There are no shortage of sellers on ebay.

There are two types of ebayers in this world, those that use it all the time for everything, and those who use it once and a while when it is the only place where they can find what they are looking for.

I used to fall squarely in the latter camp.  I opened my eBay account in 2003.  From 2003 until August of 2008 I bought and sold a grand total of 8 items through eBay.  During those 5 years I used eBay so seldom that every time I bought or sold something I had to stumble through the interface re-figuring out how to buy and sell stuff there.

By October of 2008 when I was ready to start selling my Locking Mailboxes  in earnest, I decided to start with eBay.  Why eBay?  I thought the learning curve would be the least steep of all the main online marketing methods (Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimization, etc).  Also, relative to the sales price of a mailbox the listing fee was almost negligible.  That means that I didn't have to pay any significant fees unless I sold a mailbox.

Oh yeah, and my website still wasn't finished because my lame-ass web developer dropped off the face of the earth.

So I jumped in to eBay with both feet!  I opened my ebay store, talked to other ebayers, read tons of blog posts, read everything I could on eBay, and got my listings all ready.

While I was doing all of this research, the one thing that everybody was talking about were the eBay policy changes made in early 2008.  In early 2008 eBay wasn't even on my radar so even though I had heard of some changes, I didn't really know anything about them or what they meant. However, to the eBay faithful, these changes were massive, earth-shaking, cataclysmic changes.

One change was allowing fixed price listings to last for 30 days for 35 cents.  Most ebayers thought this was a pretty positive change.  EBay was obviously trying to encourage more fixed price listings.  Everyone concluded eBay was doing this to stop losing market share to Amazon.com.

What was the biggest, heavy-duty cataclysmic change?  EBay stopped allowing sellers to leave negative feedback for buyers.  Sellers could leave positive feedback, or no feedback at all.  Well, this upset sellers to no end.  Where was the justice?  How could they protect themselves against vindictive buyers?  Blogs and articles were inundated with unhappy sellers complaining about how unfair this new feedback policy was.

Even to this day whenever WebProNews does an article on ebay you can count on hundreds of vitriolic comments from disgruntled current and former eBay sellers.

This all happened before I started seriously selling on eBay.  During my research I read so many blogs and comments saying what a piece of crap eBay had become because of this new policy that I seriously considered not selling on eBay.

But I decided to try it anyway (better than passing out flyers door to door...right?)  So, now having 6 months of experience in the eBay trenches I have somethin' to say about the new e-bay feedback policy:  It's not actually that bad!  As a matter of fact, I think the changes are actually a good thing.  I think there needs to be some modifications to the current feedback policy but overall, eBay is better for the changes.

Why?  Before, the sellers had much more power than the buyers.  On eBay, a negative feedback rating is bad.  Really bad.  Ebayers (myself included) find themselves obsessing about their rating, trying to make sure they don't get negative feedback.  Before the changes, there was always the possibility that a seller could give a crappy customer service experience to the buyer.  This happened a lot.  Sellers would mis-represent items, buyers would buy it, and then realize they were lied to.  When they tried to get a refund from the seller, unscrupulous sellers refused.  When the buyer threatened to leave a negative feedback rating, then the seller would threaten to retaliate with a negative feedback rating of their own to the buyer.  What was a respectable, honest eBay buyer to do in this situation?  For most smaller purchases buyers just left it alone and moved on rather than risk getting a negative feedback even though they would have been totally justified in giving the buyer negative feedback.

On bigger purchases buyers would complain to eBay.  Eventually unscrupulous sellers would be banned.  But this didn't help the buyer get their money back.  Other sellers took forever to ship items.  What if items arrived damaged in shipping?  Again, getting unscrupulous sellers to perform without threat of retaliatory feedback from that seller was next to impossible.

Sellers had much more power than the buyers because of the way eBay was originally set up.  It was set up for buyers to pay first for an item, then have the seller ship the item.  However, both buyers and sellers had equal power to leave feedback.  If the power of leaving negative feedback is equal for both parties, then the party who gets the money first and then has to perform has much more power over the party that sends the money and waits and hopes that the seller performs as advertised.

Obviously, in it's initial incarnation as an auction only site it would be impossible for eBay to set it up any other way.  There is only one item in any given auction and several bidders so there would be no way to have the bidders get the item first and then pay for it.  But, for the sake of this discussion lets do a thought experiment.  In our thought experiment lets pretend that it was possible to make it so that the seller had to send the item to the buyer first and then the buyer would send the money.  If both had equal power to leave negative feedback then the seller would send the item to the buyer and then the buyer could refuse to pay and still keep the item.  If the seller threatened to leave negative feedback, then the buyer could threaten to retaliate.  In this hypothetical experiment all the power would rest with the buyer.  Sounds ridiculous, right?

This is exactly the situation that buyers have been in all along.  They had to pay first without ever seeing the item.  If the item was misrepresented and the seller was being a jerk about it, the buyer would have to think long and hard to decide if leaving negative feedback was worth it for fear of retaliatory feedback from the dishonest seller.  As often as not, honest buyers did not leave negative feedback for dishonest sellers because the buyers determined that indeed, the hit to their feedback profile was not worth it.

By changing the feedback policy, eBay went a long way to leveling the playing field.  Despite howls of protest from sellers, this change finally equalized the advantage that sellers had all along in getting the money before having to deliver the goods, yet having equal feedback power.

Having little experience on eBay before last November, the effect on me of reading all of these negative blogs and comments about eBay was for me to make a resolution:  If I was going to sell on eBay, I had to offer insanely great customer service to avoid getting negative feedback.  So that is what I did.  I carefully inspected all of my mailboxes before shipping them to make sure they were perfect.  When people e-mailed me with questions, I e-mailed them back usually within 2 hours.  When they called my 800 number, I answered.  If they had any questions after the sale I was all over it.

I remember one experience early on when a mailbox I shipped to an eBay customer in CA arrived damaged.   I was freaked out because it was like the 4th or 5th mailbox I had ever sent by FedEx Ground.  I was so afraid of his negative feedback power that I offered to send him a full refund including shipping charges, or a new mailbox with me paying the shipping.  He opted for the new mailbox.  I sent it out the very next day.  Luckily I had purchased shipping insurance from FedEx and they reimbursed me for the damaged mailbox and the lost shipping.  Now, I would like to think that I would have given him that great of customer service anyway, but fear of negative feedback ensured that I did.

Now that I have this mentality as a seller, it makes me a lot more confident as a buyer.  Now I am squarely in the camp of people who buy everything on eBay.  When I need something, eBay is the first place I look, and I get great customer service from the sellers there.

When eBay first made the policy announcement, disgruntled sellers all predicted the speedy demise of eBay.  But they were wrong.  There are no shortage of sellers on eBay.  Go to any category and there are lots of sellers selling tons of items.  There are plenty of sellers, just less crappy ones now.

I do have some criticisms of the new policy.  When eBay first rolled it out they compared it to a retail store that a customer might shop at.  Customers service is a one way street at retail stores.  Basically the 'customer is always right' concept makes it so that customers can complain all they want, bring their items back and exchange them get refunds, etc. all without the store being able to retaliate against the customer.  You would never find a manager at Wal-Mart going to a customer's home after work to complain that he/she was a crappy customer.  That is what eBay was saying the old feedback policy was akin to.

This comparison by eBay is a stretch.  Even now, with the power that buyers have to go back to retail stores and return stuff, and complain to managers etc., buyers still do not have the right to go spray paint negative feedback on the front wall of the Wal-Mart.  This is essentially what a buyer can do to a seller on eBay now by leaving the seller negative feedback with no fear of retaliation by the buyer.

The new feedback policy changes the balance of power from very heavily in the sellers favor, now to slightly in the buyer's favor.  Now you could have unreasonable buyers who threaten to leave you negative feedback if you do not refund some of their money, etc.  I have sold probably 70 mailboxes on eBay so far and I have never run into a buyer like this, but I have heard that they're out there (all of my customers on eBay have been very gracious so far).

If eBay made one more change to the feedback policy then I think it would balance out the slight advantage that buyers now have.  I propose that eBay allow a system for sellers to petition to remove negative feedback that they felt was left vindictively by a buyer.  Currently negative feedback can be removed if it can be proved that the buyer was trying to extort money from the seller or if the buyer is using abusive language.  However, the seller would have to provide proof (threatening e-mails, bad language in e-mails, etc.)  If the extortion was made over the phone then there would be no 'paper' trail of the extortion or inappropriate language. 

EBay needs a system to remove negative feedback that is left vindictively but where the seller does not have proof that the feed back was left vindictively.  I propose that sellers who felt they've been wronged by buyers could petition to have the feedback removed.  The problem with this is that every seller on eBay would petition every negative feedback and it would bog the system down.  To counteract this eBay could charge the seller a fee to review the transaction.  Say $150.00.  Then eBay could form a 3 person panel.  Two ebayers and one eBay employee would form the panel and review the transaction.  Each of the reviewers could get $50.00 for their trouble and eBay could keep the other $50.00 to offset the cost of the employee review.  The panel could review all of the evidence, they could call or e-mail the buyer and the seller and get everyone's side of the story, and then make a judgement.  The ruling of the panel would stand.

Currently, a buyer who leaves negative feedback has the ability to go in and change it to positive if the seller makes the buyer happy. 

With my brilliant modification to the eBay feedback system a seller could determine exactly how much a negative feedback rating was worth.  If it was worth less than $150.00 then they could choose not to petition the rating and just leave it alone.  If the seller knew in his/her heart of hearts that the negative feedback was justified, then they would not petition to have it removed, rather they would do whatever it took to make the customer happy.  In most cases, this would cost less than $150.00 since the vast majority of things that sell on eBay sell for less than $150.00.  If the seller determined that the negative feedback was going to cost them more than $150.00 in lost sales, and they were just absolutely convinced that they were wronged by the buyer, then they could choose the petition option.

Sellers are outraged that buyers might be able to vindictively and unilaterally leave negative feedback.  With my proposal, it takes the outrage out of equation and makes it a purely financial proposition.  The seller would simply have to determine the value of negative feedback, and then act accordingly.

When you boil it down to strictly a financial proposition and take the emotion out if, most rational people would just do whatever it took to make the buyer change the feedback from negative to positive even if that means basically bribing a crappy buyer.  Hey, that's basically what Nordstrom does, right?  They'll take back anything, in any condition regardless of length of time between the purchase and the return.  They have decided that their reputation is worth more that what it costs to deal with a handful of unreasonable customers.  On eBay, each seller has to make that same determination.  In my case, I have determined that my reputation is the most important thing and that I will do virtually anything necessary to make my customers happy.  Wait a second....I think this is what eBay intended to have happen!  In at least one case (mine) it is working!

I was not active in eBay before the change, so I don't know the overall customer service levels of sellers then.  I do know that I have been extremely happy with the customer service levels of sellers that I buy stuff from now on eBay.