I get the shaft from eBay buyers more often than I like. I think it sucks that eBay has removed the capability to leave negative feedback about buyers. How do you warn other sellers to beware non-payers or difficult customers?
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I thought many of the ebay sellers were going on strike because of some of their new policies?
So, what's their argument? Why is this a good idea, in their mind, I wonder?
It works both ways. We had a perfect 100% positive ebay rating. We purchased some "new without tag" clothing for our daughter. The seller was slow to process our order even though we paid immediately. The clothes came heavily perfumed.... we had to wash them several times to get the odor out. We sent a polite email to which the seller came back ranting about our mention of the heavy perfume (our daughter has allergies). I gave the seller a "neutral" rating, her first ever. She retaliated and gave us a negative rating calling us "unreasonable" and our perfect rating dropped to 95% positive in an instant. Perhaps there's a better way to manage the rating system but we are all for not rating the buyers. We paid promptly and that's really the only criteria by which a buyer should be rated!
ljjasper, what if one doesn't pay promptly? Or doesn't pay at all?
In the "old" system, buyer/sellers could respond to negative feedback and even work out ways to agree to remove each other's negative feedback if they decided tit for tat got out of hand.
In the new way, sellers can take heat from unruly customers (I had one guy totally freak out on me for no reason and despite my best efforts to make him happy), but I can't say "Difficult customer" about him any more (as several people had about him before he bid in one of my auctions).
Oh yes! Etsy people are WAY cooler! Not that I'm biased or anything.
Hmmm.... I'm not sure what the answer is. I think feedback should be left for both sellers and buyers. In either case, how do you arbitrate a settlement without ruining a buyer or seller's rating when one or the other is unreasonable and impossible to please? In my case the seller refused to reach an agreement that would allow us to retract our ratings.
It's why a lot of Ebay seller whose products are hand-crafted are flocking to Etsy. That and the fees at Etsy are lower. And we're cooler.
