I've bought from sellers with sub-98% eBay feedbacks, and I've gotten burned more than the 2% of the time you'd expect from that rating. Granted, my number of eBay transactions is low enough that my experience isn't statistically significant, but I hear the same thing from others, so I don't think I'm a statistical anomaly in this respect. The "grade inflation" on the eBay feedback system is so great that it leaves very little ability to differentiate the good sellers from the bad ones based on feedback. The theory of the feedback system is great, but between shilling, back-patting, and fear of retaliation, in practice it just doesn't work as well as it ideally should.
 

jd callow

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Talk about Morality.

This topic got me thinking so I did a search of my ebay user ID and came up with this:

Dead Link Removed

Some joker who bought some of my prints is reselling them. I don't mind him selling them, but he doesn't use my name and claims that it is part of a series of 5 prints. He has no idea how many I've printed.

I suspect I should do something...
 

David A. Goldfarb

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Hey, but that's quite a blurb--"Welcome to the strangely beautiful world of PeachButt. Breathtaking illuminations of color collide with piercing imagery to create these unigue photographs. Anyone interested in photo collecting should start here. 16x24, - Unframed. Limited to run of 5."

You should post that on your website.
 

Dave Parker

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Normally,

If it is a commercial enity that is reselling, you should have an agreement in place, with the way you want the image described and portrayed, so no one gets confused and upset, which can come back to byte you as well.

Dave
 

Paul Sorensen

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The strangely beautiful world of Peachbutt indeed! This conjures up mental images that I wish I had never had.

I have no idea about legality, but I would certainly contact the seller to let him know that he is misrepresenting your art work. Also, I think that it would be appropriate to identify the artist. Although, I guess he kind of has.

Maybe you can get a legal name change and just go by Peachbutt. That might be just the thing you need to jump into the upper eschelon of famous photographers. Well, that and being dead...
 

jd callow

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Paul Sorensen said:
Maybe you can get a legal name change and just go by Peachbutt. That might be just the thing you need to jump into the upper eschelon of famous photographers. Well, that and being dead...
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If i changed my name I'd have to change my avatar and the next thing you know I'd only be able to post on the alt.binary news threads...
 

Dan Fromm

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Hey, Nick, I'm one of those idiot buyers who leaves negative feedback for sellers who mail lenses to me in plain paper envelopes or who represent badly damaged lenses' condition as "very good." The "very good" guy got his negative because he wouldn't refund in full, not to mention pay postage both ways. I don't pay liars for the right to inspect their wares. All three retaliated, by the way.

As a buyer, I've had my share of items not remotely as described and the occasional wrong item delivered. In those cases the sellers have been gracious so I've given them appropriately good feedback. In fact, I'm in the middle of one of those now and I expect to give the guy a good report.

But I think that bad packing is inexcusable and will accept retaliation for negatives given because of it. Funny thing is, none of sellers I've left negative feedback on has disputed the facts, they all just called me names.

So far none of my buyers has complained to me, let alone left bad feedback. So as a matter of practice I don't know how I'd deal with an unhappy buyer. I haven't had the opportunity to find out.

Regards,

Dan
 

Nick Zentena

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Dan I'm not talking about people with legitmate feedback. I've left negative feedback more then once myself. But you'll find some wierd negative feedback. Feedback that IMHO shows more about the buyer then it does about the seller.
 

Nick Zentena

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I still think long term it's basically 100% impossible to keep a perfect feedback score. No matter how hard you try.
 

jvarsoke

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A tad OT: there was a guy on eBay who was purchasing and re-selling mundane items (toasters, trinkets, beanbag dolls) but posting feedback as if the items were of high . . . uhm, erotic, value.

Not exactly moral but, completely hilarious.
 
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