| March 08, 2007 |
 eBay Feedback 2.0 - Too Much Transparency? |
| By: Ina Steiner |
| Thu Mar 8 2007 13:16:58 |
Now that eBay Feedback 2.0 has rolled out in some international sites, users can see the change in the way information is displayed. Going to the feedback page of a user, you can see a page of items recently purchased and sold, as the auction title and the price are displayed.
My reaction when I first heard about new feedback system was that it would help me understand if a seller was feedback padding - buying lots of one-penny ebooks and suddenly selling $2000 flat screen TVs, a possible sign of fraud.
But once the new system rolled out, I realized how embarrassing it could be to users - particularly buyers. Many buyers shop for particular keywords. Much as you might enter "gift" in a search box around the holidays, some people enter "gay interest." Now, those purchases will be highlighted on a feedback page. I personally am concerned about harassment and hate crimes being aided by such transparency. The online world is a reflection of the real world, after all.
Imagine viewing a user's feedback page and seeing a list of items of an adult nature. I think this will turn buyers off. Collectors are also likely to be turned off by having their past buying behavior exposed.
I expressed my concerns to eBay spokesperson Catherine England. She said the information has always been available, and this is true, but you had to spend a lot of time clicking on individual item numbers on feedback pages to see what the items were. It wasn't displayed 25 at a time on a page (25 is the default, but you can change it to show 200 items at a time!).
The auction titles will go away after 90 days, England confirmed, just as the feedback system does today.
England said eBay is definitely watching Feedback 2.0 closely - it's Day 2, she said, and there is a reason it's a pilot. (Though to users in the 8 countries where it's been unleashed surely don't think of it as a pilot.)
There are tradeoffs, England said, and this new system addresses concerns over feedback padding (the type of scenario I mentioned above with ebooks, for example).
"We are definitely going to watch it," England said. "We think the transparency will be better in the long run, but we are watching it."
I wonder if it would be best if auction titles and prices displayed only for items sold, and not for items purchased. We'll see how this plays out!
Here's an article I ran this week on user reaction to Feedback 2.0.
And we'll be publishing the results of our feedback survey - conducted prior to the launch of Feedback 2.0 - soon.
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