eBay Marketplace prez Lorrie Norrington posted an announcement on Thursday in part to help sell the controversial feedback changes coming in May. Norrington said that it is up to sellers to report incidents of feedback extortion from buyers, and when eBay identifies a pattern of abuse or the evidence is clear from seller reports, eBay will remove the negative or neutral feedback retroactively.
Norrington also said eBay will also remove seller negs and neutrals retroactively in cases where sellers have claimed Unpaid Item reports but where the buyer has not specifically called out poor seller performance, item condition or transaction problems. This was an issue sellers raised during the recent IMA conference where they said deadbeat buyers respond to UPI claims saying they would pay, but never would, leaving sellers with 2 choices: eat the eBay fees on sales that weren't actually completed, or risk receiving a negative feedback from the buyer. (Both options cost sellers real dollars one way or the other.)
Do these changes affect the way sellers feel about the coming feedback changes, now less than 2 months away?
Norrington also announced that the eBay Expanded Seller Protection program is now available (sellers must enroll in the program). Here's part of an email I received from a seller about the program:
Read through the Power Seller discussion boards, quite a few people got the invite, and couldn't get the sign-up to work, others never got the invite, but were able to get in?? Conversation I had with one gal at pay-pal told me that this entire announcement was made the same day pay-pal found OUT about it. And since they switched processors about a week ago, that held things up even longer!
I'm thinking this is what happens when you hire many YOUNG people to run your company. I wish I could convince myself that I'm worng about that, but aprroximately half the time, it seems no one knows what's going on over there.
Thursday's full announcement can be found here.
