An Ebay experience

17 Feb 2012. Ebay appear to have taken no action against the seller who has new listings. Ebay did send a 'Customer Satisfaction Survey' to the buyer. Very strange behaviour given that it would seem there was no attempt made to satisfy the Buyer's concerns.

9 Feb 2012. After a successful bid, the seller claimed the item had sold 30 minutes prior to the auction close. The Seller still had the item and stated is was to be picked up on Saturday by someone who had called about the Ebay listing. The Seller said a deposit had been taken for a sale price above the auction result.

Unable to complete the sale, a complaint was raised with Ebay which the buyer has been told will be investigated. The buyer was also directed to leave feedback, which was done (Negative).

The curious thing about the Seller is that they had 100% Positive Feedback score despite 70% of comments being negative such as "don,t have anything to do with this member " ( a moderate example of the negative comments listed).The anomaly is worrying as it suggests some fundamental problem with the Feedback process.

My thoughts on this are that the Feedback process is not comprehnsive enough to be of much value. What is needed is a more robust method where transactions are monitored by Ebay and meaningful statistics produced such as Percentage of Items withdrawn; Percentage of Sales completed successfully; Average time to deliver etc. Presently, only the quality of the item description and satisfaction with the transaction have any input collected about them.

Apparently, Ebay are going to investigate the Member over this sale and the anomaly in the feedback. If an outcome becomes known, it will be reported here.

Meantime, the message is clearly not to rely on the feedback score alone always read the feedback comments.