(Accidentily hit Post...)
I don't agree with you on the feedback system weeding out bad sellers, because bad buyers can use that to try to blackmail a seller, or as revenge if they don't get their own way. While I would never do this, I l know others have and would. Just as sellers would post false negs for buyers in response to an honest neg.
When I started buying here, it was all buyers had. Yeah, there was some nonsense going on. But if you studied it a bit... looked at the feedback left and recieved of both parties to a bad transaction... for all their bad transactions... you could tell pretty quick which one that left the neg. was legit and which one was the problem. Seller has 30 neg.s for counterfeit item, and left 30 negs. for "claimed counterfeit, scamming buyer!", but most of the buyers had few if any neg.s claiming this from other sellers - plus, you could see the listing! Sure enough, the seller sold a counterfeit coin, there it is!
I'm not suggesting buyers should have been forever sifting through that stuff, eBay should have been sifting through that stuff, and should have eliminated the users committing fraud - on either side of transactions. Once they had the ability to prevent the user from reappearing on another ID, it would have worked. But they gave up on it before then, and they never did enough of it anyhow. And high volume sellers with account managers were scamming away and delivering poor service with impunity, they never got sanctioned for anything.
i've realized lately that sellers are getting penalized for buyer's remorse returns, or in other words, any returns, with lowered visibility and sales. If the buyer doesn't read the listing, and returns, that is not the seller's fault. If the buyer doesn't know that what they bought is not what they need, that is not the seller's fault.
Now there's a whole multitude of problems. Buyers that aren't shown the description, buyers that went with the eBay Catalog info. (that was in error, or was for the wrong product), buyers who use the Zappos model and buy 10 pairs of shoes at once with every intention of returning 9 of them because of "free" return shipping, buyers who would rather just buy and see if it's what they needed rather than making sure it is what they needed before buying (also encouraged by "free" returns), buyers who bought the completely wrong item (thought they were buying something else) because of the new "buy box" page issues... none of that is the seller's fault.
Which leads us to the new 30 Day Free Returns thing. I think that's going to be an epic trainwreck. Not just on the seller side (which has been discussed here quite a bit), but on the buyer side. Sure, that sounds good to buyers, but eBay attempted to fix the "faulty return" problem with a partial refund provision. Buyers are going to hit the roof, because the "free" return ended up costing them money. Buyers are going to distrust the MBG program, because it's included in that, so whatever benefit the MBG has provided (not without great pain to sellers) will be undercut. And eliminating the re-stocking fee is supposedly going to end false SNADs to avoid the fee, but the fee was at least visible to the buyer at the time of purchase. Sellers - at eBay's direction and with eBay's blessing - are going to use the partial refund to replace the re-stocking fee (open box return, missing tags, etc.). But buyers will not know it's coming, they'll scream bloody murder, and probably file at PayPal to recoup the rest of the payment (even though they're supposed to appeal to eBay), then eBay and PayPal will start Sgt. Schultz-ing buyers. Sellers are conditioned to this sort of treatment by eBay/PayPal by now, but it's going to be a total shock to buyers.
Like I said, I hope I'm wrong... but this has the makings of the mother of all bad ideas written all over it. In just a few days now, we shall see.
The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves.
