eBay Hacks, 2nd Edition

Withhold Feedback

Know when to hold ‘em, and know when to leave ‘em.

The trouble with the global village is all the global village idiots.

—Paul Ginsparg

The biggest flaw (and in some ways, the biggest strength) of eBay’s feedback system is the risk of retaliation. You leave negative or neutral feedback for someone, and they will—without considering the circumstances or who’s at fault—do the same for you. That is the fear, and that is the reason why many people simply let problems slide.

But the risk of retaliation also reminds people that they are responsible for their own words; if there were no consequences, people would leave negative feedback with abandon, and we’d have even more problems on our hands.

I won’t deny that the risks sometimes outweigh the gains. Sometimes a bidder has a seemingly legitimate reason for not paying. Perhaps a seller is inexperienced, and while a particular transaction might not have gone very smoothly, it wasn’t due to any malice by the seller. Do these people necessarily deserve blemishes on their records? Perhaps not, but they don’t necessarily deserve praise, either. In other words, sometimes the best move is no move at all.

Who Goes First

Often the fear of retaliation can work to your advantage. Say you’re a seller, and someone has just purchased an item from you. The bidder pays in full, and you go ahead and reward the bidder with positive feedback. But when the bidder receives the item, he’s not happy. Since you’ve already played your hand, the bidder then feels free to file negative feedback, or simply threatens to do so.

On the other hand, if you withhold feedback, the bidder will be much more likely to pursue a diplomatic solution to any problems that come up. Instead of leaving negative feedback, the bidder might politely request a refund, or, better yet, might even go away and not bother you at all.

For this reason, a wise seller will usually wait until the customer has left positive feedback, or at least wait for confirmation that the item has been received and the buyer is happy.

But what about the buyer? If an otherwise happy bidder leaves positive feedback for the seller, isn’t there still risk of negative feedback from the seller?

In a word, no. Once a seller has shipped, the seller has everything he or she might’ve wanted. Unless the bidder does something grievously wrong, the seller has no reason to leave anything but positive feedback.

If There’s Doubt

Not everybody retaliates. Some people never even leave feedback, negative or otherwise. If you’re worried about retaliation, there’s a pretty easy way to predict what any given user will do. Just go to the user’s feedback profile page and click the Left for Others tab to view all feedback written about others by that member.

Here, you’ll be able to easily tell how diligent someone is about leaving feedback, how prone she is to leaving negative feedback, and how likely she is to retaliate if a complaint is lodged against her. See “Appraise an eBayer’s Reputation” [Hack #1] for ways to more easily locate individual negative comments on the member profile page.

Just in Case

One of the best ways to lessen the effect of a single negative or neutral comment in your profile is to bury it with more-recent positive comments. And, as luck would have it, there’s a way to help determine the order of feedback comments you receive.

Suppose you’re anticipating negative feedback from someone; once it arrives, it’ll stick out like a sore thumb. But it just so happens you’ve completed one or two other recent transactions, for which you’re expecting positive comments.

The key is to withhold feedback for the positive transactions until the threat of the negative comment has passed. If you get a negative comment, go ahead and leave positive feedback for any applicable transactions right away; with any luck, those members will reciprocate and leave positive comments for you soon thereafter. The more-recent comments will appear above the older negative one, effectively burying it.

Naturally, there are no guarantees; this tip works only under the assumption that the other eBay members are withholding their feedback until they get comments from you, as described earlier in this hack. But sometimes, all it takes is a little careful timing to make the best out of a bad situation.