I am extremely frustrated with the new ebay philosophy on feedback. They state feedback is all about the "buyer's experience". I've been selling for 24 years and received my first 2 negative feedback within the last few days. The first one the customer used profanity in the feedback and complained about receiving nosey feedback questions. As you know, we as sellers have nothing to do with feedback questions. Ebay sends those reminders to buyers. Ebay removed the wording on the feedback, however, they said they couldn't remove the negative mark. So now all it shows is two dotted lines and the negative feedback.
The most recent negative feedback was a product review. The buyer said "Very difficult to set up. No rain fly. Is roomy and good construction.". Once again, it had nothing to do with my listing, my communication, shipping charges or times. It had to do with the product that was completely sealed.
As most know, Amazon separates seller feedback from product feedback, where ebay combines them all together. In regards to both feedbacks, the agents I spoke with on the phone agreed that they weren't fair to me and should be removed, however, it was out of their hands and there is a new "feedback team" that takes care of that. It's very sad that there's no longer a one on one connection where you can discuss the issue and ebay makes the proper decision. Now everything is based on the buyer's experience and the buyer could be happy on 99 items out of 100, but that one negative thing they feel, results in negative feedback and an increased fee on the sellers side.
It's just getting tougher and tougher to sell on ebay because so many negative things are happening that are out of our control. If they are going to be that worried about the buyer's experience, then they need to bring back the ability for sellers to rate buyers. It's extremely unfair that they can rate us, but we can't rate them. Ebay says it's ok to have negative feedback and that most buyer's understand, but tell me how you feel about something on Amazon or ebay when you see a negative feedback.. You immediately think the seller did something wrong. Well in the case of both of these negative feedbacks on my account and with confirmation from ebay that I did nothing wrong, then why am I getting penalized??
