Buyers LOOSE protection on eBay

Was IT intentional?

Who knows! eBay Management certainly doesn't, as Ms Norrington said "I think it’s a great point of learning for us." So what did we learn today?

At the PeSA/EMCTA Summit in New Orleans last month some very grand statements were made by upper eBay management. Matt Halprin VP of Trust and Safety said

buyers don’t trust the feedback system because they can’t discriminate between great sellers, average sellers or poor sellers. We needed to fix that because eBay is based on trust. If buyers don’t have trust they won’t send money or bid as much on an item

Lorrie Norrington, President, Marketplace Operations, stated

I think it’s obvious that our intent is to put more trust back into the system. We think this new Feedback system does that.

An unfortunate side effect to all of eBay's recent 'improvements' to feedback including the statistically deficient analysis of retaliatory feedback as defined by Brian Burke, Director of Global Feedback Policy last week

We used a really simple definition when determining exactly what constituted retaliatory negative feedback. It was strictly a user who received a negative feedback and subsequently left a negative feedback. That second negative feedback was counted as being retaliatory. There wasn’t anything that we did to go back and look to see if that negative was justified rather we observed how behavior changed in the marketplace over time

will be to reduce the much vaunted Buyer Protection Plan afforded by 'Safe Shopping with Paypal'. In the Answer Center we used to advise buyers never to buy from a seller with a feedback percentage of less than normal human body temperature or 98.6%, by the end of May if may be difficult to even find a seller with a higher percentage than 98.6

eBay decided to count neutral feedback as negative because "it is not positive". When calculating Seller feedback percentages the sum of positives received, minus the total of neutrals and negatives is expressed as a percentage. It is now possible for a low volume seller who has no negative feedback and a few neutrals to fall into restricted selling status with a single additional neutral.

While researching my submission to the ACCC I did a lot of reading in the Paypal User Agreement,see Sec.13.1 and 13.9, and I was not the only one. Sellers in Australia where the 'new & improved' feedback took effect today, pointed out

First, buyers are basically being encouraged to leave Neutrals and Negs on sellers.

So this is the honeymoon period for buyers.

Then their actions start to affect buyers .. in their hip pocket.

Because after Negging and Neuting as many sellers as they can find --- they suddenly discover that their ahem .. E-Pay 'protection' has dramatically reduced from the $3,000 they've been assured they 'may' be entitled to .. to just $400 that they 'may' be entitled to as result of their buying from sellers with less than 98% (the same sellers those buyers smashed down to 98% and under, lol)

Get it now, lol

Ebay has arranged for buyers to slit their own throats. Got to admit, it's funny.

It appears that no less than 56% of the MedVed top 100 PowerSellers on eBay will NOT be eligible for Top Tier Coverage.(auctionbytes blog comment from 'PowerSellerSlaughter08)

Smart buyers should not buy anything worth more than $200 from a seller who has less than 98% positive feedback, eBay & PayPal say so.
Of course most buyers are oblivious to the fact that a seller with less than 50 total feedback or any seller with less than 98% is not a good risk over $200. Is eBay publicizing that? No. Seems strange with all that concern for “excellent buying experience”.

AND here is another Aussie (gotta love these guys)

Well I lasted 4+ years on 99.9% and I was using protection most of the time, Paypal that is.

Now in one foul (very foul that is) swoop, overnight I have dropped to 99% - did someone prick my protection ????

Geez, I lasted longer under the old system than less than 12 hours under the new system. Methinks I need to find a new form of protection, lest I be accused of things that I never begat..

Just to remind my Aussie friends that after the UK tomorrow, we in the USA will get chucked on the dungheap too by the end of the week. Then we will all be in it, together, hock deep.





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