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Giving and Receiving Feedback

The major fraud prevention mechanism for eBay users is its feedback system. After every transaction both the buyer and seller have the option of rating each other. They can give a "positive", "negative", or "neutral" rating and leave a short comment. So if a buyer has problems, he can rate the seller "negative" and leave a comment such as "never received product". Learning the system and examining a seller's feedback history is a buyer's best protection.  Once you start getting Feedback, your profile will look like this:

The feedback system can protect sellers as well as buyers; a seller can reject a bid from a potential buyer if the buyer's feedback rating isn't to the seller's liking.

Weaknesses of the feedback system include:

• Small and large transactions carry the same weight in the feedback summary.

• A user may be reluctant to leave honest feedback out of fear of negative retaliatory feedback (including "negative" in retaliation for "neutral").

• The receiver of a negative feedback is allotted only 80 characters to type a response in their defense, making a thorough rebuttal extremely difficult to write.

• eBay's policies make it nearly impossible to remove unfair or retaliatory feedback.

• When a user feels that a seller or buyer has been dishonest, a dispute can be filed with eBay. An eBay account (whether seller, buyer or both) may be canceled if there are too many complaints against the account holder. Of course, all laws still apply and legal action may also be possible.  (Wikipedia)

The seller should give feedback as soon as possible after receiving payment. The buyer should give feedback as soon as possible after receiving (and inspecting) the item.

Both parties should use care when giving feedback. If the deal was not your most pleasant but nothing crooked occurred, you can probably find something nice to say. If not, you can simply say thanks for the item in your feedback.

When there is a problem with an item when you receive it, don't jump in and give negative feedback right away. If the item seems incorrect, read the description again first. We sometimes only see what we want to see when reading a description. If you think there really is a problem, ask the seller questions before giving negative or even neutral feedback.

In fact, If things still cannot be resolved to your satisfaction, negative feedback may be necessary. Sometimes giving negative feedback is the polite thing to do - if you are sure you have found a "slimy" seller that others should be aware of, not giving others any warning is not very polite.  (eBay Auction Secrets)

eBay will prompt you your trading partner to give feedback via e-mail.  This is not something to overlook, and it is expected that both the buyer and the seller will give feedback to each other.

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