posted on September 18, 2001 11:14:15 AM
I've been reading these boards for more than a year now and have seen probably hundreds of threads started about fraud by either the seller or the buyer.
Many of the sellers and some of the buyers involved have hundreds of positive feedbacks meaning to me that they complete the majority of their transactions successfully so my question is: Do these people target random transactions for fraud or are the majority of these just mis-understandings?
posted on September 18, 2001 11:34:50 AM
GOOD question! In my NOT so humble opinion, quite often the problem arises WHEN a problem arises! As a buyer-only, into my 4th year of ebay, I depend heavily on feedback info. Unfortunately, when you run across those multitudnous seller feedbacks, you are sentenced to spend untold time trying to discover what the negs and neutrals mean! Ebay can't (won't?) seem to find a way for us to pull up JUST the neutral & negs so we can be INFORMED before we bid. I am tending to just pass on auctions where "bad" feedback exceeds 2% of a sellers closed auctions.
While negs are not necessarily bad....they can tell us how a seller tends to react IF a problem occurs with a transaction! At least then you are going in with your eyes open.
Two months ago, I received my first neg from a high volume seller as a retailtory to my neutral for poor communication and extremely slow shipping. After taking 30 minutes to pull up the more than 50 other negs & neutrals this seller had accumulated over the past year, it turns out that she goes absolutely beserk when anyone dares post anything but a positive and proceeds to issue retailitory negs followed up with VERY nasty emails. It would have been nice to be able to know this before you bid without devoting so much time to research!
Course....the other answer to your question could be: Some of us buyers might be a fry or two short of a happy meal when leaving feedback on a "less-than-perfect" deal!
posted on September 18, 2001 11:39:18 AM
I use the feedback widget at vrane to separate out the negs and neutrals from the positives. It's a free tool located at
