Topic: Workshop on Understanding Feedback changes Host: Vidmay Naini Date: Monday, 11 February 2008 Time: 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. IST Location: "Feedback to eBay India Team" dicussion board
Description: The eBay Feedback system was originally designed to provide a simple, honest, and accurate record of the buyer's and seller's online experience and to ensure safe and satisfactory trade. Over a period of time, we found that the current Feedback system was not performing to the desired objectives. Hence, we felt the need to modify the way the Feedback system works in the current business context.
We'll be making a few significant changes to eBay's Feedback system to continue to improve accuracy and accountability. Within the next six months, these changes should help to differentiate and reward sellers who provide a positive buying experience on eBay.
Thank you for taking time to attend this workshop and I will meet all of you more often to address your concerns and feedback for furture changes. Hope I've addressed to your concerns/questions. Regards, Vidmay
I’m glad to have you on this workshop. Thank you for going through my posts.
The trend that sellers leave retaliatory feedback more than the buyers is similar for India as well.
There are various tools that we provide to our sellers for resolving feedback issues which they feel are unjustified such as Mutual Feedback Withdrawal (MFW), Online Dispute Resolution (ODR India) & Reporting Unjust Feedback. I’m sure you that you would find the below link useful Security Resolution Centre.
In addition to this for the benefit of sellers, we have facilitated ODR Feedback Dispute Mediation for PaisaPay Transaction to be “Fee of Cost”.
Let me also point out that some important changes in the Feedback system, in the interest of protecting the Sellers Reputation. Earlier negative and neutral feedbacks of only permanently suspended buyers within 90 days were removed. However with this change all negative and neutral feedbacks of suspended will be removed.
Feedback removed due to suspension will be permanently removed and will not be reinstated upon reinstatement of the member account.
In addition to this beginning end of this month, Positive Feedback percentage will be based on the past 12 months of Feedback
As mentioned earlier also, we would surely do whatever it takes to protect our sellers from feedback abuse and cases of extortion from buyers Regards, Vidmay
Yes you are correct that I have prepared some of your answers well in advance.
To address your point on Unpaid buyers who leave Negative feedbacks?
From what I gather the primary concern for the seller is, buyers who don’t participate in the UPI process have no right to impact the reputation of the seller on site.
The data for India indicates that there are few cases where the buyer don’t participate in the UPI process and still leave a bad feedback for various reasons. Hence the next obvious question will be, what is eBay doing to protecting genuine seller’s reputation?
We’ve been de-scoring Feedback left by buyers who do not respond to the Unpaid Item process for a few years and now view it as unfair to sellers who willingly participate in the process to have their reputation include comments from members unwilling to participate in the Feedback process. We will remove the rating and the comment from buyers who do not respond to the UPI process
Having said that, I assure all sellers that we will be implementing various measures for eBay India sellers to ensure their interests are protected. Regards, Vidmay
We realize that feedback has been a two-way street, but our data shows a disturbing trend, which is that sellers leave retaliatory feedback eight times more frequently than buyers do and this figure is up dramatically from only a few years ago.
.... but am sure this is the trend outside India.
Here in India both Sellers and Buyers are in a learning mode.
With evary major change .... the sincere & genuine Sellers are affected the most.
It's good to hear that you are concerned about the protection of genuine Sellers ..... but when it comes to actually helping them out ..... things are different.
Till now I have received 2 Negatives. One from the Buyer who wanted to Blackmail and other one was suspended within 90 days of registration.
As per the rule Book both Negatives should have been withdrawn .... but who cares.
ebay is bent 90 degrees towards Buyers ..... just a 5 degree bend towards Sellers can do wonders to the site. .
Thanks for joining in and let me also congratulate you for the success of your Air Guitar listing which also became News
It gives us great pleasure to know that many of our sellers have welcome most of our Feedback changes. I’d like to stress and elaborate on some of these changes, which were also a part of the announcement post, in the interest of other members of the seller fraternity and I’m sure all our sellers would welcome them.
Repeat Feedback Credit Starting in February 2008, we’re going to give members credit for multiple Feedbacks from the same buyer or seller for listings that end in different calendar weeks (Monday to Sunday). We think this is a great change for our sellers (and buyers). If you are delivering great customer service – and it shows through repeat buyers – your Feedback score will reflect this.
Feedback Percentage based on Past 12 Months Starting in February 2008, the Feedback percentage which calculates a member’s percentage of positive Feedback will be based on just the last 12 months (and not the member’s lifetime transactions, as it is today), although the total count remains lifetime.
We’re doing this because a member’s recent Feedback is the most relevant to their transaction partners. Over the years, many members have questioned why a single negative can affect their score for years. The Community has asked for this change, and we are happy to deliver. Going forward, any negative Feedback left for you more than 12 months ago will no longer affect your positive percentage.
To your question of how are we going to protect our sellers we have a number of initiatives to protect our sellers from the abuse of this change. I request you to please refer my post to jaipur_fashions.
I hope I’ve answered your concerns! Regards, Vidmay
Thank you for actively participating in this workshop.
We understand that you have a valid concern around our sellers’ safety and I’m happy to address to your concerns.
We would take various steps to ensure that only genuine and good buyers transact with our sellers. Besides the initiatives I’ve put across in my responses above I’d like to highlight some of the other checks and balances we are putting in place to ensure that buyers also provide our sellers a good experience.
Buyers will be held accountable via non-public seller reporting (e.g. UPI; dispute console) and if a buyer shows a pattern of behavior (multiple seller reports – like UPI), even without clear evidence, eBay will suspend the buyer. If a buyer asks for more than what was promised in the item description (e.g. wants overnight delivery but only paid for standard delivery) the seller should report the buyer to eBay and appropriate actions would be taken against the buyer. Sellers should only file these complaints when the buyer asks for more than what is promised in the listing If there is clear evidence of extortion we will take action on the first offense itself. Repeated violation will be penalized If we suspend the buyer, any negative or neutral Feedback they left for others will be removed permanently irrespective if they get reinstated on a later date.
I hope the above steps will give you even more confidence that we would do all to ensure that our community (both buyers and sellers) can trust each other through the new Feedback system. Regards, Vidmay
Firstly, I’d like to extend my special regards to you on maintaining such an amazing record of providing good buyer experience.
From your posts we understand that you have some concerns around the New PaisaPay. I’m sure you must have read through the discussion on Rajan’s Open house and would agree that we have absorbed our community’s suggestions and feedback and are working towards it.
We always feel great about our community and the one thing that distinguishes us from the rest of the organizations is the active engagement of our members in our policies and strategies on our very own discussion boards. We assure you that we would never want our discussion forums such as community boards loose importance as we can relate to the community concerns/suggestions through them which help us in a long way. In fact I feel privileged to be here as a member of one of the discussion forums this evening. Please rest assured that no suggestion on the boards goes unnoticed and there is no day in the life of eBay when the boards are not monitored. Regards, Vidmay
We understand that besides changes being made to the feedback system you also have concerns around the New PaisaPay and SM/SM Pro tool. I would request you to read detailed responses from our Country Manager around these concerns on his Open House thread.
I am glad to address your concerns on the feedback changes. To your question of why sellers are not allowed to rate buyers, I would say that sellers are allowed to rate buyers but by only giving a positive feedback and at the seller’s option.
To give you some background, the original intent of eBay’s public feedback system was to provide an honest, accurate record of member experiences. Over a period of time, we found that the transparency of the existing Feedback system makes some members reluctant to hold others accountable. For example, buyers fear retaliatory Feedback from sellers if they leave a negative. To make the Feedback system relevant to the buyers and motivating them to express themselves more freely by way of Feedback, we are making the below change.
However we do understand that there are some valuable suggestions provided by you on how we can automate the UPI process and we would surely consider them for feasibility.
Please feel free to write in more if you have further concerns. Regards, Vidmay
Welcome and thank you for taking out time to attend this workshop.
We understand your concern around the change where sellers may only leave positive Feedback for buyers, at the seller's option. While I address to this concern I’d like to give you a context behind this change. We realize that feedback has been a two-way street, but our data shows a disturbing trend, which is that sellers leave retaliatory feedback eight times more frequently than buyers do and this figure is up dramatically from only a few years ago.
We understand that this is a huge change, but we’re also putting into place protections that sellers have always asked for. In addition to holding buyers accountable via non-public seller reporting tools, such as Unpaid Item reports, we are planning a number of other Seller Protections against inaccurate feedback:
• We will remove, not just de-score, negative and neutral feedback when a buyer doesn’t respond to the Unpaid Item process • We will remove all negative and neutral feedback and comments when a buyer (or seller) is suspended. We will also do this retroactively – which means any negatives and neutrals you’ve received from members we’ve ever suspended will be removed. • For sellers with an established track record, we’ll prevent negative and neutral feedback within 3 days of listing end to promote communication. • We’re going to reduce the number of days a member can leave feedback from 90 to 60 days. • We’ll increase block bidder list capacity from 1,000 to 5,000 user IDs • We’ll increase our monitoring, and take action based on seller reports of buyers behaving very badly • Feedback percentage will be based on the last 12 months, although the total count remains lifetime. This means that any negative or neutral feedback left for you more than 12 months ago will no longer affect your percent positive.
I hope that I was able to address your concern and we are confident that our sellers would co-operate as always to achieve this objective.
Before we get started today we will be posting some responses to the questions/concerns raised on this thread on recent Feedback initiatives launched globally on eBay.
In a short while at 5 pm we will start today's workshop and will open the floor to any questions you may have to Vidmay Naini, Manager, Trust & Safety. I request members that they do not raise any personal account issues in this forum and encourage you to contact our Customer Support team for specific information
I had gone through the new feedback changes.Some of the changes are encouraging,but the other are kind of unscientific.
First of concerning the feedback calculation on the basis of 12months,I have to tell that it is an awesome idea.I have only one negative feedback which was posted more than one year,and my percentage has being lingering due to this.I guess by end of february,it would change? Is it like that?
Sellers can leave feedback only on the basis of seller's wish.This sounds unscientific.How is ebay going to give protection to sellers who are honest and trustworthy? I got a negative feedback due to the mistake of an arrogant buyer.
when buyer compain us about item we check buyer's feedback score read negative neutral comment of seller and then decide what kind of buyer reputation if buyer reputation of feedback is good then we serve him best example recent one buyer inform me he don't received item i track online status show it ITEM DELIVERED i check buyer feedback which was very nice and i trust buyer and send item another one if seller can not leave negative then how we can find that buyer problem is genuine or not we treat reputed out of any eBay rule and to give best services don't see profit or loss to know buyer there is only way is feedback not any other system like we see man face to face and decide if any seller left negative and write buyer has habit of file false claim we can know that buyer is not genuine and claim wrong if this type of problem rise how we know what type of buyer is ? this change is same as new paisa pay change we seller call new paisa pay :- head ache of seller
dear all powesellers no body will listen our excuses, they will do what they want to do. as they hv done before (launching of new paisapay) so keep fingure on ur mouth. or close ur ebay shop's shutter. thats all the outcome of this decision
I am very sacred of any new change eBay makes. New paisa pay in my opinion has failed to impress sellers. The basic site working has been disturbed as Selling Manager and Selling manager Pro has become unreliable. They display incorrect information. The prices have gone up & sales have come down. There are many more side effects of new paisa pay.
With this new feedback also I have many doubts. Why sellers are not able to rate buyers? What if buyer does not pay? I just have to wait for 7 days and still more seven days and then I get FVF? And after doing so much of work, wasting time and pleading buyer to make payment, we have to make market place clean by not sharing our views that a buyer is not paying? In item not received buyers are King, why payment not received is not given the same preference. Such non paying buyers should be given feedback rather than restricting seller to give only positive feedback.
We have to remember who has made payment and whose payment is not received. On the due date we have to file UPI and again remember the date to get back FVF. All these things need to be automated so that we don’t waste our time in such activities. Before launch of new paisa pay all this was working fine with the Selling Manager. Now such things are not reliable on Selling Manager. Things which need automation are left to sellers to remember and do it. If seller forgets to do he looses his own money. We have mention to eBay many times that if buyer does not leave feedback, an automated feedback should be given to seller. Now instead of that they have asked the buyer to confirm the item receipt and did not do anything for automated feedback. When the buyer says item receipt, on same page there should be a feedback option and then submit button which will make sure that feedback and item receipt are done together.
EBay if you have time to implement new changes, please take a note of seller’s suggestions also...
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