Wired.com has an interesting piece up today about significant changes in eBay's feedback policies and fee structure, an article with a gentle buyer-centric slant. They're doing their due diligence in countering the corporate spin, but based on our own experiences on eBay I'd say they're giving the company's stance on feedback less weight than they should, and they failed to mention another significant change that will have a huge impact on the experience of bidding on the site.
Fee Changes
EBay will be lowering its "insertion fees" by 25 to 50 percent and increasing its "Final Value" fees, which are assessed when items sell. The clear beneficiaries of the site's fee shifts will be casual sellers; assessing fewer fees up front and more when items sell shifts the bargains towards people who list items that don't sell. While an inexperienced eBayer might take an unconsummated listing to be a sign of an item's objective "saleability" on eBay, the many who make their living from the online auction service will tell you that, beyond certain obvious product areas to avoid, most items that go unsold are improperly priced or poorly sold by their placement, timing, or descriptive text. This means that new and casual sellers will have cheaper chances to try out the service, and fail, without feeling burned, which seems like an obvious growth strategy for the company. Quibbles between eBay and its power sellers boil down to whether this adjustment results in greater overall costs or not - buyers estimate a 33% jump in fees, and eBay somewhat disingenuously claims a 40% dip.
Feedback Policy Changes
More interesting to us are the changes to the site's feedback policies, which we feel will have a dramatic impact on the buyer's experience on the site. EBay has always offered rating mechanisms for both buying and selling behavior on all eBay members, but will now virtually eliminate feedback on buying activities. In other words, sellers will no longer be able to post negative or neutral feedback on a buyer's profile if they have a bad experience with a buyer.
While this may on its face seem "imbalanced," it in fact redresses an imbalance that has plagued eBay from its inception. As an eBay spokesman explained to Wired.com:
"We've seen a four-fold increase in unwarranted negative feedback left for buyers in a retaliatory way. Buyers have told us consistently -- that one of the strongest reasons for not using the site is retaliatory feedback," says Lieberman. "If buyers have a bad transaction, that won't drive them away. What does drive them away is retaliatory feedback."We experienced this firsthand, and it did in fact mark the end of our consistent use of eBay. Jenni bought a pair of shoes that were misrepresented as being of a particular brand, and when she received them she discovered they were in fact a cheap knock-off brand. Communicating with the seller did us no good, despite the clearly fraudulent nature of the item's description on eBay, and when we contacted the company's mediation arm we learned that the only way to initiate the process for getting a refund was to pay an up-front, nonrefundable fee of $25 - more than half of what we had paid for the item.
Our only recourse was to leave negative feedback on the seller's profile, describing our problem; the seller retaliated by leaving negative feedback on our own profile, after explicitly threatening us with it if we filed our own negative review. What struck me most about that situation was that the seller, who had feedback from hundreds of buyers, had the same "A++++" style feedback in droves, so our one complaint, which we considered a serious breach of ethics, had virtually no impact on his standing; we, in contrast, rarely sold on eBay and had only purchased a handful of items, so the negative feedback rating knocked our satisfaction rating down by more than 10%. This experience explained a lot about that "100% positive" rating that so many power sellers have; the costs of crossing them, by a dissatisfied buyer, may have simply been too great. It will be interesting to see how seller feedback ratings shift after the new policies are implemented.
The company says it will be introducing alternative methods for buyers to protect themselves from deadbeat bidders who bid up prices and then don't follow through with payment when they win, a leading cause of seller dissatisfaction.
Discouraging Bait-and-Switch Seller Pricing
Perhaps the single most significant change eBay is implementing may fix something that had been laughably broken on the site for a long, long time - the use of high shipping fees to allow ridiculously low sale prices that have allowed sellers to game the eBay search engine for years. The situation was so bad that it could be almost impossible to compete with honest listings in some areas, as they were buried under an avalance of "99-cent" items with exorbitant shipping fees to make up the difference.
We noticed a while back on one of our rare visits to the site that eBay was finally listing shipping charges in its search results, but still didn't combine them with sale or bid prices into a "total price" that would allow for legitimate price ranking. EBay now says it will take new steps to favor "honest" pricing in its display of listings. We look forward to seeing how they implement it.
Further Reading
- eBay's press release about the changes
- Wired.com's "seller backlash" article
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