Ben Bishop was one of several entrepreneurs who launched services earlier this year designed to help sellers cope with the changing landscape on eBay. The auction site has done away the ability for sellers to leave negative or neutral feedback ratings for buyers - and has also done away with its Mutual Feedback Withdrawal process. The AfterTheGavel.com website is intended to duplicate the functionality that eBay had previously provided.

Bishop said his site is a way for sellers to leave feedback about buyers to prevent problems. "Perhaps the buyer is trying to threaten the seller with negative feedback to try to extort a lower price," he said. "This is a mechanism for sellers to report that to other sellers so this buyer can't go on doing this indefinitely, hopefully."

According to Bishop, the site has between 300 - 400 registered users and received at its peak 2,000 page views. He said he has received requests by users for permission to put up AfterTheGavel banners to let other users know about workarounds to eBay's feedback changes.

Visitors can use the search box on the home page to search for buyers who have been reported by AftertheGavel.com registered users. The service logs the sellers' IP addresses internally, but sellers are never publicly identified. "You register with the site, you are then able to go and identify a user, identify an auction service. Almost entirely our feedback centers around eBay, but we don't want to limit it to that. And then you can leave negative or netural feedback," Bishop said.

The concept is so new, he said some people get confused about what the service is, thinking it's a feedback problem resolution service (it's not).

As more sellers use the service to document bad buyers, the payoff will be greater. "There is a critical mass effect where the value of the service grows as the number of people using it grows, much like online auction sites."

Bishop said his service is not currently designed to amass a list of "bad buyers" to add to a blocked bidding list. Instead, "If you have a question about a particular buyer, you can enter a query for them" on AftertheGavel.com. But if he were to receive requests for such a feature, he'd consider it. He was somewhat skeptical a blocked bidder list was scalable, however, given that eBay limits sellers to 5,000 blocked names.

Related Article:

Controversial Feedback Changes at eBay Lead to New Tools
http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y08/m02/i25/s01