Ebay Feedback: Let me know your thoughts

xbaggypants

Like many, I am interested in reputation systems, and eBay has built the largest public reputation system. Many have noted how feedback on eBay is overwhelmingly positive — a 97% positive rating would be a reason to be wary of a seller.

It’s also noted that people do this because they are scared of revenge feedback — I give you a negative, you do it back to me. One would think that since the buyer’s only real duty is to send the money that the seller should provide positive feedback immediately upon receipt of that money, but they don’t.

Some fixes have been proposed, including:

* letting you see the count of total auctions the party has been buyer or seller in, so you can see how many resulted in no feedback at all. Right now only eBay knows how large that number is.
* double-blind feedback. That is to say that feedback is not revealed until both parties have entered it, or if only one party enters it, after the feedback period has expired.
* Marking revenge feedback, ie. putting a mark next to negatives that were a response to an outgoing negative.

Thus you could have very low fear of revenge feedback and there would be no argument about who should go first.

This idea’s fairly obvious, so like many other obvious ideas about eBay one wonders if eBay doesn’t feel some benefit to themselves from not doing it, though it’s hard to see. I’m also curious as to why eBay doesn’t offer a “going, going, gone” auction where the auction closes only after 5 minutes with no bidding. That seems to be in the interests of sellers (and eBay which gets a cut of the selling price) and it’s certainly not something they are unaware of.

The only proposition I’ve heard is that eBay has decided that there is a positive value to itself (and possibly sellers) from bid-sniping, the process of bidding preemptively in the last minute of an auction to not give other live bidders (who didn’t use the automatic rebidder) a chance to come in with more. The only way this could be good woudl be if Snipers deliberately overbid in order to trump anything. Any research or thoughts on this? It may also be the case that the sniped auctions are more “fun,” or more of a contest. And finally having fixed closing times does facilitate participating in multiple auctions for the same thing.

Thanks,
Ryan

jimq112

I never cared if they sent me a neg back, if they earned it they got it. They had to really screw with me to get a neg though.

I had a 98.2 positive rating, some of the penny card sellers think that's horrible but there were over 300 cars/trucks in that 98.2 and that's hard to do. All my negs were retaliatory.

I would love to see a separate category for retaliatory but that would only increase the negs left. If there's a chance you'll neg me then I neg you first and yours would be retaliatory.

The blind feedback is a good idea.

It should be that if you get a non-paying bidder credit then you can have the feedback removed without a trace. If I don't pay you and I don't have a good enough reason to not get an unpaid item strike I shouldn't have the right to neg you.

I don't like the going going gone idea, most of the fun for me as buyer is the thrill of last second winning. As a seller I love to watch an auction go from 50 bucks to 700 in a minute or 2.

As it is I'm NARU and don't plan on coming back till ebay shows that they care a little about more than fees.

Good topic!

bsavage

I think your first and third ideas are really good. I do see a problem with the second one, though. This gives a seller that has "turned bad" (from getting hijacked or whatever) a long time to really do some damage. No one is going to see any feedback from these guys because they are probably never going to leave any feedback at all, so no one is ever going to see the negatives that people have left until the time has expire (30 or 60 days, I think). So, they can just keeping running bad auctions.

Does this make sense, or am I just rambling?

xbaggypants

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Does this make sense, or am I just rambling? >>



Makes perfect sense, I didn't think about that.

sagard

I don't think Ebay will ever offer a "going, going, gone" type of service. Right now they claim only to be a market place and that is why they claim no responsibility for the thieves who exploit Ebay/consumers. If they were to offer a true auction service some responsibility for those auctions may be required.

Treetop

Ryan,

Back on January 19, 2004 I was ready a web page called Brians Ideas.

Ring-a-ding-ding-a-ling???