I spotted that and have a real problem with the decision. About half my action is buying, half is selling (I sell stuff in order to buy more stuff, pretty much). On the selling end, I like to know who is bidding on my stuff. I'd like to know if I've got a repeat deadbeat or someone with a history of giving problems to sellers over petty issues. I think eBay's move sucks.

More fuel to the fire -- a recent eBay purchase from late 2007 was never received (I foolishly waited too long to file a claim and the seller has not responded to my emails), and I have just had to file a claim at half.com because I did not receive the item and the seller has not responded to my emails. This B.S. is getting old fast!

Expect your half claim to move VERY slowly.

Geff,

Thanks. Somehow, I figured as much. Think I am done with half.com now that the seller does not even have to confirm availability before they charge you.

Jay

I had a claim with them last year. I finally got the money, but it took quite awhile & I had to threaten half with a chargeback before they actually sent the money.

As a buyer, what I don't like about this policy is that it will undoubtedly affect the overall prices of Ebay items. I expect sellers to simply shrug this fee off by jacking up the "handling" part of the "shipping and handling" charge.

As an ebay seller, I wish I could successfully raise handling fees or even selling price. In the last year, I've experienced 5 increases in my shipping boxes, 2 postal increases & now this from ebay

Unfortunately, most cd's sell for pennies on the dollar on ebay, so there's no way I can raise anything. As it is, i have some of the lowest cd shipping rates on ebay ($3.25 1 cd, $4.00 for 2-3) & my "DSR" (Detailed Seller Ratings) for shipping cost is only 1/10 th of a percentage point better then a drop shipper I recently checked who charges $6.99 a cd for shipping. Ebay now chooses search engine placement based on "DSR's". I suspect they are dishonestly weighing the drop shippers "DSR" ratings up because of the high fees they get from their thousands of listings. What I mentioned above makes no sense otherwise.

I would give my first born to have a REALISTIC option to ebay as a seller (Amazon is worse for sellers then ebay) & the others have very few buyers.

Ebay is getting less and less realistic by the day for both buyers and sellers...I've been meaning to pick up this new Smashing Pumpkins import EP for a couple of weeks now, and a quick survey of Ebay is showing the following:

Of the eight non-ebay stores listings, the seller in Michigan with the lowest shipping rate ($3) has listed a $19.99 "Buy It Now" price, a whopping $5 higher than the next-highest "Buy It Now" price. One seller has started the bidding at $8.99, but wants $5.50 to mail it from Wisconsin (and, according to the listing, only mails out orders on Tuesday). Two sellers are both asking for $4.95 shipping to mail it from Wisconsin (again) and California, while two other sellers are asking $5 and $6.46 to mail it from South America (which makes a little more sense). On the Ebay Stores side of things, there are two listings. A seller in California wants $4.95 in shipping, while another seller in Singapore is only asking for $2.98 (!?!).

No thanks.

Reason #87 why I hate ordering CD's online: I got an automated e-mails from an Amazon seller telling me the following:

"We are very sorry but this product in our inventory was defective. Your purchase has been refunded. We attempted to reorder it for you but it wasn't available. We didn't want to delay your order much longer. We apologize for this."

*banging head against monitor screen*

Yeah...this is another oldie but goodie! I feel your pain, as does almost everyone else here.

*sniff* Thank you...seriously...it's always reassuring to learn that I am not alone...

I'm glad I still have a few brick & mortar options left, even if they are dwindling.

Looking over Ebay's revised feedback policy, I'm still unclear on what sort of feedback I can expect from a seller. Here's what I'm pondering today: Last month I bought two CD singles using "Buy It Now" from a seller in the Netherlands. Shipping for one CD was $7, so I ordered two in order to combine shipping and save. I knew better than to expect anything within a week, and a little over two weeks later, an envelope arrived from the Netherlands...containing only one CD. Over the course of the next two weeks, I e-mailed the seller three times (through Ebay) asking a simple yes or no question: Has the other CD shipped yet? Never getting an answer, I posed my question through Paypal Claims, and now have gotten a refund for the CD that was apparently never shipped.

Frankly, I'm inclined to leave negative feedback, not because the seller never shipped the CD for whatever reason, but because I never got a response to any of my e-mails asking if the item had shipped or not. However, common sense tells me that if a seller accepts my money and never ships the item, refunding my money a MONTH later, that my experience with that seller could then be described as "negative" for that reason alone. The only reason that I wouldn't label it as such in my feedback would be the threat of retaliatory feedback from the seller--usually, when money is refunded, you wind up seeing those "feedback withdrawn by mutual consent" notation in the feedback listings. But it seems to me that if a seller wastes a month of a buyer's time and NEVER offers an explaination for the delay (the seller is still listing same title as a "Buy It Now" item), a refund certainly isn't going to undo my dissatisfaction with the transaction.

I understand where Geff is coming from, in terms of buyers potentially being just as big of a pain in the neck as sellers, but if I leave "neutral" feedback for a seller, am I fully communicating to other buyers the frustration I've had with this seller? Remember, I only have 80 characters to explain my feedback rating.

(Of course, as I've now learned, the ultimate solution is to order from Amazon so that Linda gets her "stipend".)

Retaliatory feedback is a huge problem on eBay. They say it's against the rules, but there's no way to enforce that policy. Fortunately I've built up a high enough feedback rating over the years that I don't have to worry about an occasional negative, but those who have smaller feedback numbers can really get hosed by retaliators.

Your seller definitely deserves a negative, IMHO. But they will probably retaliate, so you just have to decide whether you're willing to eat a negative yourself. (They may retaliate even if you leave a neutral.)

On both sides. I almost never leave negs for buyers because of fear of retaliatory fb. That's one of the reasons the new fb changes are unfair to sellers - ebay claims their data shows most negs left by sellers are retaliatory. That data is skewed as many sellers like myself WON'T leave a neg unless we've already been neg'd for fear of retaliation. Ebay is now going to be basing seller fees on fb & other "buyer satisfaction metrics"; it's to ebay's advantage for sellers numbers to fall just below the "standards" so ebay can charge higher fees & make more profits.


I agree this seller deserves a neg. SUPPOSEDLY, sellers can't neg any transaction that occurred after 2/20/08. I don't know if this is true or not. I was able to neg a particularly evil non paying bidder from a January transaction recently.