Feedback Part 1 -Ebay (and other sites)

Feedback Part 1

So lets talk about feedback!

Most auction sites and particularly eBay, are built around a reputation system called "feedback". Basically, anyone we trade with can leave us a comment, good, bad or other wise about what they thought of how things went.

Sounds pretty simple, doesn't it? What you wouldn't think of, is what a fuss can come out of what should be such a simple thing. Problem is that while we all can say we don't care about our feedback, we only care about our sales, our customers or our purchases, we do infact take our feedback personally. We just can't help it...can we :-)

Today we will look at feedback from a buyers point of view, starting with how to choose a trading partner from their feedback. All up, to cover this huge topic from all angles, it is going to take a while, so to stop you from falling asleep, lol, we'll break it down into a few blogs :-)

First of all as a buyer, you need to check out your potential trading partner's feedback, so see what sort of trader they are. They will have a mix of positive, neutral and negative comments. It is easy to think that any negative comments at all would mean they are not safe to trade with, right? No, not at all. We need to look at how long they have been trading, how many people they have traded with and what sort of negatives they have.

If for example, they have 4 negatives this month but also 400 positive comments, that is not too bad. If they had 4 negative comments and say 4 positive comments, then that would be a potential concern. Think of it like a shop in a mall. If they only had 8 customers that day and four left really unhappy, you'd have to be crazy to want to deal with them. If though they had 400 or even 1000 people through the doors that day and only 4 weren't happy, that's pretty good odds. You know the old saying, you can't please everyone all of the time.....it still applies for online trading, particularly when you add in the element of inexperienced traders selling along side of experienced retailers.

The next thing to look for, is if the sorts of negatives they have, make any sort of pattern. Do they all say, "I paid and I never received my xxx" or are they all different complaints. In general if there is a problem with one particular area of the sellers service, it will come out via multiple complaints about the same thing.

What sort of person gave the negative? Are they new and expecting too much (i.e. expecting the item to be received from one side of the country to the other in 1 day, etc), or did they use bad language or name calling that would make them seem unreasonable or are their complaints level headed and logical.

Is the problem referred to, something you can look into for yourself? On the very right hand side to of the line where the person left the negative (on eBay feedback anyhow) you will see the item number, if it is still in the eBay system, you can click on it and have a look at the listing yourself. It could be that the person's complaint was that the item was too small, yet when you look at the listing yourself you can see the seller clearly provided dimensions and the buyer had obviously made an error. Normally with a little investigation you can piece together within reason, what happened in the transaction from each person's point of view.

You can also check how the seller responded to the complaint, by checking what feedback they left for the disgruntled buyer. Did they overreact and give the buyer a negative in return for no real reason, or was their response fair and calm? Did it look like the seller was working through the issues with the buyer? Did they resort to name calling, etc?

You can also look at the buyer's feedback and click on the link "Left for others" to see what sort of comments do they normally give out. Are they a serial complainer (we have all met some of those in real life) or was the other feedback they left fair and reasonable, leading you to believe there really was something wrong with that transaction?

By looking through all of this information, you can start to piece together who you are dealing with and how they will react to any problems. Remember problems don't ruin transactions, it's how the people involved deal with them that count.

No feedback score will protect you 100%, but it is a reference point to start with. For larger dollar transactions, always look at paying via credit card or using an escrow service and look for any buyer protection offers each auction sites offers.

Next time, we will look at leaving feedback as a buyer.

See you then,
Amanda
www.helpmyauction.com