Negative Feedback

[bosshall41]

Why are you punished for a full year when a buyer decides to leave a negative or neutral feedback. It severely affects your sales. I've been an eBay seller for over 20 years, and in that time have received approximately 5 unwarranted feedbacks. It stays on your record for 1 year regardless of your prior sales of an item. As an example I had one item that I sold 168 times before a buyer left a negative feedback about the item. Does eBay think that is fair to the seller?               

[releasethekraken_1]

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@bosshall41 wrote:

Why are you punished for a full year when a buyer decides to leave a negative or neutral feedback. It severely affects your sales. I've been an eBay seller for over 20 years, and in that time have received approximately 5 unwarranted feedbacks. It stays on your record for 1 year regardless of your prior sales of an item. As an example I had one item that I sold 168 times before a buyer left a negative feedback about the item. Does eBay think that is fair to the seller?               

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Obviously yes, they do, or they would change the policy. Negatives used to count forever in your %; eBay realized that was unfair, and reduced it to 1 year, which seems eminently fair to me.

How long do you think it should affect your %?

[nocoolnamejane]

I feel like one year is reasonable, no? As @releasethekraken_1 pointed out, they used to be there FOREVER.

I feel like one year is a good middle ground between small and large sellers because of the fact that the latter can see the neg pushed down and their percentage raised back up quicker than the former.

If negative feedback only affected an account for one month, for example, what would be the purpose at all?

[donsdetour]

Most likely that is not the cause of decreased sales. Just saying.

[jayjaspersgarage]

All I can say is you are in a technical selling area.   Confusion is bound to occur once in a while so you best make the effort to satisfy the one in a thousand customer who wants a refund or whatever.

I hope you adjust your $12.56 shipping rate way down for domestic customers.

[inhawaii]

When i was a newbie, i used to ask that question.

I've sold 827 of these and nobody else had a problem or complaint.  Then you get 1 moron who complains.

Does ebay take that in to account?  That you sold so many others without a problem or complaint?

The answer is NO.  They do not take that i to account.  Sorry.

Good luck and stay safe!

[mamabeardsley]

I also think a year is too long for negative feedback to remain. It is especially unfair when a buyer leaves a negative without ever contacting you to seek a resolution. I have also had negative feedback left that the buyers did not even know they had done. (I guess they thought it was a customer satisfaction survey or something). I offer free returns, so if a customer is unhappy, they can simply return an item, thus making negative feedback unnecessary; punishing a seller for a year is unjust.

[motor-wagen]

The bottom line is that eBay doesn't care about its sellers.  At all.  It didn't used to be this way, I've been using eBay for 20 years, about 3 years ago it started to seriously go down hill.  

Around that time there was an update on the app, plenty of people had problems with preset setting being changed when listings automatically renewed along with several other listing issues, myself included.  Unknown to me, a bunch of my listings changed from 3 days handling to 1 day, which then became defects when I shipped them out "late" , which then effected my account and I was put on restrictions.  My listings were reduced from about 650 to a maximum of 250 listings per month for 90 days.  I couldn't renew and save them, and at the 90 day mark they were deleted.  Countless hours of time spent creating those listing wasted. The eBay rep said that there was nothing they could do and that I would have to try to provide better service for my buyers in the future.  90 days of income reduced from thousands of dollars a month to hundreds made me reconsider selling on eBay as a way to make a living.