Hi, this morning I need to rant about ebay and some of the massive changes they have recently made to make ebay a better experience for their shoppers. They have announced this week that they are ‘backtracking’ on a couple of the changes.

Quite a few sellers have voiced their concerns about the new way that ebay calculates feedback. At the moment,  neutral  feedback is counted as negative! This would, without a doubt, affect the Powerseller status of quite a few big sellers. Ebay are claiming that they are listening to the sellers concerns (yeah, right) and now say that, from August, they are going to recalculate feedback percentages/scores without neutrals and no one will lose Powerseller status due to neutral feedback (Hurrah!)

Another change that rankled with the majority of sellers was the taking away, from sellers, the option to leave negative or neutral feedback for buyers! Ebay claims that some buyers were afraid to leave negative feedback for fear of receiving a retaliatory negative from the seller and some sellers were abusing the system by threatening to leave negatives for buyers (why couldn’t they just hunt the abusers down and ban them?). If you received a negative and felt, you didn’t deserve it or felt it was given in error, it could be resolved by communicating with the buyer/seller and agreeing to mutual feedback withdrawal. Now, seller’s have a choice of leaving a positive or leaving nothing at all.

Ebay will be trying out another new process in October which they claim will ”help you resolve issues with buyers, even after the buyer has left negative feedback” allowing buyers to change feedback if they make a mistake or the seller ‘put’s right’ the ‘wrong’ in a timely and efficient manner. 

The two changes I have covered here are steps in the right direction and for that I applaud ebay. I don’t believe, for one minute, that they are ’listening’ (they don’t want to!). I believe that the recent changes that have been implemented have lost ebay a lot of sellers and therefore a lot revenue from listing fees, final value fees, paypal fees etc.etc. So ebay are forced to try and encourage the lost sellers back.

Finally, I’ve heard and read  recently that ebay are aspiring to become an Amazon like platform for sellers, if they are not careful, that is where their present sellers and store owners will be going!

I feel better now!

Have a great day!

Colin