CHOICE has had a complaint from someone who bought something on eBay and it didn’t arrive. They were able to get a refund, but when trying to leave negative feedback on the seller’s page, it was deleted. While drafting the negative feedback, they noticed there were two other negative feedback comments on the seller’s page. However, when they returned, the two other negative feedback comments disappeared…
They checked a few more times and found three more instances of negative feedback being applied and then later deleted. Has anyone ever had their feedback removed after making a purchase on eBay?
I haven’t had feedback removed, but have been asked to change negative feedback for an item which did not arrive…and after refund was received.
The seller said my negative feedback was inappropriate as they had despatched the item (allegedly had proof) and its loss was not their fault/outside their control.
I changed to it to neutral with comments indicating goods never arrived but refund given.
I wonder if the seller has asked eBay to remove under the grounds that the buyer was ‘Leaving inappropriate Feedback’ as the goods were lost in transit and not due to the direct actions of the seller?
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Ebay started as a altruistic marketplace that was basically kept inline by the feedback system that was once set in stone, once feedback was left even if it was unfair it was unimpeachable. How do I know? I was a early adopter in the mid 1990’s.
Back then payment systems like PayPal didn’t exist and it was common to send currency through the mail and other dumb things to transact.
But the original owners sold out and ebay is now a large listed multi-national company that is running ‘rivers of gold’ basically by gouging the sellers at around 11% of sales and because of the competition from free sites like gumtree and craigslist their margins have been hurting of late.
So ebay is now more than ever prepared to kowtow to sellers to keep them on their portal so this means basically what the big sellers want the big sellers get.
That is if you move a lot of product and ebay makes a lot of mulla from you, they will review negative feedback on your behalf and request and reverse it if necessary.
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Gumtree is a wholly owned subsidiary of Ebay, they purchased it in 2005. They do make money out of it as certain categories have what they call “Insertion Fees”.
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I was wondering how long someone would raise that. It is clear to me that ebay’s gumtree purchase was designed to control the competition. They allow it to operate at the no/low fee end of the sale spectrum to encourage secondhand item sales away from ebay which they are trying to position as a site for new merchandise new product purchasing portal.
IMO Owning gumtree is a market strategy to block new free startups ‘trading’ sites getting traction and critical mass and keep the likes of businesses such as craigslist in Australia from growing into major competitors like it is in the US.
Oh and when Gumtree has snuffed out the free/low cost competition it too will start charging IMO.
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With numerous publicised cases of review/feedback tampering in hmmm the last few years maybe - I pretty much approach ALL review / feedback no matter the source with a healthy level of scepticism. Except Choice of course 
T/A is a another perfect example. Quantitive or not that is how I view them all. Still do the research, still take it into account but by no means rely on it.
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I received an email in Spanish from eBay over the weekend notifying me that the terms of my account had been changed. Since I didn’t have an account I was worried. I logged on by requesting a password reset: then closed “my” account.
I notified eBay via their chat window: and got told that there was nothing they could do about this apparent security breach. I then asked to speak to an actual operator: and got called by someone who didn’t listen to me, who cut me off at every opportunity and who, IMHO was downright rude. So I asked to speak to, and got through to, their manager: who then told me that it was because my 13 year old email address had been “recycled” by my email provider…
I asked her to check if messages had been sent to my address in the last few years. She could only examine the last 90 days, but confirmed that several emails had been sent. She didn’t believe me when I told her that I had received none of them: and that there must have been some kind of redirect inside their systems if the emails had been responded to. And there the matter was left, as she had no interest in sorting it out further 
After this experience I’m not going near eBay…
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