Feedback changes announced in January were introduced onto eBay.com on Monday as part of a global rollout that began last week in Australia. As of Monday, sellers on eBay.com are prohibited from leaving buyers anything but positive feedback, and eBay has adjusted the way it calculates a member's positive feedback percentage score.
eBay warned users on Monday that while it continues to update its database, some sellers would see a temporary discrepancy between their scores shown on their Item pages and on their Feedback Profile. The Feedback percentages will display only the last twelve months' worth of transactions and will show credit for repeat Feedback retroactive to 1996. The changes will be completely rolled out on all sites by May 28, eBay stated.
Sellers on eBay.com who went to leave feedback on Monday saw a new page that gave them the choice of leaving a positive feedback or leaving feedback later. The page includes a link to a new page where sellers can report problem buyers over the following issues: Unpaid Item; Feedback Extortion; Feedback Abuse; Unwelcome and Malicious Buying; Customs Fraud; Report Another Problem The portal page gave some sellers hope that eBay would monitor and take action against buyers who might abuse the new feedback system (http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/report_problem.html).
Some sellers are disconcerted not only by seeing changes to their positive percentage score (some scores have gone up, while others have gone down), but also by learning of the message buyers receive when going to leave feedback, which we first wrote about on May 14th. The message states, "Buyers, you can no longer receive negative or neutral Feedback from sellers. You should leave honest and accurate Feedback without the fear of receiving negative or neutral ratings" (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y08/m05/i14/s01).
