eBay has made changes to its Feedback Policy to deter users from buying or trading feedback from other members. eBay also added a new policy to prohibit sellers from including in their listings any terms and conditions that restrict or limit the ability of a member to leave feedback.
eBay's Feedback Solicitation Policy bans the selling, buying or trading of feedback. The new change forbids users from including the word “feedback” in a listing title unless it specifically describes the item. The feedback system is eBay's method for establishing a user's reputation. Members rate their trading partners with a Positive, Negative or Neutral feedback.
Over the years, eBay's feedback system has been a hotbed of controversy, from feedback padding to extortion. Some users refuse to leave negative feedback in fear that their trading partner will retaliate by giving them a negative in return.
Last December, AuctionBytes conducted a reader survey to find out how serious these problems were. According to the survey, 39% of respondents felt that feedback retaliation was a very big problem on eBay. Nineteen percent of respondents had received retaliatory feedback within the previous 6 months, and 16% had been a victim of feedback extortion within the previous 6 months.
eBay has made some improvements to the Feedback System since it was first introduced. eBay now requires feedback be tied to a specific transaction, and it adds "buyer" and "seller" designations next to individual feedbacks. eBay also improved the display box this year, automatically displaying the percentage of positive feedback a member has (i.e, 98%). But there's no way to see the value of individual transactions at a glance, and older auctions are removed from eBay altogether.
eBay's Feedback Solicitation Policy is designed to prevent someone from "buying" another member's reputation. In 2001, the New York Times reported that a coin dealer had purchased another member's feedback points and was later suspended from eBay for suspicion of defrauding bidders of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
