Monday, September 23, 2013

How to Leave Negative Feedback on EBay

My husband and I have been selling on EBay for a while, my husband more than me. EBay is always changing their rules. In the past, if a buyer (or seller) was not nice or didn't play by the rules, you could leave a negative feedback - well not any more. I recently had someone purchase something from me and they did not pay. Not only did they not pay, they didn't respond to my emails. After 4 days, I reported them so I could get the transaction cancelled. The transaction was cancelled, but when I go to leave negative feedback, I couldn't - EBay took that option away. Here is what EBay is saying, 


"Sellers aren't able to leave negative or neutral Feedback for buyers. That means sellers need other tools that will protect them against unfair treatment from buyers and bring those buyers to eBay's attention."

Many people don't like this, me included. How are we to know about deadbeat buyers? Negative feedback was what my husband and I (along with most of you) relied on as far as seeing who good and who was not.

I suppose the current way to handle this is to report them via feedback. Now when leaving a feedback, you can report the buyer. Reporting the buyer starts the investigation process on EBay's end - this is EBay's way way of protecting the buyer. I had actually reported my buyer before realizing I could do it through feedback. Not knowing what to do with leaving a feedback for this buyer, I just left them hanging. Well, a couple of weeks go by along with another good sale. I go to leave feedback for the good sale and saw the bad sale still sitting, waiting for a feedback. Forgetting that this was a deadbeat buyer, I automatically left a postive feedback. When I go to review my sales, I realized that I had made an error - I gave my deadbeat buyer a positive feedback! I didn't know what to do. I knew there was a way to reply to feedbacks so I researched it and here is what I did:

  1. Go to Feedback Forum.
  2. At the far right, under "Feedback Tools", click on "Follow up to feedback left".
  3. Find the feedback you want to correct and click on "Follow up" at the far right.
  4. You will see a blank box after "Follow up comment" and you can revise your positive feedback and leave an appropriate comment.

I felt bad that I had accidentally left a positive feedback, for a negative transaction, but after doing the steps above, I feel better. Now people can know about this buyer and proceed with caution.

I hope this helps others when faced with a negative situation on EBay.

Happy Selling!!! 




Comments or questions are always welcomed. I would love to hear what you think of this post or any of my other posts. Thanks!

1 comment:

Andrew Jens said...

Thanks for the this post, but the problem with the above is that buyers can now have a "Private" feedback profile. That means that sellers are no longer able to see the comments left by previous sellers.
Funny how eBay is dead keen to protect deadbeat buyers, and equally keen to shaft honest sellers.