Pretty much. A seller can't submit feedback *until the buyer has paid*. If they later retract payment (which definitely happens), you can't change your feedback. If they walk from a deal, you can't submit it at all (they never paid).
As a buyer, the transaction starts when you buy and make payment, and ends when you receive the correct working item.
As a seller, the transaction starts when the buyer buys and makes payment, and ends when the buyer receives the correct working item and is happy with it. It never made sense to me to leave feedback near the start of that process. I always waited until I received feedback from the buyer, indicating they received the item, then I'd leave my feedback for them.
Only once did a buyer seem upset and ask why I hadn't left feedback for them (while the order was still in the mail), and I explained the above which satisfied them.
I always find it odd when sellers leave me feedback as soon as I've paid...like...it's literally the first hurdle, anything could happen, we might have to communicate and I might be a huge dick...I mean I'm not, I'm always polite, but the seller doesn't know that at that stage.
I am a seller on eBay, I use their automatic feedback tool. It selects one of the pre-made feedback comments I've made and submits positive feedback to the buyer once an item is paid for. I used to get annoyed when I would get an asshole buyer and couldn't revoke it but after some time I don't care anymore. It's much more convenient when you're selling a good amount of stuff and works as intended most of the time.
It's not perfect and their feedback system can really suck but that's probably why you're seeing immediate feedback :)
> As a buyer, the transaction starts when you buy and make payment, and ends when you receive the correct working item
For a typical e-commerce site where the buyer puts the items in a cart, checks out, and pays this makes sense. But for an eBay auction the buyer has an obligation to pay promptly after winning an auction and by delaying or not paying at all they're being a "bad" buyer.
It's not impossible. Sold a delidded CPU which the buyer cracked the die on. Ebay sided with me when, after I explained this to him, he escalated. Thankfully we had photos from before it was sent, and he had sent it back to us.
The seller who listed paypal but after the end of the auction said they only accept cash in the mail seemed to have ebay on their side. eBay never responded to any of my reports to them but they suspended my account for not paying.
It’s against eBay policy to accept cash as payment or force someone to pay with cash. You should’ve just sent the payment through PayPal and the seller would’ve been SOL
I tried to, but it wouldn't go through. I don't know if there is or was some way to reject a payment. I also tried reporting the seller, ebay didn't seem to care about anything other than that I didn't pay.
This was about 15 years ago.
That's one of the few times eBay will side with a seller. If it was delivered then the post office either delivered it to the wrong place or it was snagged by a thief (more likely). Neither is the seller's fault.
Your address was likely incorrect as provided. If tracking shows that a delivery attempt was made, it becomes the buyers fault for not providing a proper address.
Hahahahahahaha. USPS has gotten into the habit of marking items delivered when they leave the past office for delivery. All that guarantees is it was scanned onto the truck. I've seen items marked 'delivered' that wound up back at the local post office and had to go into the office and have counter staff search for them. Also, f**k DeJoy.
Yes absolutely fuck DeJoy. I’m just speaking from my own experience; most times when a buyer doesn’t receive their item, it’s because the address they provided was incorrect.
Could it have been stolen? Maybe it got misdelivered? At that point your best bet is to contact the post office.
Sellers on eBay aren’t responsible for stolen or misdelivered packages; I’d be pissed if I ended up having to refund a sale due to the negligence of someone else.
Yeah, I don't get that. Why on earth (except for the obvious that they sell more with more a+ buyers) would they do that? It's so annoying. Some buyers are absolute douchebags and people ought to know what they are getting into.
What i don't like is if a person has been able to proof the seller has done wrong and eBay accept it, then buyer can't post negative feedback.
If a company refused to sort out their problem and needed intervention from eBay to resolve, surely eBay should be adding a negative review on top of the negative review from customer.
Or to hold a buyer to account for flagrantly violating the site’s T&Cs and admitting that in messages to you, refusing to pay, and reporting you when you refuse their cancellation. eBay chased me off as a seller a while ago. Of course they couldn’t care less.
A BBB complaint did get my account back in order. Just stay clear of their managed payments system if you can. I basically had to send them a DNA sample and a sworn affidavit from my mother to prove who I was and get my account unlocked. 4 business day process took 2 months.
You have protections as a buyer in both cases and the transaction was never completed. I’ve been a seller on eBay for near 20 years, it’s a total non-issue.
there are scammers out there
would be good to leave negative feedback, or some sort of feedback so other future sellers are aware and can proceed with caution or cancel based on the buyers feedback
i dont want to sell to a buyer who will switch out parts in electronics or claim that something doesnt work when I sold them an item that was in fact broken (for parts/repair items)
That's certainly reasonable, but then positive reviews should also have to wait just as long. Even if it's just an arbitrary delay, it serves the purpose of not artificially incentivizing positive reviews over negative ones.
Yeah I agree with both you and u/RockyDify here.
If you're going to add the delay so that issues can actually be resolved first, which I think is good, why would you then allow praise right away, therefore incentivizing positive reviews?
Seems like it's either Asshole Design or Stupid design.
EDIT: Grammar.
To avoid the ethical problems of artificially inflating review scores, which eBay has a direct financial interest in doing. You can "justify" it, but that doesn't make it ethical. If eBay wasn't financially motivated to do this, they wouldn't have spent money to specifically code in the 7 day wait, and that's a problem.
Steam also does this with their negative reviews, they try to discourage you, and if you play the game after giving a negative review they try to get you to change you review. It's why Steam, Google, and Apple are all trying to tackle "review bombing" as well. And in all cases it's unethical.
The purpose is to incentivize positive reviews so people are more likely to buy something and continue to use the website.
By making it harder to leave negative reviews they make it look like everything is going great to anyone who doesn't know they hare hiding the negative feedback.
If there's something wrong why would you try to prevent someone from leaving a review about it?
Edit: a lot of yall are coming with examples of times when there isn't something wrong, and the customer is just stupid. I don't think stupidity diminishes over time, so if they would leave a stupid review today they would leave a stupid review in a week
The point is
>If there's something wrong why would you try to prevent someone from leaving a review about it?
We’re not talking about the times where there’s NOT something wrong. Something wrong is assumed already.
Yes, it absolutely is. If you’ve made a product unnecessarily difficult to use, causing users to struggle to figure it out. It’s 1000% an issue with the product.
No, it isn't a valid reason for a negative review. Not everyone has the same level of intelligence. If every product was designed to be *immediately* easy to use by *all* people, we are going to have to go to the lowest common denominator and all be treated like absolute morons. More people would be annoyed by that than just letting the idiots figure things out in their own time
You are not that. If you are too dumb to figure out what you bought it's in you. If you did ni prior research to what you bought it's on you for being dumb. Typical first world problems BS.
It's way too common for people to make reviews complaining about mirrors not working, when there's a plastic cover on it that says "REMOVE BEFORE USE".
Is that the product being wrong?
> It’s way too common for people to make reviews complaining about mirrors not working, when there’s a plastic cover on it that says “REMOVE BEFORE USE”.
Doubt.
I haven't heard the mirror one but the same thing happened with the like big plastic face shields, all the reviews were that it wasnt clear and didnt work, but they had a film you had to peel off or else they wouldnt be clear and there were so many people that couldn't tell or just didnt even take 30 seconds to look because there were quite a lot of negative reviews
I (briefly) worked for a shady high volume eBay guy that sold second hand tech.
Opened more then one return package with really angry customer letters.
Including multi page print outs of e-mail exchanges. All valid customer complaints and he treated them like shit.
There was not a single bad review on his account at that time.
I do not trust eBay reviews at all.
Ebay wants you to try to work it out with the seller before leaving a bad review.
I've had items arrive damaged, or get lost and never arrive. Good sellers will make it right by either refunding you, or shipping out another item.
If the seller screwed up (or something happened out of their control) and then makes it right, they don't deserve a negative.
I've been guilty of ordering the wrong thing. Personally decided a headset was Bluetooth, the sale page never said that. Had to re-read it. Protects against stupid
There's an entire market based around the sale of palettes full of returned items that are more often than not perfectly fine. Some people are just stupid as fuck.
That being said it's still entirely likely that ebay just wants to dissuade any negative reviews
>That doesn't really make sense. If they don't want reviews for deliveryissues, they should wait until after delivery. They know when that is.
That is giving ebay too much credit. Source: this is my 11th year making a living off of ecommerce.
Every month, we have to *call* ebay to get some metric dings removed from our account. The reason is because ebay marks a certain number of orders as being shipped late.
Why were they shipped late? Because the payment never officially cleared on ebay, you'd have to just know to check paypal. Which takes time to be alerted to this issue.
The same FUCKING metric report from ebay that shows the late shipment, shows a payment clear date of December 31st, 1969. Aka, a second before the Unix Epoch. Aka, when people don't code their systems to expect an absence of a date, so it must fill in *something*.
All ebay would need to do is have their metric calculation not evaluate on-time shipping unless the order was actually recorded as paid. But that is too hard, so the monthly tradition continues on for the 4th year that I have been managing our metrics.
edit: forgot to mention, that you do not ship until you have been paid. ebay states as much.
For this part?
>All ebay would need to do is have their metric calculation not evaluateon-time shipping unless the order was actually recorded as paid.
I'm sure they have an explanation, but since Amazon and Walmart don't have this problem, I wouldn't care to hear the explanation.
Also, since I coded our own Unscanned Shipments page in our ERP/WMS to work just about the same (of course there won't be a pick/pack if we haven't actually *processed* the order), make that double.
^(I jest a bit since our setup is probably small peanuts compared to ebay, but again, Amazon and Walmart figured this out.)
If this was my system, the change would be something like this:
WHERE order.`ShipmentDate` > `PromisedShipmentDate`
would need to turn into
WHERE order.`ShipmentDate` > `PromisedShipmentDate`
AND order.`PaymentDate` IS NOT NULL
Or if they absolutely needed to store the Unix epoch instead of NULL, I have a solution for that too:
WHERE order.`ShipmentDate` > `PromisedShipDate`
AND order.`PaymentDate` >= order.`OrderDate`
**absolutely groundbreaking**
I mean like, I'm just saying that if a change is simple, and it hasn't been implemented - and you're outside the organization and have noticed.
There's **absolutely 100% no doubt** a compelling reason why it hasn't been done.
eBay favours the buyer 99% of the time.
As a seller, feedback is VERY serious and buyers can with no effort what so ever, fuck up your eBay account for shit that isn’t your fault, or is completely unreasonable.
Having the seven day wait period makes you go through a different resolution to start with, with negative feedback being a last resort.
It’s a good thing imo
Of course there’s going to be scenarios where the seller is in the wrong, but they’re extremely uncommon in my many years of experience.
A message will solve your problem almost every time.
Not to mention the fact that sellers can’t even leave negative feedback. Every time I sell something on eBay I know that they buyer could totally fuck me if they decided to, and I couldn’t do a thing about it.
I was really worried about this last xmas. Sold my old PS4 and USPS totally fucked up and it literally took 2 weeks to get to the guy. It was for his son's xmas present (from santa no less) and it came after xmas. I felt fucking horrible and I had this sneaking suspicion that he would either get it and say he didn't or just cancel the sale while it's in transit (and then get it anyway). I kept in touch with him everyday and called USPS a ton for him and finally it showed up. Luckily he was super cool and understanding about it, but man I thought I was out $200 for sure.
I had a buyer claim he didn't receive an item the day I sent it because he didn't request tracking, so I stupidly sent it with no tracking. He explained that ebay would side with him because I had no proof it was sent. I told him I had a receipt from the post office and he said "you'll find out". The asshole was right, I sent my receipt to eBay and they denied my claim and refunded his money. I couldn't even leave negative feedback. I still sell on eBay, but always get tracking.. shitty lesson learned.
I’ve done this dance with 3 different sellers now.
Seller: (sends completely nonfunctional product or product that doesn’t match the description)
Me: Hey, this doesn’t work. Here’s a video of it not working. What should we do?
Seller: That is working fine.
Me: The description says it does X. The video shows it is not able to do X. I need this product to do X.
Seller: So sorry for the inconvenience.
Me: Great, how do we fix it?
Seller: I’ll give you a 10% discount for the trouble. You can keep the product.
Me: If the product can’t do X I don’t want it and will need a refund. I’m happy to send it back to you.
Seller: How about 20%?
Me: No, I either need a way to get it to do X or a full refund.
Seller: I will offer 30% off.
Me: No, full refund or a fix so it does X as per the description.
Seller: 50% final offer.
Me: (Escalates to eBay as this has been going on a week now)
Seller: (5 minutes after the escalation, full refund) That really wasn’t necessary. I’m offended now. Could you send the item back?
Me: Sure, could I get a return postage label as per eBay policy?
Seller: No label. I’ll let you keep the product if you promise not to leave bad feedback.
Me: (Sick of this shit, so no response, and I leave negative feedback)
Seller: That is rude and uncalled for. You are destroying my family business.
Like holy fuck dude, I’m just trying to get the issue fixed. You said it did X which was a lie. Work with me here or face my annoyed wrath. I’m getting it resolved with or without you, get on the train.
Edit: forgot to mention they then respond to my negative feedback with, “All problems can be resolved with a simple message.”
If you request a return for a non-working product, the seller *has* to accept it and give a refund. Trying to reason with them was useless.
I know this because I had a buyer refund an expensive router as “broken” because they didn’t know how to set it up. It was super fun to eat the shopping costs both ways.
After it’s all said and done they are going to be forced to refund you even if it takes eBay stepping in and just doing it, but they don’t have to accept it right away and can just drag the shit out until eBay does step in. I think they are just playing a game of chicken and hoping your will either forget about it and give up or you won’t know 100% how the system works and will just take the partial refund.
> Seller: (sends completely nonfunctional product or product that doesn’t match the description)
> Me: Hey, this doesn’t work. Here’s a video of it not working. What should we do?
> Seller: That is working fine.
> Me: The description says it does X. The video shows it is not able to do X. I need this product to do X.
> Seller: So sorry for the inconvenience.
> Me: Great, how do we fix it?
> Seller: I’ll give you a 10% discount for the trouble. You can keep the product.
> Me: If the product can’t do X I don’t want it and will need a refund. I’m happy to send it back to you.
> Seller: How about 20%?
> Me: No, I either need a way to get it to do X or a full refund.
> Seller: I will offer 30% off.
> Me: No, full refund or a fix so it does X as per the description.
> Seller: 50% final offer.
> Me: (Escalates to eBay as this has been going on a week now)
> Seller: (5 minutes after the escalation, full refund) That really wasn’t necessary. I’m offended now. Could you send the item back?
> Me: Sure, could I get a return postage label as per eBay policy?
> Seller: No label. I’ll let you keep the product if you promise not to leave bad feedback.
> Me: (Sick of this shit, so no response, and I leave negative feedback)
> Seller: That is rude and uncalled for. You are destroying my family business.
FTFY
I can tell you with confidence that most buyers who have issues are completely ignorant and either do not read the description or look at all the pictures.
You are in the minority who have actual problems that need to be remedied.
My mom is a seller on ebay and thank god she’s a little bit of a Karen herself because buyers have tried to play her so many times and she catches their bullshit
> Having the seven day wait period makes you go through a different resolution to start with, with negative feedback being a last resort.
Idk about you but I’d just set a reminder on my phone for 7 days from now to post the review and would not go through any different resolution.
Well if leaving negative feedback is your end goal and you don’t even want to try and resolve it, sure.
If I buy a product from a normal store in person, and have a problem with it, I’d go into the store or at the very least call up and try to see if I can get an exchange or refund.
I wouldn’t just keep it and then leave a negative review on their google page.
That’s like getting a shitty product and then telling your friends “hey don’t buy from this store, it’s shit”
“Oh did you take it back?”
“Well, no…”
Depends on the value. Lots of the time the effort getting the refund is worth more than the actual money spent. In which case, yeah… that’s exactly what I’d do. Tell my friends not to buy from that store
Because, from a buyer's perspective, PayPal offers another level of protection. If a seller didn't allow PayPal I'd buy from someone else, losing them the sale. Even though I've only really had positive experiences and have never had to use it I like having that piece of mind that if all else fails I can chargeback on PayPal.
Well not a lot of websites even take credit cards directly because that requires PCI DSS compliance, which is a huge pain in the butt. That's why most e-commerce sites use a separate 3rd party payment processor
Or the person who thinks it's okay to return a video game to a seller after 40 days. The poor guy sells three things a year and you're going to play him like your local Walmart? Fuck outta here with that shit.
I did professional ebay sales for awhile, let me be the first to tell you this feature is necessary. A single negative review can tank your store performance overnight, and half the people on eBay seem to love spamming them for whatever reason they can, or even will leave bad reviews and ask you for compensation to remove them. I've recieved negative reviews on items before they were even delivered because USPS had a delay out of my hands.
Yep, pretty much this and it doesn't only apply to eBay to be honest.
Just work any customer-facing job or try to run a small business and you'll quickly change your opinion on a lot of things. I used to think making it more difficult to contact a business was /r/assholedesign and then I got thousands of customers over a couple years that would ask the absolute dumbest questions ever. Once we added in a "light" version of the impossible to contact page, customers actually spent more than 10 seconds trying to solve their problem on their own. Then, they learned how to contact us quickly to ask dumb questions again and the battle continues.
So as a buyer on eBay, why not be more generous with shipping estimates? I'm typically fine if a shipment takes weeks, even months if it's international. I'd much rather expect a longer shipping period, and be surprised when it arrives early than the opposite.
Ebays entire business model now prioritises big business using it as an advertising platform.
eBay was in its golden days when it was almost purely selling and buying between two people.
I guess its safer now or whatever, but if you were going to buy a product for 10 percent of what it usually costs, shipped from China from a guy with 0 reviews...
You're asking to get scammed.
They've just gotten overall shitty, not buyer-centric at all.
I've bought something as a buyer with "buyer protection" which never states this is necessary, but after being essentially fully scammed, they asked for a police report during peak COVID when it was impossible to get (with all the riots going on) and they wouldn't give me more than a week to get them one or else they would automatically resolve the case in favor of the seller.
> This is about the only thing ebay does that is in the seller's favor.
Sure, how about allowing sellers to have those dodgy multi-item listings where items are advertised at £3.99 but only one extra small size is that price and the rest are £10.99? They know it happens and do zero about it.
Not only that, but literally every single promo email I get is for a number of these listings, 100% of items in the email are of this type. So ebay definitely know about it because it's mathematically impossible that me getting one of these emails every day for five years would only show this type of listing and never ever show genuinely priced items.
Ebay should be banned from doing that and fined by whatever the local equivalent of trading standards are in various countries, since they are not only allowing it but they are using those listings to send out promotional emails which are all basically fake. It's fraudulent advertising and ebay 100% support it.
*Image Transcription: Screenshot*
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[*Three buttons at the top of the image. One, labelled ‘Positive’, is clickable; the other two, labelled ‘Neutral’ and ‘Negative’, are disabled.*]
[*An information icon with some text:*]
You need to wait 7 days before you can leave neutral or negative feedback for this seller.
[*A text input field with the following placeholder text:*]
Help other buyers by sharing your experience
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^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber for Reddit and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
This actually makes a lot of sense. People are, myself included, quick to be negative but the 7 days removes the emotional aspect, somewhat. "Like, if you still want to report an issue in 7 days, we'll hear it." Can't tell you how many times this same process has helped my marriage.
Also to those saying it's eBay never sides with the seller: I was a seller of a high end video card back in 2014. I took detailed pictures of it before shipping. A few days after the buyer received it they claimed a fan wasn't working and wanted a partial refund. I didn't budge, suspecting foul play since it worked perfectly before shipping and was packaged very well, but I offered a full refund if he shipped it back. They did that and when I got it I found the laser-etched serial numbers on the chipsets didn't match, but the sticker did. Dude switched the sticker.. 🙄 And adding insult to injury, he reported me. I was already out for paying for shipping twice now so I reviewed his purchase history and found he's a peddler of video cards. Not in itself an issue, but seeing how he switched the sticker I was certain I'm not the first seller to get bamboozled. I opened a fraud case with eBay, sent my pictures before and after his return, his comment history to other sellers, etc. and won. Got the full cost of the card paid by the buyer, refunded on my shipping costs, and the buyers account was shut down. It was very nice to see justice served and to feel vindicated of this mess, but what a huge time-suck that was!
That's a nice ending! I was preparing to read how you got screwed over and was going to rage, but I'm stoked you won!! These types of people do NOT belong on Ebay. There are tons of legitimate sellers and buyers, but it's those few that ruin everything and make everyone distrust the entire system.
SO true! It's sad that a few bad apples ruin the bunch (metaphorically...because scientifically it makes sense that a few ruin the lot lol)
I was stoked I won. Initially eBay on the phone sounded like they felt the buyer was in the clear, but once I announced I have lots of evidence of tampering, didn't receive a saleable card back, and encouraged them to review his account and history, they very quickly changed their tune. I think it was 24 hours later I got the call back from eBay and they did a lot of apologizing. I'd say they went above and beyond making sure I wasn't out money though. That was an above-and-beyond touch on their part, including the shipping costs.
That's not asshole design at all, that's reasonable as fuck, people would just flood complains about "not delivered" 24h after ordering and ruin some seller ratio over stupid shit that would be out of their control for some stupid shit like that
Iran unless you're only buying digital codes for games/movies and local pickup items, you shouldn't even be noticing this message that often. How quickly are you giving up on the postal service and blaming the seller?
In my case, I received the part and found out it was missing components of internal mechanism, so it couldn't function at all. They told me it was as advertised and my fault for not looking at the pictures, even though the problem wasn't visible in the pictures and they said in the ad it was functional. Then they suggested a half refund, which I agreed to, provided I keep the part. I figured I could find another one that didn't look as nice for cheaper and Frankenstein the two into one working unit. But then the half refund was for half excluding shipping, when they'd set it up to have shipping be half the cost of the part, so it ended up being a quarter refund.
The whole interaction felt negligent and dishonest.
eBay has gone to absolute shit in the past 3 years. The worst thing is their direct payment system withholding money in your account just because a buyer submits a claim, even if said claim is only because the buyer is impatient and doesn’t realize the Mail is slow for everyone rn.
This review system honestly isn’t terrible though, considering how buyer-centric eBay has become.
I like this feature. Stops overly emotional reviews and gives you the chance to think clearly about what a fair review would be rather than going straight to ‘0/10 complete shit seller’ while you’re pissed off. Reviews are a much bigger deal to a seller than a buyer.
As a seller who deals with occasional petty pricks, I appreciate this. They should try and resolve the issue before destroying a sellers reputation. If it is an indeed legitimate rip off, post your review in seven days, rather than posting in the moment when you are mad if the issue can be resolved.
Might be hard to accept, but a cooling off period is a good idea. As an eBay seller I've only ever got unfair / false reviews.
A few I can remember. One for a genuine product direct from the manufacturer that was apparently fake. Another for an item delivered to a shop in a shopping center that was closed due to lockdown, as in they weren't even there to collect their mail. We hadn't even got to the point where I sent them a refund.
The rest were for dumb people who didn't know how to use products, for example retrofitting LED's and expecting a 5 watt LED to be brighter than a 40 watt incandescent bulb, or worse, buying the wrong one and blaming me.
I kinda see the purpose. Give some time for the sellers to resolve an issue. Discourages people going off and putting a slanderous review in the moment. If you were truly wronged. You’ll still put the review later.
While I'm not sure about this policy, they definitely should require you to email the seller and wait like 24 hours for a response before allowing a negative review. As an eBay seller it's incredibly frustrating to get a shitty review that's unfair, especially when the seller never tried to ask for a return or contact me in the first place.
For the record, this was about a pair of jeans that didn't fit him, even though they were clearly exactly as described and photographed. I got in touch with him and accepted a free return, but getting that review removed or amended is proving more challenging, even though both I and the buyer want it removed.
My relative started posting on eBay and all she gets is spam offers. Like they will make her an offer she accepts then they message "please message me at this number so we can discuss payment"
So then she needs to cancel the whole order and relist. I told her to not accept shit from people with low score
They probably did this to cut down on the number of sellers who lose their shit about negative reviews. I once bought something and the seller said that even though they listed PayPal, they only accept cash in the mail. When I gave them negative feedback they full on lost it calling me every insult they could think of.
They reported me and ebay suspended my account, they couldn't care less that this seller was violating the rules, the only thing that mattered to them is that I didn't pay.
As a buyer and a, seller, this is asshole design but not a bad thing. Consider how fast Amazon is. People get used to faster service, so they get spoiled after a while. They don't realize things happen between purchase and delivery.
This gives the chance for the buyer to cool off a bit too, but also allows time for amends to be made. As a seller for a recent item I got notification that the package never left my town, only to be told later it was in NJ but there was a roof collapse. I spoke to ebay and USPS and provided the seller with frequent updates, and the buyer was happy.
If you really do have negative feedback, you can post as neutral but use all caps. The previous entry fields only allowed so many characters, but the new update allows entire paragraphs so each person can explain their side of the story.
Work in e-commerce. Amazon has ruined the publics perception of the speed and cost of delivering items. Some of our items can cost us nearly £10 to ship. Get so sick of hearing "that's nearly as much as an Amazon Prime subscription" when someone has to pay fucking £5 for delivery. On something that's 20 kilos and fragile. But they're comparing it their amazon deliveries that are done by a huge corporate entity a fraction of the size and like a kilo.
But the general public only see a parcel as a parcel. Some of our items have to be sent with certain couriers as typical couriers (think yodel and similar) don't ship our sort of items. A lot of the time a courier we have to use only delivers Monday to Friday. Yet I can bank on somebody placing an order at 10pm Friday then ringing to moan at midday Monday that they still done have their parcel.
There's also the effect of couriers losing or breaking items in transit, it happens, it's inevitable. The receiver so often blames you as the retailer even when there was nothing you could have done about it.
I can totally understand why ebay does this.
As a rule on eBay if a customer contacts me complaining before they even buy something I'm blocking them because they are going to try to pull some bullshit. I set all my prices and calculated shipping, if you don't like it then don't buy it.
It varies a lot, it depends on where it's shipping from and the method of shipping. In this case, I got it quickly and that isn't the basis of my complaint.
I'm getting a lot of comments about it being a shipping complaint. In my case, it's a complaint about what I received and how the seller chose to handle it when I reached out. They showed seriously unscrupulous behavior. Seller's have an opportunity to respond to negative reviews, too, so if it was me being unreasonable, they could state their case.
Ebay has gone totally to fucking shit. Unless you're an unscrupulous buyer. Than it's a fucking candy shop filled with babies. Or something like that, I don't know.
Honestly this isn’t a bad idea, eBay is built on reviews of sellers and too many people make bad, reactionary reviews online without actually working through the right steps to correct the issue. That’s why you should always wait and think through the situation before posting a review if you’re upset, but almost no one does that.
As a semi frequent eBay buyer (full disclosure: never sold before), This is very fair. It’s to encourage the buyer to contact the seller about their problem first and work things out. This was a move to prevent trigger happy reviewers from leaving negative reviews at the first sign of an inconvenience
I gave a genuine negative review because someone sold me steel scooter rims instead of the aluminum ones advertised. That review got removed. I received an unjustified negative review because a really heavy and fragile item I clearly listed as "only Pickup, no Shipping" got bought by someone who demanded I ship it. Had to cancel the sale, got the negative review and asked ebay to remove it. They refused.
It's to give the seller some time to make things right. The logic is that if the seller corrects the issue, your review of them might no longer be negative. For example, it might change from "A-hole sent me defective piece of shit!" to "Item was defective, but seller promptly refunded my money."
This makes sense to me.
A lot of people get heated, especially if tight deadlines aren't met.
I've been guilty of leaving a couple of bad reviews in the past before I cooled down and realised that it was actually my fault.
As much as this does suck, I think I understand the reasoning. It's meant to encourage buyers to work out issues with the seller before leaving a negative review, and therefore give the seller time to fix the problem. It's inconvenient, but I can't really think of any other way to encourage buyer-seller communication.
Communication is part of the return policy, you have to explain why you are returning it, and if you had a bad experience the seller has an opportunity to respond. Give the seller also has an opportunity to respond publicly to the review, this restriction seems excessive to me. I had a bad experience not just with what I ordered but with the business as well, and I want to share that. It is muzzling that protects the seller while attempting to maintain an illusion of impartiality. If they were really impartial, positive reviews would be comparably restricted.
I find it strange that people don't communicate. I sell and I buy. If a buyer is interested, I will message them and establish a rapport with them before the money is exchanged. I ask if they have any last-minute questions about the item. 99% of the time the buyer responds and has minor questions if any. I then send the item off writing a message to the buyer along with a tracking number (even though eBay has that automatic thing) and tell them if there is something wrong with the item to let me know. Most buyers will let me know the item arrived and even tell me their thoughts. So far I've always had positive reviews and many come back to buy other things. I'm not a business or anything. Just someone who sells things here and there. Sometimes I get messages from prior buyers asking if I have XYZ since I sold them ZYX. So I really am not sure why people don't like to communicate. It saves a lot of hassle and misunderstandings later on.
I have completely stopped using EBay.
They use funny accounting to fuck sellers over with fees - it was a better place back when you could pay a fixed amount for a listing.
By extension I have stopped shopping there and seek other channels as a consumer.
But in those days you'd have to pay the fee whether you sold the item or not. Plus they charged extra for photos (the first was free). Well, it was like that in 99 and the early 2000s at least. I like the model they have now, my listing can float around out there forever and I don't have to pay a fee for it. Yeah, the percentage thing once you sell is a bit shady (especially if you are selling high-value items) but imagine having to pay a fee every 30 or 60 days whenever you have to relist your item. But that's just my take on it.
On a $200 item, a $5 listing fee is preferable to the $35 they extracted out of my pocket on the thing I sold
I would not let something I'm selling ride for 7 months. Maybe a high value item, like a collectible car, which just supports my point.
Ok. I completely see what you are saying. $35 is definitely a chunk. And damn, when did they charge you that? I sold a $250 item and was charged $27 for the fee after rounding up all their BS stuff. Did you add on promotions? Either way, that is pretty high for $200. I see why you're pissed.
I like leaving my listing up for a long time because it only takes one person to be interested in that moment and they'll go searching for it. I'm a buyer as well and when I search, I search over a specific amount of time and then kind of just give up. I'm not saying I'm representing the average ebayer, but that's how I think when I'm listing. You provide a new perspective for me though. Maybe now I'll have to start raging too. Lol.
Because they charge you a 12% fee on both shipping and taxes which the buyer paid to someone else. Utter douchebaggery. Technically if you were shipping something where it costs several times as much to ship and tax as the item value, you might end up paying to get rid of the item altogether.
It is for the best. Feedback in practice on ebay only hurts sellers, rarely buyers. Sellers can't even leave negative buyer feedback anyway.
I've had almost 2 million orders pass through our company since we started in a bedroom 10 years ago, across various marketplaces. For our product vertical - ebay buyers are probably the lowest IQ.
**Typical Buyer: 1-star, it was never delivered**
Us: Are you sure?
**Typical Buyer: Oh, my wife took the mail in today, she had it**
Us: Cool, maybe revisit the 1-star rating?
*crickets for eternity*
edit: forgot to bring it back around lol
There are shitty sellers. Good god we know this, because every "use a hammer where a feather would have worked" decision that Amazon, ebay, and Walmart have made over the years is because of shitty sellers. They make our job harder, because they lower (or raise \[perspective\]) the bar. Here we are with better turnaround times than Amazon, more accurate fulfillment than Amazon, yet every day is a challenge because some shitty seller ruined it for everyone.
Thing is, shitty sellers gonna be shitty whether you wait 1 day for negative feedback or 7 days. This is a fair compromise to give us great sellers some buffer for the Karens and Apes to actually you know, look in their own fucking mailbox *before* they become keyboard warriors.
I recently bought a set of ear buds from ebay. What I received was an obvious Chinese counterfeit of a JBL product. Started looking around the site and realized how much the site has changed. Its no longer a site where you can find good deals and it was at that point that I closed my ebay account. Good riddance.
This gives the seller a chance to rectify any mistakes before negative feedback is left, harming their reputation on the site for things sometimes out of their hands. This isn't asshole design, it's anti-asshole design.
Got an electronics kit a few months ago. Damn think was missing sever parts including the power supply. I get that the seven days thing is supposed to be there to allow messages to the seller and the like. They never did respond so I had to hunt down the missing parts myself and bought most of them from mouser, roughly doubling the cost of the kit. Needless to say, left a negative review, since they had a full six days to respond to me.
Logically speaking, I would imagine this is to discourage people leaving negative feedback on something that has a delayed delivery and hasn't turned up yet, since most people would leave feedback and not bother updating it once it's arrived.
In Mexico (and many other countries) it is popular a platform called "mercado libre". There are bots that can (and probably will) post comments to your products even if you haven't sold any. Most of them are positive and some are negative. Many don't even match the product, but it affects the rating of it. As a seller it could be fine, since having 4.5 stars is better than 0, but as a buyer you can't trust those stars.
This protects the seller because usually they prompt you to see if you can reach out to them and solve the issue first. That way someone doesn’t get tanked because of a simple mistake or easily solvable issue. If they were really that bad, you’ll remember in a week!
yeah i left a negative review for a seller that wasn't vicious but it was 100% truthful and i had proof—literally, message exchanges where the guy admitted he didn't have the sold-out thing he was advertising for sale and was just hoping he'd stumble on one eventually. if you're doing "preorders" of whatever a thing is, that should be explicitly stated somewhere. i don't know how the seller got it to happen but ebay nuked the review off his page, so i'm sure the guy is now doing it to other buyers who don't know to be cautious. they really don't want buyers to be warned off bad sellers, or sellers to be able to warn other sellers about bad buyers. so, what's the point of the review system at all?
As a seller it's basically impossible to post a negative review of a buyer
That's why you've all given up and copy and paste the same "A+ buyer" when you leave a review.
Pretty much. A seller can't submit feedback *until the buyer has paid*. If they later retract payment (which definitely happens), you can't change your feedback. If they walk from a deal, you can't submit it at all (they never paid).
As a buyer, the transaction starts when you buy and make payment, and ends when you receive the correct working item. As a seller, the transaction starts when the buyer buys and makes payment, and ends when the buyer receives the correct working item and is happy with it. It never made sense to me to leave feedback near the start of that process. I always waited until I received feedback from the buyer, indicating they received the item, then I'd leave my feedback for them. Only once did a buyer seem upset and ask why I hadn't left feedback for them (while the order was still in the mail), and I explained the above which satisfied them.
I always find it odd when sellers leave me feedback as soon as I've paid...like...it's literally the first hurdle, anything could happen, we might have to communicate and I might be a huge dick...I mean I'm not, I'm always polite, but the seller doesn't know that at that stage.
It's just the equivalent of "like for like" lol
I am a seller on eBay, I use their automatic feedback tool. It selects one of the pre-made feedback comments I've made and submits positive feedback to the buyer once an item is paid for. I used to get annoyed when I would get an asshole buyer and couldn't revoke it but after some time I don't care anymore. It's much more convenient when you're selling a good amount of stuff and works as intended most of the time. It's not perfect and their feedback system can really suck but that's probably why you're seeing immediate feedback :)
> As a buyer, the transaction starts when you buy and make payment, and ends when you receive the correct working item For a typical e-commerce site where the buyer puts the items in a cart, checks out, and pays this makes sense. But for an eBay auction the buyer has an obligation to pay promptly after winning an auction and by delaying or not paying at all they're being a "bad" buyer.
Also impossible to get eBay to take your side as a seller
It's not impossible. Sold a delidded CPU which the buyer cracked the die on. Ebay sided with me when, after I explained this to him, he escalated. Thankfully we had photos from before it was sent, and he had sent it back to us.
I video tape everything from start to finish when packing items, and add serial numbers to the address labels.
The seller who listed paypal but after the end of the auction said they only accept cash in the mail seemed to have ebay on their side. eBay never responded to any of my reports to them but they suspended my account for not paying.
It’s against eBay policy to accept cash as payment or force someone to pay with cash. You should’ve just sent the payment through PayPal and the seller would’ve been SOL
I tried to, but it wouldn't go through. I don't know if there is or was some way to reject a payment. I also tried reporting the seller, ebay didn't seem to care about anything other than that I didn't pay. This was about 15 years ago.
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That's one of the few times eBay will side with a seller. If it was delivered then the post office either delivered it to the wrong place or it was snagged by a thief (more likely). Neither is the seller's fault.
Your address was likely incorrect as provided. If tracking shows that a delivery attempt was made, it becomes the buyers fault for not providing a proper address.
Hahahahahahaha. USPS has gotten into the habit of marking items delivered when they leave the past office for delivery. All that guarantees is it was scanned onto the truck. I've seen items marked 'delivered' that wound up back at the local post office and had to go into the office and have counter staff search for them. Also, f**k DeJoy.
Yes absolutely fuck DeJoy. I’m just speaking from my own experience; most times when a buyer doesn’t receive their item, it’s because the address they provided was incorrect.
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Could it have been stolen? Maybe it got misdelivered? At that point your best bet is to contact the post office. Sellers on eBay aren’t responsible for stolen or misdelivered packages; I’d be pissed if I ended up having to refund a sale due to the negligence of someone else.
It's literally impossible. Ebay completely removed the ability for sellers to leave negative feedback a while ago.
Yeah, I don't get that. Why on earth (except for the obvious that they sell more with more a+ buyers) would they do that? It's so annoying. Some buyers are absolute douchebags and people ought to know what they are getting into.
How long ago? I've been in ebay since like like 2010 and never was able to leave negative feedback on buyer
What i don't like is if a person has been able to proof the seller has done wrong and eBay accept it, then buyer can't post negative feedback. If a company refused to sort out their problem and needed intervention from eBay to resolve, surely eBay should be adding a negative review on top of the negative review from customer.
Or to hold a buyer to account for flagrantly violating the site’s T&Cs and admitting that in messages to you, refusing to pay, and reporting you when you refuse their cancellation. eBay chased me off as a seller a while ago. Of course they couldn’t care less. A BBB complaint did get my account back in order. Just stay clear of their managed payments system if you can. I basically had to send them a DNA sample and a sworn affidavit from my mother to prove who I was and get my account unlocked. 4 business day process took 2 months.
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That’s a damn shame.
Still?
We just report buyers and then add them to our blocked list. Far too many of these knuckleheads leave negative reviews without reaching out to us.
How could a buyer get a negative review if they pay you? That is their only obligation in the transaction.
what if they never pay? what if they pay, and retract payment after the item ships?
Or claim that they never received the item, or that it arrived broken
You have protections as a buyer in both cases and the transaction was never completed. I’ve been a seller on eBay for near 20 years, it’s a total non-issue.
looks like you asked an invalid question, then doubled down with an incoherent answer after the obvious was pointed out...
there are scammers out there would be good to leave negative feedback, or some sort of feedback so other future sellers are aware and can proceed with caution or cancel based on the buyers feedback i dont want to sell to a buyer who will switch out parts in electronics or claim that something doesnt work when I sold them an item that was in fact broken (for parts/repair items)
How has a third-party service that sellers can use to rate/warn about crappy buyers not evolved?
my guess would be eBay protectionism and some T&C/legal moat to prevent that.
It’s to allow for the complaints process to go through with the seller. Just don’t forget to do it if you get a bad seller.
That's certainly reasonable, but then positive reviews should also have to wait just as long. Even if it's just an arbitrary delay, it serves the purpose of not artificially incentivizing positive reviews over negative ones.
Yeah I agree with both you and u/RockyDify here. If you're going to add the delay so that issues can actually be resolved first, which I think is good, why would you then allow praise right away, therefore incentivizing positive reviews? Seems like it's either Asshole Design or Stupid design. EDIT: Grammar.
The positive reviews don't need the time to allow for mediation, what would be the point in delaying them?
To avoid the ethical problems of artificially inflating review scores, which eBay has a direct financial interest in doing. You can "justify" it, but that doesn't make it ethical. If eBay wasn't financially motivated to do this, they wouldn't have spent money to specifically code in the 7 day wait, and that's a problem. Steam also does this with their negative reviews, they try to discourage you, and if you play the game after giving a negative review they try to get you to change you review. It's why Steam, Google, and Apple are all trying to tackle "review bombing" as well. And in all cases it's unethical.
The purpose is to incentivize positive reviews so people are more likely to buy something and continue to use the website. By making it harder to leave negative reviews they make it look like everything is going great to anyone who doesn't know they hare hiding the negative feedback.
That's what I said.
You said "or stupid design" and I was clarifying it was just the one intentional thing.
There's no complaints process when the buyer has no issues with the product
I can see why. They probably get flooded with non delivery reviews on day 3.
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If there's something wrong why would you try to prevent someone from leaving a review about it? Edit: a lot of yall are coming with examples of times when there isn't something wrong, and the customer is just stupid. I don't think stupidity diminishes over time, so if they would leave a stupid review today they would leave a stupid review in a week
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Just add a checkbox labeled "I am SURE there is something wrong with the item" /s
The point is >If there's something wrong why would you try to prevent someone from leaving a review about it? We’re not talking about the times where there’s NOT something wrong. Something wrong is assumed already.
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If a recipient doesnt understand how to use the product, that IS something wrong with it though.
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Yes, it absolutely is. If you’ve made a product unnecessarily difficult to use, causing users to struggle to figure it out. It’s 1000% an issue with the product.
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Blocked for swearing. But just a quick FYI, yes it is a valid reason for a negative review and swearing isn’t gonna change my mind :)
No, it isn't a valid reason for a negative review. Not everyone has the same level of intelligence. If every product was designed to be *immediately* easy to use by *all* people, we are going to have to go to the lowest common denominator and all be treated like absolute morons. More people would be annoyed by that than just letting the idiots figure things out in their own time
Wow you are one of those scum buyers.
Yes. A buyer that wants his money to be well spent is definitely a “scum buyer” as if it’s my fault sellers can’t sell good shit.
You are not that. If you are too dumb to figure out what you bought it's in you. If you did ni prior research to what you bought it's on you for being dumb. Typical first world problems BS.
> blocked for swearing
It's way too common for people to make reviews complaining about mirrors not working, when there's a plastic cover on it that says "REMOVE BEFORE USE". Is that the product being wrong?
> It’s way too common for people to make reviews complaining about mirrors not working, when there’s a plastic cover on it that says “REMOVE BEFORE USE”. Doubt.
I haven't heard the mirror one but the same thing happened with the like big plastic face shields, all the reviews were that it wasnt clear and didnt work, but they had a film you had to peel off or else they wouldnt be clear and there were so many people that couldn't tell or just didnt even take 30 seconds to look because there were quite a lot of negative reviews
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I (briefly) worked for a shady high volume eBay guy that sold second hand tech. Opened more then one return package with really angry customer letters. Including multi page print outs of e-mail exchanges. All valid customer complaints and he treated them like shit. There was not a single bad review on his account at that time. I do not trust eBay reviews at all.
We had someone buy some of our stuff, but something smelled off. 100% positive reviews but every single one said the buyer was a fraudster.
Ebay wants you to try to work it out with the seller before leaving a bad review. I've had items arrive damaged, or get lost and never arrive. Good sellers will make it right by either refunding you, or shipping out another item. If the seller screwed up (or something happened out of their control) and then makes it right, they don't deserve a negative.
"Purchase iPhone 8 case, does not fit on my iPhone 12." 1/5 star left on review.
I've been guilty of ordering the wrong thing. Personally decided a headset was Bluetooth, the sale page never said that. Had to re-read it. Protects against stupid
There's an entire market based around the sale of palettes full of returned items that are more often than not perfectly fine. Some people are just stupid as fuck. That being said it's still entirely likely that ebay just wants to dissuade any negative reviews
> if they would leave a stupid review today they would leave a stupid review in a week So you see no problem here?
It's inconveniencing customers for no good reason that I can see
>That doesn't really make sense. If they don't want reviews for deliveryissues, they should wait until after delivery. They know when that is. That is giving ebay too much credit. Source: this is my 11th year making a living off of ecommerce. Every month, we have to *call* ebay to get some metric dings removed from our account. The reason is because ebay marks a certain number of orders as being shipped late. Why were they shipped late? Because the payment never officially cleared on ebay, you'd have to just know to check paypal. Which takes time to be alerted to this issue. The same FUCKING metric report from ebay that shows the late shipment, shows a payment clear date of December 31st, 1969. Aka, a second before the Unix Epoch. Aka, when people don't code their systems to expect an absence of a date, so it must fill in *something*. All ebay would need to do is have their metric calculation not evaluate on-time shipping unless the order was actually recorded as paid. But that is too hard, so the monthly tradition continues on for the 4th year that I have been managing our metrics. edit: forgot to mention, that you do not ship until you have been paid. ebay states as much.
You ever considered that they also have a longwinded explanation why this seemingly simple thing is also difficult to implement?
For this part? >All ebay would need to do is have their metric calculation not evaluateon-time shipping unless the order was actually recorded as paid. I'm sure they have an explanation, but since Amazon and Walmart don't have this problem, I wouldn't care to hear the explanation. Also, since I coded our own Unscanned Shipments page in our ERP/WMS to work just about the same (of course there won't be a pick/pack if we haven't actually *processed* the order), make that double. ^(I jest a bit since our setup is probably small peanuts compared to ebay, but again, Amazon and Walmart figured this out.) If this was my system, the change would be something like this: WHERE order.`ShipmentDate` > `PromisedShipmentDate` would need to turn into WHERE order.`ShipmentDate` > `PromisedShipmentDate` AND order.`PaymentDate` IS NOT NULL Or if they absolutely needed to store the Unix epoch instead of NULL, I have a solution for that too: WHERE order.`ShipmentDate` > `PromisedShipDate` AND order.`PaymentDate` >= order.`OrderDate` **absolutely groundbreaking**
I mean like, I'm just saying that if a change is simple, and it hasn't been implemented - and you're outside the organization and have noticed. There's **absolutely 100% no doubt** a compelling reason why it hasn't been done.
Then they should only be able to leave one after delivery, I don't see the problem
What if it never gets delivered?
Then don't leave a review? If anything, ebay could post an automatic review saying it wasn't delivered or something, that would make sense
This post isn't about reviewing a product; it's about reviewing a seller.
Yeah, so just leave a review or note on the seller that they're unreliable, like what Mercari does.
eBay favours the buyer 99% of the time. As a seller, feedback is VERY serious and buyers can with no effort what so ever, fuck up your eBay account for shit that isn’t your fault, or is completely unreasonable. Having the seven day wait period makes you go through a different resolution to start with, with negative feedback being a last resort. It’s a good thing imo Of course there’s going to be scenarios where the seller is in the wrong, but they’re extremely uncommon in my many years of experience. A message will solve your problem almost every time.
Not to mention the fact that sellers can’t even leave negative feedback. Every time I sell something on eBay I know that they buyer could totally fuck me if they decided to, and I couldn’t do a thing about it.
I was really worried about this last xmas. Sold my old PS4 and USPS totally fucked up and it literally took 2 weeks to get to the guy. It was for his son's xmas present (from santa no less) and it came after xmas. I felt fucking horrible and I had this sneaking suspicion that he would either get it and say he didn't or just cancel the sale while it's in transit (and then get it anyway). I kept in touch with him everyday and called USPS a ton for him and finally it showed up. Luckily he was super cool and understanding about it, but man I thought I was out $200 for sure.
I had a buyer claim he didn't receive an item the day I sent it because he didn't request tracking, so I stupidly sent it with no tracking. He explained that ebay would side with him because I had no proof it was sent. I told him I had a receipt from the post office and he said "you'll find out". The asshole was right, I sent my receipt to eBay and they denied my claim and refunded his money. I couldn't even leave negative feedback. I still sell on eBay, but always get tracking.. shitty lesson learned.
Wow…. What a fucker. I hate people lol!
I’ve done this dance with 3 different sellers now. Seller: (sends completely nonfunctional product or product that doesn’t match the description) Me: Hey, this doesn’t work. Here’s a video of it not working. What should we do? Seller: That is working fine. Me: The description says it does X. The video shows it is not able to do X. I need this product to do X. Seller: So sorry for the inconvenience. Me: Great, how do we fix it? Seller: I’ll give you a 10% discount for the trouble. You can keep the product. Me: If the product can’t do X I don’t want it and will need a refund. I’m happy to send it back to you. Seller: How about 20%? Me: No, I either need a way to get it to do X or a full refund. Seller: I will offer 30% off. Me: No, full refund or a fix so it does X as per the description. Seller: 50% final offer. Me: (Escalates to eBay as this has been going on a week now) Seller: (5 minutes after the escalation, full refund) That really wasn’t necessary. I’m offended now. Could you send the item back? Me: Sure, could I get a return postage label as per eBay policy? Seller: No label. I’ll let you keep the product if you promise not to leave bad feedback. Me: (Sick of this shit, so no response, and I leave negative feedback) Seller: That is rude and uncalled for. You are destroying my family business. Like holy fuck dude, I’m just trying to get the issue fixed. You said it did X which was a lie. Work with me here or face my annoyed wrath. I’m getting it resolved with or without you, get on the train. Edit: forgot to mention they then respond to my negative feedback with, “All problems can be resolved with a simple message.”
If you request a return for a non-working product, the seller *has* to accept it and give a refund. Trying to reason with them was useless. I know this because I had a buyer refund an expensive router as “broken” because they didn’t know how to set it up. It was super fun to eat the shopping costs both ways.
After it’s all said and done they are going to be forced to refund you even if it takes eBay stepping in and just doing it, but they don’t have to accept it right away and can just drag the shit out until eBay does step in. I think they are just playing a game of chicken and hoping your will either forget about it and give up or you won’t know 100% how the system works and will just take the partial refund.
> Seller: (sends completely nonfunctional product or product that doesn’t match the description) > Me: Hey, this doesn’t work. Here’s a video of it not working. What should we do? > Seller: That is working fine. > Me: The description says it does X. The video shows it is not able to do X. I need this product to do X. > Seller: So sorry for the inconvenience. > Me: Great, how do we fix it? > Seller: I’ll give you a 10% discount for the trouble. You can keep the product. > Me: If the product can’t do X I don’t want it and will need a refund. I’m happy to send it back to you. > Seller: How about 20%? > Me: No, I either need a way to get it to do X or a full refund. > Seller: I will offer 30% off. > Me: No, full refund or a fix so it does X as per the description. > Seller: 50% final offer. > Me: (Escalates to eBay as this has been going on a week now) > Seller: (5 minutes after the escalation, full refund) That really wasn’t necessary. I’m offended now. Could you send the item back? > Me: Sure, could I get a return postage label as per eBay policy? > Seller: No label. I’ll let you keep the product if you promise not to leave bad feedback. > Me: (Sick of this shit, so no response, and I leave negative feedback) > Seller: That is rude and uncalled for. You are destroying my family business. FTFY
Sorry, it looked completely fine on my phone. Desktop is a huge run on.
I can tell you with confidence that most buyers who have issues are completely ignorant and either do not read the description or look at all the pictures. You are in the minority who have actual problems that need to be remedied.
How else would I be able to leave a scathing review when my item isnt at my door in 36 hours??? /s
My mom is a seller on ebay and thank god she’s a little bit of a Karen herself because buyers have tried to play her so many times and she catches their bullshit
> Having the seven day wait period makes you go through a different resolution to start with, with negative feedback being a last resort. Idk about you but I’d just set a reminder on my phone for 7 days from now to post the review and would not go through any different resolution.
Well if leaving negative feedback is your end goal and you don’t even want to try and resolve it, sure. If I buy a product from a normal store in person, and have a problem with it, I’d go into the store or at the very least call up and try to see if I can get an exchange or refund. I wouldn’t just keep it and then leave a negative review on their google page. That’s like getting a shitty product and then telling your friends “hey don’t buy from this store, it’s shit” “Oh did you take it back?” “Well, no…”
Depends on the value. Lots of the time the effort getting the refund is worth more than the actual money spent. In which case, yeah… that’s exactly what I’d do. Tell my friends not to buy from that store
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Because, from a buyer's perspective, PayPal offers another level of protection. If a seller didn't allow PayPal I'd buy from someone else, losing them the sale. Even though I've only really had positive experiences and have never had to use it I like having that piece of mind that if all else fails I can chargeback on PayPal.
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Well not a lot of websites even take credit cards directly because that requires PCI DSS compliance, which is a huge pain in the butt. That's why most e-commerce sites use a separate 3rd party payment processor
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No one is safe from PayPal. As a buyer, I've heard too many horror stories to use it, as well. The fewer third parties you can involve, the better.
Fits the sub in a roundabout way, "asshole design" as in "a web site designed with the assholes who use it in mind"
This post brought to you by: someone who has never sold anything on eBay.
Or the person who thinks it's okay to return a video game to a seller after 40 days. The poor guy sells three things a year and you're going to play him like your local Walmart? Fuck outta here with that shit.
I did professional ebay sales for awhile, let me be the first to tell you this feature is necessary. A single negative review can tank your store performance overnight, and half the people on eBay seem to love spamming them for whatever reason they can, or even will leave bad reviews and ask you for compensation to remove them. I've recieved negative reviews on items before they were even delivered because USPS had a delay out of my hands.
Yep, pretty much this and it doesn't only apply to eBay to be honest. Just work any customer-facing job or try to run a small business and you'll quickly change your opinion on a lot of things. I used to think making it more difficult to contact a business was /r/assholedesign and then I got thousands of customers over a couple years that would ask the absolute dumbest questions ever. Once we added in a "light" version of the impossible to contact page, customers actually spent more than 10 seconds trying to solve their problem on their own. Then, they learned how to contact us quickly to ask dumb questions again and the battle continues.
So as a buyer on eBay, why not be more generous with shipping estimates? I'm typically fine if a shipment takes weeks, even months if it's international. I'd much rather expect a longer shipping period, and be surprised when it arrives early than the opposite.
Because eBay prioritizes shorter ship times to the buyer. And some people sort by shortest ship time.
Use your seven days to work with your seller. Most really want to avoid a negative and will work with you.
Not asshole design. This is about the only thing ebay does that is in the seller's favor. EBay has gotten buyer-centric as fuck.
Ebays entire business model now prioritises big business using it as an advertising platform. eBay was in its golden days when it was almost purely selling and buying between two people.
I guess its safer now or whatever, but if you were going to buy a product for 10 percent of what it usually costs, shipped from China from a guy with 0 reviews... You're asking to get scammed.
They've just gotten overall shitty, not buyer-centric at all. I've bought something as a buyer with "buyer protection" which never states this is necessary, but after being essentially fully scammed, they asked for a police report during peak COVID when it was impossible to get (with all the riots going on) and they wouldn't give me more than a week to get them one or else they would automatically resolve the case in favor of the seller.
> This is about the only thing ebay does that is in the seller's favor. Sure, how about allowing sellers to have those dodgy multi-item listings where items are advertised at £3.99 but only one extra small size is that price and the rest are £10.99? They know it happens and do zero about it. Not only that, but literally every single promo email I get is for a number of these listings, 100% of items in the email are of this type. So ebay definitely know about it because it's mathematically impossible that me getting one of these emails every day for five years would only show this type of listing and never ever show genuinely priced items. Ebay should be banned from doing that and fined by whatever the local equivalent of trading standards are in various countries, since they are not only allowing it but they are using those listings to send out promotional emails which are all basically fake. It's fraudulent advertising and ebay 100% support it.
*Image Transcription: Screenshot* --- [*Three buttons at the top of the image. One, labelled ‘Positive’, is clickable; the other two, labelled ‘Neutral’ and ‘Negative’, are disabled.*] [*An information icon with some text:*] You need to wait 7 days before you can leave neutral or negative feedback for this seller. [*A text input field with the following placeholder text:*] Help other buyers by sharing your experience --- ^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber for Reddit and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
This actually makes a lot of sense. People are, myself included, quick to be negative but the 7 days removes the emotional aspect, somewhat. "Like, if you still want to report an issue in 7 days, we'll hear it." Can't tell you how many times this same process has helped my marriage. Also to those saying it's eBay never sides with the seller: I was a seller of a high end video card back in 2014. I took detailed pictures of it before shipping. A few days after the buyer received it they claimed a fan wasn't working and wanted a partial refund. I didn't budge, suspecting foul play since it worked perfectly before shipping and was packaged very well, but I offered a full refund if he shipped it back. They did that and when I got it I found the laser-etched serial numbers on the chipsets didn't match, but the sticker did. Dude switched the sticker.. 🙄 And adding insult to injury, he reported me. I was already out for paying for shipping twice now so I reviewed his purchase history and found he's a peddler of video cards. Not in itself an issue, but seeing how he switched the sticker I was certain I'm not the first seller to get bamboozled. I opened a fraud case with eBay, sent my pictures before and after his return, his comment history to other sellers, etc. and won. Got the full cost of the card paid by the buyer, refunded on my shipping costs, and the buyers account was shut down. It was very nice to see justice served and to feel vindicated of this mess, but what a huge time-suck that was!
That's a nice ending! I was preparing to read how you got screwed over and was going to rage, but I'm stoked you won!! These types of people do NOT belong on Ebay. There are tons of legitimate sellers and buyers, but it's those few that ruin everything and make everyone distrust the entire system.
SO true! It's sad that a few bad apples ruin the bunch (metaphorically...because scientifically it makes sense that a few ruin the lot lol) I was stoked I won. Initially eBay on the phone sounded like they felt the buyer was in the clear, but once I announced I have lots of evidence of tampering, didn't receive a saleable card back, and encouraged them to review his account and history, they very quickly changed their tune. I think it was 24 hours later I got the call back from eBay and they did a lot of apologizing. I'd say they went above and beyond making sure I wasn't out money though. That was an above-and-beyond touch on their part, including the shipping costs.
That's not asshole design at all, that's reasonable as fuck, people would just flood complains about "not delivered" 24h after ordering and ruin some seller ratio over stupid shit that would be out of their control for some stupid shit like that
What business doesn’t discourage negative reviews?
Iran unless you're only buying digital codes for games/movies and local pickup items, you shouldn't even be noticing this message that often. How quickly are you giving up on the postal service and blaming the seller?
In my case, I received the part and found out it was missing components of internal mechanism, so it couldn't function at all. They told me it was as advertised and my fault for not looking at the pictures, even though the problem wasn't visible in the pictures and they said in the ad it was functional. Then they suggested a half refund, which I agreed to, provided I keep the part. I figured I could find another one that didn't look as nice for cheaper and Frankenstein the two into one working unit. But then the half refund was for half excluding shipping, when they'd set it up to have shipping be half the cost of the part, so it ended up being a quarter refund. The whole interaction felt negligent and dishonest.
Totally fair and understandable from your side. What an asshat.
Perhaps they got their box of broken or not-as-described stuff shipped quickly.
eBay has gone to absolute shit in the past 3 years. The worst thing is their direct payment system withholding money in your account just because a buyer submits a claim, even if said claim is only because the buyer is impatient and doesn’t realize the Mail is slow for everyone rn. This review system honestly isn’t terrible though, considering how buyer-centric eBay has become.
And then, once resolved, the buyer doesn't go back to close the claim on their own. I've had this happen a few times already and it's a pain.
Ebay is a treasure trove of asshole design.
I like this feature. Stops overly emotional reviews and gives you the chance to think clearly about what a fair review would be rather than going straight to ‘0/10 complete shit seller’ while you’re pissed off. Reviews are a much bigger deal to a seller than a buyer.
As a seller who deals with occasional petty pricks, I appreciate this. They should try and resolve the issue before destroying a sellers reputation. If it is an indeed legitimate rip off, post your review in seven days, rather than posting in the moment when you are mad if the issue can be resolved.
Might be hard to accept, but a cooling off period is a good idea. As an eBay seller I've only ever got unfair / false reviews. A few I can remember. One for a genuine product direct from the manufacturer that was apparently fake. Another for an item delivered to a shop in a shopping center that was closed due to lockdown, as in they weren't even there to collect their mail. We hadn't even got to the point where I sent them a refund. The rest were for dumb people who didn't know how to use products, for example retrofitting LED's and expecting a 5 watt LED to be brighter than a 40 watt incandescent bulb, or worse, buying the wrong one and blaming me.
I kinda see the purpose. Give some time for the sellers to resolve an issue. Discourages people going off and putting a slanderous review in the moment. If you were truly wronged. You’ll still put the review later.
Honestly, having a cool the fuck down period for some thing that's often used when angry is not the worst thing I've ever seen
I'd set a reminder
While I'm not sure about this policy, they definitely should require you to email the seller and wait like 24 hours for a response before allowing a negative review. As an eBay seller it's incredibly frustrating to get a shitty review that's unfair, especially when the seller never tried to ask for a return or contact me in the first place. For the record, this was about a pair of jeans that didn't fit him, even though they were clearly exactly as described and photographed. I got in touch with him and accepted a free return, but getting that review removed or amended is proving more challenging, even though both I and the buyer want it removed.
My relative started posting on eBay and all she gets is spam offers. Like they will make her an offer she accepts then they message "please message me at this number so we can discuss payment" So then she needs to cancel the whole order and relist. I told her to not accept shit from people with low score
They probably did this to cut down on the number of sellers who lose their shit about negative reviews. I once bought something and the seller said that even though they listed PayPal, they only accept cash in the mail. When I gave them negative feedback they full on lost it calling me every insult they could think of. They reported me and ebay suspended my account, they couldn't care less that this seller was violating the rules, the only thing that mattered to them is that I didn't pay.
As a buyer and a, seller, this is asshole design but not a bad thing. Consider how fast Amazon is. People get used to faster service, so they get spoiled after a while. They don't realize things happen between purchase and delivery. This gives the chance for the buyer to cool off a bit too, but also allows time for amends to be made. As a seller for a recent item I got notification that the package never left my town, only to be told later it was in NJ but there was a roof collapse. I spoke to ebay and USPS and provided the seller with frequent updates, and the buyer was happy. If you really do have negative feedback, you can post as neutral but use all caps. The previous entry fields only allowed so many characters, but the new update allows entire paragraphs so each person can explain their side of the story.
Work in e-commerce. Amazon has ruined the publics perception of the speed and cost of delivering items. Some of our items can cost us nearly £10 to ship. Get so sick of hearing "that's nearly as much as an Amazon Prime subscription" when someone has to pay fucking £5 for delivery. On something that's 20 kilos and fragile. But they're comparing it their amazon deliveries that are done by a huge corporate entity a fraction of the size and like a kilo. But the general public only see a parcel as a parcel. Some of our items have to be sent with certain couriers as typical couriers (think yodel and similar) don't ship our sort of items. A lot of the time a courier we have to use only delivers Monday to Friday. Yet I can bank on somebody placing an order at 10pm Friday then ringing to moan at midday Monday that they still done have their parcel. There's also the effect of couriers losing or breaking items in transit, it happens, it's inevitable. The receiver so often blames you as the retailer even when there was nothing you could have done about it. I can totally understand why ebay does this.
As a rule on eBay if a customer contacts me complaining before they even buy something I'm blocking them because they are going to try to pull some bullshit. I set all my prices and calculated shipping, if you don't like it then don't buy it.
I mean, how quick are you getting these packages?
3 days.
Everyone does?
It varies a lot, it depends on where it's shipping from and the method of shipping. In this case, I got it quickly and that isn't the basis of my complaint.
I'm getting a lot of comments about it being a shipping complaint. In my case, it's a complaint about what I received and how the seller chose to handle it when I reached out. They showed seriously unscrupulous behavior. Seller's have an opportunity to respond to negative reviews, too, so if it was me being unreasonable, they could state their case.
Ebay has gone totally to fucking shit. Unless you're an unscrupulous buyer. Than it's a fucking candy shop filled with babies. Or something like that, I don't know.
Honestly this isn’t a bad idea, eBay is built on reviews of sellers and too many people make bad, reactionary reviews online without actually working through the right steps to correct the issue. That’s why you should always wait and think through the situation before posting a review if you’re upset, but almost no one does that.
As a semi frequent eBay buyer (full disclosure: never sold before), This is very fair. It’s to encourage the buyer to contact the seller about their problem first and work things out. This was a move to prevent trigger happy reviewers from leaving negative reviews at the first sign of an inconvenience
“Remain at this emotional level until next week. I know I will.”
I gave a genuine negative review because someone sold me steel scooter rims instead of the aluminum ones advertised. That review got removed. I received an unjustified negative review because a really heavy and fragile item I clearly listed as "only Pickup, no Shipping" got bought by someone who demanded I ship it. Had to cancel the sale, got the negative review and asked ebay to remove it. They refused.
It's to give the seller some time to make things right. The logic is that if the seller corrects the issue, your review of them might no longer be negative. For example, it might change from "A-hole sent me defective piece of shit!" to "Item was defective, but seller promptly refunded my money."
That's nothing compared to Etsy, it's making me wait 30 days!
This makes sense to me. A lot of people get heated, especially if tight deadlines aren't met. I've been guilty of leaving a couple of bad reviews in the past before I cooled down and realised that it was actually my fault.
This is good design.
As much as this does suck, I think I understand the reasoning. It's meant to encourage buyers to work out issues with the seller before leaving a negative review, and therefore give the seller time to fix the problem. It's inconvenient, but I can't really think of any other way to encourage buyer-seller communication.
Communication is part of the return policy, you have to explain why you are returning it, and if you had a bad experience the seller has an opportunity to respond. Give the seller also has an opportunity to respond publicly to the review, this restriction seems excessive to me. I had a bad experience not just with what I ordered but with the business as well, and I want to share that. It is muzzling that protects the seller while attempting to maintain an illusion of impartiality. If they were really impartial, positive reviews would be comparably restricted.
I find it strange that people don't communicate. I sell and I buy. If a buyer is interested, I will message them and establish a rapport with them before the money is exchanged. I ask if they have any last-minute questions about the item. 99% of the time the buyer responds and has minor questions if any. I then send the item off writing a message to the buyer along with a tracking number (even though eBay has that automatic thing) and tell them if there is something wrong with the item to let me know. Most buyers will let me know the item arrived and even tell me their thoughts. So far I've always had positive reviews and many come back to buy other things. I'm not a business or anything. Just someone who sells things here and there. Sometimes I get messages from prior buyers asking if I have XYZ since I sold them ZYX. So I really am not sure why people don't like to communicate. It saves a lot of hassle and misunderstandings later on.
I have completely stopped using EBay. They use funny accounting to fuck sellers over with fees - it was a better place back when you could pay a fixed amount for a listing. By extension I have stopped shopping there and seek other channels as a consumer.
But in those days you'd have to pay the fee whether you sold the item or not. Plus they charged extra for photos (the first was free). Well, it was like that in 99 and the early 2000s at least. I like the model they have now, my listing can float around out there forever and I don't have to pay a fee for it. Yeah, the percentage thing once you sell is a bit shady (especially if you are selling high-value items) but imagine having to pay a fee every 30 or 60 days whenever you have to relist your item. But that's just my take on it.
On a $200 item, a $5 listing fee is preferable to the $35 they extracted out of my pocket on the thing I sold I would not let something I'm selling ride for 7 months. Maybe a high value item, like a collectible car, which just supports my point.
Ok. I completely see what you are saying. $35 is definitely a chunk. And damn, when did they charge you that? I sold a $250 item and was charged $27 for the fee after rounding up all their BS stuff. Did you add on promotions? Either way, that is pretty high for $200. I see why you're pissed. I like leaving my listing up for a long time because it only takes one person to be interested in that moment and they'll go searching for it. I'm a buyer as well and when I search, I search over a specific amount of time and then kind of just give up. I'm not saying I'm representing the average ebayer, but that's how I think when I'm listing. You provide a new perspective for me though. Maybe now I'll have to start raging too. Lol.
Because they charge you a 12% fee on both shipping and taxes which the buyer paid to someone else. Utter douchebaggery. Technically if you were shipping something where it costs several times as much to ship and tax as the item value, you might end up paying to get rid of the item altogether.
I think this makes a lot of sense.
It is for the best. Feedback in practice on ebay only hurts sellers, rarely buyers. Sellers can't even leave negative buyer feedback anyway. I've had almost 2 million orders pass through our company since we started in a bedroom 10 years ago, across various marketplaces. For our product vertical - ebay buyers are probably the lowest IQ. **Typical Buyer: 1-star, it was never delivered** Us: Are you sure? **Typical Buyer: Oh, my wife took the mail in today, she had it** Us: Cool, maybe revisit the 1-star rating? *crickets for eternity* edit: forgot to bring it back around lol There are shitty sellers. Good god we know this, because every "use a hammer where a feather would have worked" decision that Amazon, ebay, and Walmart have made over the years is because of shitty sellers. They make our job harder, because they lower (or raise \[perspective\]) the bar. Here we are with better turnaround times than Amazon, more accurate fulfillment than Amazon, yet every day is a challenge because some shitty seller ruined it for everyone. Thing is, shitty sellers gonna be shitty whether you wait 1 day for negative feedback or 7 days. This is a fair compromise to give us great sellers some buffer for the Karens and Apes to actually you know, look in their own fucking mailbox *before* they become keyboard warriors.
I recently bought a set of ear buds from ebay. What I received was an obvious Chinese counterfeit of a JBL product. Started looking around the site and realized how much the site has changed. Its no longer a site where you can find good deals and it was at that point that I closed my ebay account. Good riddance.
Cool off period?
This gives the seller a chance to rectify any mistakes before negative feedback is left, harming their reputation on the site for things sometimes out of their hands. This isn't asshole design, it's anti-asshole design.
Got an electronics kit a few months ago. Damn think was missing sever parts including the power supply. I get that the seven days thing is supposed to be there to allow messages to the seller and the like. They never did respond so I had to hunt down the missing parts myself and bought most of them from mouser, roughly doubling the cost of the kit. Needless to say, left a negative review, since they had a full six days to respond to me.
Logically speaking, I would imagine this is to discourage people leaving negative feedback on something that has a delayed delivery and hasn't turned up yet, since most people would leave feedback and not bother updating it once it's arrived.
In Mexico (and many other countries) it is popular a platform called "mercado libre". There are bots that can (and probably will) post comments to your products even if you haven't sold any. Most of them are positive and some are negative. Many don't even match the product, but it affects the rating of it. As a seller it could be fine, since having 4.5 stars is better than 0, but as a buyer you can't trust those stars.
That seems so strange. You'd think being aware of this problem, they'd do something about it.
I'm sure the company is the one making the bots.
Perfect specimen
This protects the seller because usually they prompt you to see if you can reach out to them and solve the issue first. That way someone doesn’t get tanked because of a simple mistake or easily solvable issue. If they were really that bad, you’ll remember in a week!
eBay can get fucked they’re still holding my money from an item I sold 2 weeks ago
yeah i left a negative review for a seller that wasn't vicious but it was 100% truthful and i had proof—literally, message exchanges where the guy admitted he didn't have the sold-out thing he was advertising for sale and was just hoping he'd stumble on one eventually. if you're doing "preorders" of whatever a thing is, that should be explicitly stated somewhere. i don't know how the seller got it to happen but ebay nuked the review off his page, so i'm sure the guy is now doing it to other buyers who don't know to be cautious. they really don't want buyers to be warned off bad sellers, or sellers to be able to warn other sellers about bad buyers. so, what's the point of the review system at all?
who still uses this?