When there is no fear of retribution

Since I already had one e-bay post today…

Ebay used to be held up as the golden standard for online reputation engines.  Because of thier system you believed that buyers could trust sellers and vice versa. Ebay recently decided to make the reputation rather one sided by not allowing sellers to leave feedback on buyers.

Now, my feedback is rather anecdotal with limited data, but in the 10 years I’ve been using ebay I’ve never had a buyer fail to pay up… until this month. And now I’ve had two in the month. This is putting a serious delay in my goal to clear junk out of my house. Is this related to a lack of retribution for the behavior?

 

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By: On: March 11, 2008
Categories: Social
Tags: , ,
  • http://richmercer.com/ Rich Mercer

    I’ll be interested to see how this one plays out. I am on the other side. I paid $500 for a cell phone (within 1 minute of the auction ending) and have 1 negative feedback from it. Why? Because after 20 emails and 3 weeks of the item not arriving, the seller had not responded, so I filed a dispute. When the dispute was settled in my favor, and I receieved $100 from Paypal, I left him negative feedback, as I should have, right? Well he responded in kind, leaving me with a less than perfect feedback rating, so was it really that good to begin with? :)

    I was actually really pleased when I heard that they were stopping this from happening to people in the future. All that it meant was that people were scared to leave negative feedback for sellers, even if deserved, in fear of receiving a negative comment themselves.

  • http://evolvingwe.com josh ledgard

    Clearly I don’t mind that I can’t leave feedback about buyers in the traditional sense… but what’s irksome is that in the case that I win the dispute… nothing happens to the buyers. This essentially means, right now, you could disrupt the whole system by just bidding 1 million dollars for everything without fear of repudiation.