eBay: Positive Feedback Only?

Either eBay or the San Jose Sharks are in trouble. Since the Sharks are 19-3-1, I'm thinking it's eBay. On what do I base this?

eBay has been just about useless this year in helping me sell my extra Sharks season tickets.

• My auctions are mostly not ending successfully (despite a sub-face-value opening bid and a consecutive string of sold-out home games)
  
• I get lots of eBay messages from members asking me to sell around eBay and do a transaction on the side
  
• eBay seems to have figured this out since they now preface every message with a warning to not do transactions on the side
  
• When my tickets don't sell on eBay, I pay a listing fee anyway
  
• When my tickets do sell on eBay and the buyer can't pay (as just happened), I pay a both a listing and a "success" fee anyway

Adding insult to injury, Ticketmaster seems to have finally figured out that Craigslist and eBay were eating them alive in the secondary market and, after a few years of trying, seem to have finally setup a reasonable secondary market strategy: PowerPlay Ticket Trader, where season ticket holders can resell their tickets. (The rub: you can only list them for a minimum of about 20% over face value.)

Simply put, based on my personal experience selling tickets and other more typical used goods, eBay used to work. I could sell stuff. When it sold, people would pay. And I wasn't constantly being invited to work around the system.

In some sense eBay was granted the "be careful what you wish for" curse and is now a mainstream site used by everybody, including scammers and fools. I liked it better when it was mostly the digerati.

Says this post in the Guardian, entitled The Steady Decline of eBay:

What is the cause of eBay's problems? Henry Blodget blames eBay failing to turn the business around, as well as overpricing and competition. We'll need to be further into the recession to see if difficult economic times mean far less people spending money on luxury second-hand stuff on eBay, or of the site might actually see some evidence of people trying to make essential extra cash by selling stuff they don't need.

But even if that is the case, eBay users have been frustrated by various rule changes, and the introduction of bulk retail listings in August this year that reinforced a very different direction from the home-seller users that got the site going.

But what kicked me over the edge this morning was this message when I was trying to leave feedback on a transaction:


First, as a nit, I was the seller in the transaction, not the buyer, so I don't know why eBay is talking to me as if I were the buyer. Second -- and infinitely more important -- look at the substance of the message: buyers can no longer receive negative or neutral feedback from sellers.

What is the purpose of a feedback system if you can only leave positive feedback!!

Yes, they try to explain the reason for this is to avoid retaliatory negative feedback -- for example, where a rightfully upset buyer gives negative feedback on a bad seller only to be wrongfully negatively rated in return. But this approach to the problem is ridiculous. eBay already allowed you to see feedback on a person in their buying and selling roles separately, and they also already allowed comments / explanations where you could type a line explaining your viewpoint.

So, first, the problem was already solved if a person wanted to dig a bit. Second, this solution discards the baby with the bathwater. What should a seller -- e.g., me -- do when a buyer wins an auction, goes silent for 10 days thereafter, and then finally sends me an email saying that he can't pay? I can only leave him positive feedback? That's insane!

I really believe that eBay is going down the tubes for a number of reasons, but first and foremost is my personal experience in using it.

(For eBayers: yes, I know about unpaid item strikes but I view those as outside the regular feedback system, since someone can not pay a seller and still maintain their 100% positive feedback.)

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