very upset with ebay

No doubt, the system is flawed and your seller rightfully earned his neutral.

 

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He would not have managed to get feedback even that good from me. Bribery constitutes a crime IMO.

 

The way I see it, at the point of payment, the buyer has merely initiated the transaction. My feedback is based on the entire transaction, not just receiving payment.

What if there was a similiar rating system for other businesses that people actually paid attention to the way buyers on FeeBay do?

Let's say McDonalds rated customers the way most people expect sellers to rate buyers. They'd take an order, receive payment, and give the customer a positive rating. Then the customer could do whatever they want. They could trash the dining room. They could complain endlessly about the quality of the food. They could bother other customers. They could loiter in the dining room for hours taking advantage of the free refills and wi-fi. They could even go back up to the counter after they received and consumed their food and claim they never received their order. Or, maybe they point out that the food they ate didn't look like the pictures on the menu, so they'd like a full refund. McD's might be reluctant to address their behavior because they know the customer can still give McD's a negative rating. Since 99% of what makes a bad customer (or at least not a good customer) is ignored in the rating, what is that rating actually worth in the end? Add in a restriction that McD's can't give a customer anything but a positive rating and it becomes completely meaningless. Which is what the seller portion of feedback on FeeBay has become.

As a buyer, I don't care if the seller left feedback or not when I leave mine because I don't know of any way the seller could scam me at that point. I have the item I paid for, he has my money, and there is a paper trail that shows he does. But there are still plenty of ways a buyer could scam a seller after payment has been made. Come to think of it, I've only heard of a few successful scams perpetrated through FeeBay where a buyer hadn't actually paid for the item. (Bogus checks/money orders, convincing sellers to ship before payment has been sent, offering to purchase the item outside of FeeBay/PayPal, etc) However, I think one of the main scams right now is abusing the PayPal claim process on uninformed sellers who ship high value items without signature confirmation, or medium value items without delivery confirmation. When that happens, FeeBay/PayPal sides with the buyer and washes their hands of the matter. Of course there's also the petty buyers who threaten sellers with a negative feedback for trivial issues if they won't refund their payment (and let them keep the item) or at least give them a partial refund.

It would just kill me to leave positive feedback for a person that ended up scamming me in the end because future buyers and sellers might base decisions of trust on my inaccurate feedback. Not that sellers really have much of a choice when choosing buyers, but if a person scams people as a buyer, they'd probably scam people as a seller too, and a high rating helps build trust and confidence in a seller, even if most of the ratings are from buying activities.

In summary, I believe it is much easier, safer, and meaningful for a buyer to leave feedback first. As such, I think it's backwards for buyers to expect sellers to leave feedback first. This whole rating timing etiquitte thing is just one of the many reasons I hardly ever sell on FeeBay any more...

 

I have joined those who have stopped buying/selling on Ebay... luckily I sold most of my valuable garbage years ago before things became so stilted there... but overall I had a good experience and made more money than I ever imagined I would... but this was about 6-7 years ago now... things seem to have changed quite a bit...

 

Wait, what? The seller expected to receive feedback before shipping the item? Where on Earth did they get that idea?

Even in the days when you could leave anyone feedback for anything, independent of any transaction, that would've been a stupid assumption.

 

I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers that the "post images of both sides of the slab" rule goes back a lot further than last August. What happened last August was they exempted the post 1979 coins from requiring the back of the slab image.

 

Post 1979 coins were exempted June 1, 2008 or earlier as posted in an eBay memo shown in post #51.

 

Seller thought because I was new to eBay that I didn't know my proverbial rear-end from a hole in the ground.

 

I decided to snip the rest of the commentary, as your thesis summed up what you were saying nicely. Now, that said, I don't agree with your assessment of how real auction houses operate. I've had excellent experiences with both Christie's and Heritage. I had to use Christie's once to settle an estate, and Heritage, well, is Heritage. I don't like how long it takes the latter to pay, but they pay on time, per contract. Also, I don't have to worry about the item being claimed as "lost" or "not as described" when sold by them. At least, I've not had that happen _yet_.

Beyond that, I was thinking about Yahoo! Auctions the other day and wondered why Google hasn't started their own auction group. I'm on the fence about emailing them a way to make it viable and HIGHLY competitive with eBay.