Question
Just a heads up...I did a survey for ebay...and we all know what that means, LOL. Ebay has probably changed the feedback system and is sending out surveys to make it appear that we all wanted these changes. The copy/paste below is from one page of questions.
The following are from one page where I had to rate from "not important" to "very important".
Previous buyers' ratings on their willingness to purchase from this seller again
Ability to sort seller feedback by category of items sold
Top 5 categories that the seller sells in
A member's PayPal verification
Previous buyers' ratings how responsive a seller is to email/phone calls
Information on how often a member leaves feedback
Company logo or photo/image of eBay member
Average price of items sold by the seller
Total value of all merchandise sold by sellers in the last 90 days
Not at all Important Not Important Neither Important nor Unimportant Important Very Important
Ability to sort by positive, negative, and neutral feedback
Label identifying buyer/seller based on majority of transactions to date
Previous buyers' ratings on the accuracy of the seller's item description
Total number of transactions as a seller (not feedback received but number of overall transactions)
Feedback/reputation ratings from other non-eBay sources
Feedback percentage should be based on activities in the last 12 months
Previous buyers' ratings on the seller's shipping and handling charges
Previous buyers' ratings on a seller's quality of packaging
Previous buyers' ratings on the shipping time
Total number of transactions as a buyer (not feedback received but number of overall transactions)
Previous buyers' ratings on a seller's customer support
...end of questions on page.
There were also questions about:
Feedback left regarding shipping/handling price.
Feedback left regarding time for item shipped.
Feedback left for packaging.
...continued on next page.
Answer
This appeared after I answered the questions...
eBay is considering redesigning the Feedback Profile page to help us serve your needs better. Your input will help provide direction.
Buyers will be able to:
Leave an overall feedback rating of positive, neutral, and negative for sellers. This rating becomes visible as soon as the buyer leaves it.
Leave additional feedback on a 5-point scale, rating sellers on issues such as:
Communication by seller
Item received was as described by seller
Cost of shipping and handling charged by seller
hipping time for item received
This additional feedback will become visible to the seller only after the seller has left an overall feedback rating for the buyer. Sellers will only be able to give an overall feedback rating to buyers.
...end of page.
Answer
There's more...
There's a mock up of a seller's page. Small box on feedback page before the comments are listed. Box shows :
Accuracy of description (5 star rating)
Shipping Time
Shipping and Handling Charges
Communication
Each has 5 stars following.
Answer
There's a mock up of a seller's page. Small box on feedback page before the comments are listed. Box shows :
Accuracy of description (5 star rating)
Shipping Time
Shipping and Handling Charges
Communication
Each has 5 stars following.
So, just as the Post Office has affected some feedback ratings since Ebay introduced the "Shipping Times" to the bottom of the auction page, again the Post Office will be given the inadvertant power to interfere with our trading reputations. Whilst I subsidise some of my shipping, I still can be two or three times (or more) the cost of domestic postage on International transactions. So, whilst some buyers may appreciate that I charge $4.00 to send an item that costs me $6.00+ to send, others are going to compare my shipping charge to the $2.00 to $3.00 it costs for the same product from local sources, and rate my shipping charges poorly. How many buyers will consider distance or Post Office delays when they rate shipping times? Or is that the point, Ebay wants to discourage International and long distance trade? Will a seller who clearly states in their auction that they can only get to the Post Office to ship every Thursday, be rated poorly for shipping time by a buyer who pays for Monday's auction on Friday?
Meanwhile the joy of spam filters can absolutely destroy some communication. A seller can contact the buyer every step of the way, and the buyer may believe that there was no communication at all. This may be an attempt to put all communication through Ebay, where you have substantially less room to instruct a buyer on their options for payment and shipping, than you do to answer their questions about the item.
Ultimately, IF this type of proposal is taken on, it will make leaving feedback more complex, and due to many variable factors will make the more "detailed" feedback ratings no more meaningful than the current feedback system, and will penalise sellers for actions of other parties, such as the Post Office, or even the buyer who doesn't allow communications to get past their spam filter.
Uggh, Kevin
Answer
You can barely get some buyers to 1. click buy. 2. click pay. Good Googily Moogily, how are you going to get them to click, click, click, click, click numerous times to rate/leave feedback. If any of those survey questions come to fruition, I predict even less feedback being left by buyers and if it is, it will be mainly of the negative type because they are upset enough to go through the click, click, click, click, click complaint process.
JMHO, YMMV.
Answer
Too bad they don't change the system so we can leave feedback on what we think of eBay. Wouldn't it be neat to be able to rate eBay after every transaction.
Answer
Too bad they don't change the system so we can leave feedback on what we think of eBay. Wouldn't it be neat to be able to rate eBay after every transaction.
Actually my rating of Ebay relating to most transactions would be pretty good. The interesting outcome would be to be able to rate Ebay after every enhancement.
Cheers, Kevin
Answer
Thanks Shay.
This additional feedback will become visible to the seller only after the seller has left an overall feedback rating for the buyer. Sellers will only be able to give an overall feedback rating to buyers.
What's the purpose of not allowing the seller to see all the additional feedback until after the seller leaves the buyer a rating? Are we still in grammar school or high school? Honest sellers don't need to mess with this stuff.
There's a mock up of a seller's page. Small box on feedback page before the comments are listed. Box shows :
Accuracy of description (5 star rating)
Shipping Time
Shipping and Handling Charges
Communication
Each has 5 stars following.
I may just become a "take your feedback and shove it" type seller especially regarding the handling fees. I do charge a handling fee of from 50¢ to $2.00. Who's going to decide if that is excessive? I also only ship once or twice weekly. And do the buyers know that books going by Media Mail take forever to arrive? No, they bid and they want it now.
Seems to me that lately eBay wants sellers, but gives all the benefits to the buyers.
What's that I hear knocking? Oh, it's the sounds of owning my own website.
Answer
I used to wish for ebay to implement some of these tools. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.
Besides what I presume will be increasingly unrealistic expectations from buyers in general I don't see that any of this could harm me much.
The ones that bug me though, are (in order of magnitude):
1. "A member's PayPal verification" - Once again, an outright punishment to all the good and honest sellers who don't succumb to the paypal myth.
2. "Total value of all merchandise sold by sellers in the last 90 days" -
This is information that could be very misleading, skewed greatly from moth to month, could be greatly misinterpreted. It could be viewed by non-participants that may not be welcome to see it, etc. etc.
3. "Average price of items sold by the seller" - Same kind of thing. I just don't see any real usefulness in knowing something like this from a buyer's point of view, unless it was an average for a particular item. It would just skew a buyer's expectation. The market fluctuates up and down naturally, in general and on specific items, if a feature like this became prominent, it might tend to help stall a weak market in a natural slump from swinging back up.
4. "Company logo or photo/image of eBay member" - HUH?
5. "Feedback/reputation ratings from other non-eBay sources" - It would just seem too easy for sellers to falsely inflate their image/reliability by having non-ebay related feedback
6. "Feedback percentage should be based on activities in the last 12 months" - There's too many situations that could make this percentage VERY misleading and not a true picture of the sellers character.
7. "Label identifying buyer/seller based on majority of transactions to date" - Who dreams this stuff up?
Everthing else seems bearable but not really necessary. being able to segregate the "Total number of transactions as a seller...or...buyer" might be interesting.
On the whole it gets me a little uneasy giving more power to the buyer side (and I'm a buyer too) to manipulate a sellers's image. Everything is just too subject to expectations, transactional experience (or lack of), moods, interpretations, zeal, apathy, mistakes, bad hair days, etc.
I think SIMPLE tools are the best ones for "general" use. A philosphy obviously not popular at ebay.
Hmmmm, what's this button do....
Answer
Great points being made. Yeah Kevin, a lot of this stuff does hit you a little harder. Man, I would love to see ebay live under their own feedback system. How many stars for customer service???
Absolutely right about the disgruntled buyer being more likely do all the extra work required to "exercise" their opinions.
And I really don't like that as a seller you would still only be able to leave the same general feedback for a buyer as we do now. Just doesn't seem fair.
"Good Googily Moogily" Nanook?, you can see?