How would you improve Ebay?

[Eagle]

I'd make it compulsory for the Seller to leave feedback for the Buyer as soon as they've paid in full. Standards would then improve - especially from the UK seller's side.

[Paul Hirst]

I would make e bay responsible financially for all the fake products that are sold on the site. E Bay deliberately make it difficult to have them removed and make millions in commissions on fake and counterfeit products. As a company it is a full time occupation just monitoring the site. I am working on another venture setting up a business to help others protect their IP through auction sites, in one case we identified over 7.5 million pounds in sales in one year on one product!!

[Eagle]

Originally Posted by Paul Hirst

I am working on another venture setting up a business to help others protect their IP

Great idea.

[johnm]

On the subject of ebay I have a number of suggestions.

The fees for more expensive items are prohibitive if the item does not sell. And if you sell to a spoof buyer it is time consuming to get fees refunded.

Comunication with ebay is very difficult and it is hard to get clear and concise information from them. Revising or changing items is slow and awkard and time consuming.

John

[johnm]

Reply to Eagle

I had a bad experience with an ebay buyer last year. We sold him worms for fishing which he stored in an open container against our advice and they basically crawled away.

He then claimed not to have received the full quantity and asked for another kilo. Instead we gave him a full refund. We had also gone out of our way to help him with collecting the worms (I drove 5 miles to the motorway so that he could get them collected and thereby avoid postage costs).

After all that he left negative feedback which was inaccurate and untrue. I had made the mistake of leaving him posive feedback after he had paid. So now I am much more cautious about leaving feedback.

John

[hoosierhunter]

To improve Ebay, I would make it free to list items, make stores more search friendly, and I'd probably scale down the attempts to root eBay in China. As both a buyer and seller, I've noticed a good number of China auctions with ridiculous shipping charges.

[mtatum4496]

Personally, I think that Ebay should have a process in place that investigates negative feedback and if the situation warrants it, remove the feedback and impose some sort of restriction on the poster, up to and including termination of his or her account. I had a friend who had an auction for children's clothing. When the auction was over, she sent winner instructions for mailing payment. When she did not hear back from her, she sent more emails. This went on for about a week, than she sees the winner had posted negtive feedback saying she had not been sent any instructions on where to mail the check.

Come to find out, all the emails were going into a bulk folder in the winner's email account. She didn't think to look there before she posted negative feedback and of course went back out and posted another feedback statement explaining the situation. Still, the negative rating remained.

Ebay would not remove the negative feedback, even after both the winner and the seller advised them of the situation, which struck me as absolutely ridiculous.

[hoosierhunter]

I have to agree that ebay's feedback system is flawed. I've had retaliatory negatives before, and it's not fun. I think there is a mutal way to remove negs, but I can't remember how to do it.

[Solicitors Mortgages]

I would split all the "buy it now" stuff away from the auctions.
I thought it was supposed to be an auction site and now is more like one big shop.

theyy should also clamp down on the feedback, you can actually get bad comments removed. There is a huge scandal waiting to be uncovered about this.

[Tracy123]

Paid subscription, with fingerprint and eye recognition entry, all crooks to serve a minimum of 15 years prision.