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eBay bidder with private feedback

Started by Doc McCoy,

13 posts in this topic

kav

kav

Posted
Posted

from ebay guide:

Crooks Charter

We guess that the only members who find "Private Feedback" useful are the fraudsters and scammers.

You might think that this would deter most customers, and we would agree, but it is possible that they could simply stop using that particular account for a period of time, and use one of their many alternative ones instead. Meanwhile, if they threaten eBay with defamation proceedings, it is likely that eBay would remove the negatives rather than risk losing in court, or incurring substantial legal fees, then the crook could resume the use of the account.

 

So Why Allow Private Feedback? - The Real Reason

We believe that the main, and possibly real reason why "Private Feedback" is allowed is to protect eBay from threats of legal action.

If a member gets a negative feedback and complains, he is told that he can take his feedback private. If he chooses not to, eBay have a legal defence against any claim for continued defamation, as the member complaining exercised his option not to remove the offending comment, and his case would fail, or at least be severely hampered.

Think about it, if you were running eBay, wouldn't you try to build some protection into your system to prevent a member suing you for million of pounds or dollars, and costing you many thousands in legal fees, especially when you are hosting millions of auctions daily, with millions of unknown, amateur, unprofessional and unpredictable "members", and for some auctions your total fees received may only be a few pence or cents?

So now you know the real reason.

Nowhere else have we seen this argued, yet believe it is the main reason for the existence of this feature. eBay will of course apply spin so that it appears that it exists for the protection and benefit of their members.

 

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dupont2005

dupont2005

Posted
Posted

I've only had one buyer win one of my auctions with private feedback. My auction clearly stated I expected payment within seven days or I'll offer the second chance to the next highest bidder, and if you're going to be away from the computer for over a week at auction end to simply not bid. So the private feedback buyer wins and doesn't pay or respond to any emails for a week. I send a request to cancel the transaction and give it to the second chance buyer. Then about two or three weeks after auction end he denies the transaction cancel request, pays me, and leaves me a negative feedback.

 

I wish there was a way to preemptively block anyone with private feedback from bidding on my auctions. Thanks to sniping software I can't simply remove their bids and add them to the blocked bidders list as they bid.

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Stumptown

Stumptown

Posted
Posted

If you can put something like "no bidders with less than 10 feedback. Any bids will be automatically cancelled." you should be able to put the same thing re private bidders.

 

Also, you can see how many pluses/negs/neutrals private fb people have but you can't see what those comments are.

 

If someone has a goodly number of +'s, no negs and no neutrals and their name isn't on the other thread in CG re blocked bidders, seems like it would be okay to let them bid (shrug)

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Bills Comics

Bills Comics

Posted
Posted

I recently had someone who bought one of my items . Paid promptly , as I have it for automatic payments only . I also have it set up to leave feedback automatically after payment is received . They recently left me feedback. I saw their feedback was set to private . I looked and they had 100% positive . Their feedback was a little over 100 I believe .

I dont know if it was set to private before I sold the item to them. But I could not see any bad reason to have Private Feedback in this case.

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bushwood

bushwood

Posted
Posted

Personally I don't see a problem with the private feedback. If you have a large amount of positive feedbacks and 100% why worry?

 

I have done it in the past cause I found that if I place offers on items and the seller sees that I have a preference for stuff then they will play with my emotions and say "oh he's a big batman fan…so I'm not gonna budge off the price".

 

If they can't see your buying history it's fair game in my book. That may not be a popular answer, but not everyone is a crook who uses private feedback.

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Jimmy Linguini

Jimmy Linguini

Posted
Posted

I had a conversation with ebay about this about a year ago, it went like this,

 

"and he had private feedback! in my opinion, everyone with private feedback is a scam artist"

 

"well thats not true, I have an ebay account and I have private feedback."

 

"no offence, but you're probably a scam artist."

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