In fact, the FTC Consumer Review Fairness/Protection Act is clear in that it does not provide legal protection for consumer reviews that contain comments about the products, services or behavior of parties who are not involved in the sales contract. In most cases, the only parties to the contract are the buyer and seller.
The obvious reason for this is that a seller does not have any control over the actions of a third party such as a carrier. That is true regardless whether the seller chose the carrier or not, and, although it is irrelevant anyway, one cannot assume that the seller chose the carrier in this or any case, as the seller may very well have offered various shipping and/or carrier options for buyers to choose.
In this scenario, the consumer has left a review, in essence, concerning the services of a third party (the shipping carrier's). Therefore the FTC act does not regard it as "covered communication",.
eBay does have the right to remove any feedback which is not a covered communication under the FTC act or is clearly false or misleading. Don't let them convince you otherwise.
This is clearly unfair, as the deficiency of the shipping carrier should not reflect poorly on the seller. In terms of shipping, the seller can only be held accountable for having shipped the product out on time or not.
