BUYERS FROM HELL AN EBAY PHENOMENON

The seller from hell brought out a reasponse from Ebay. Their responce was a knee jerk reaction to change the playuing field do dramatically that it gave rise to the buyer from hell.

Understand the "Buyer from Hell" always existed but his impact wax put in check by a system that allowed an ability for both parties to respond equally.

This gave the seller a ability to alert other sellers to a buyer who may be a potential problem. Ebay would also be alerted as the feedback would openly display if a buyer is a problem.

To day the "Buyer from Hell" is typically a new member to ebay,  They will have very little feedback. They find the power of ruining a sellers feedback score aluring and once they have that power they have to use it. A seller can do every thing in their power to ship the item on time and leave positive feedback and themselves open to communication including giving a buyer a refund and still get a negative.

This mean that a good seller who has done everything by the book and has a long string of satisfied buyers is unfairly put in the position where he could loose business or their ebay account. based on a few ignrorant buyers.

These buyers will not attempt to contact the seller and indicate there is a problem. They will just leave a neg in the feedback and disappear. Ebay does not demand a dialogue between the seller and buyer before a negative is left, nor do they take a sellers overall performance into considertaion when a buyer begins to complain. They have adopted the old Sears Robuck catalogue policy, " The customer is always right".

Which does not mean that the seller is wrong it only meant that a customer had the right to a refund if they were not happy. This policy was ment to instal trust in the buyer to prevent a customer having a negative experience when shopping at Sears. It kept Sears open and running for deacades and kept its customers comming back and attracted new customers, There is no way Sears could have survived by allowing the one or two impossible to please customers give its business a black eye by publishing the negative responses of a few Buyers from Hell so the the public would think that these were normal rational people not the mental patients many have turned out to be. Today in a effort to maintain good relations with the customers Sears posts guards at the door to keep out known trouble makers.

EBay wamts to model itself after Sears but it forgets that it not sears, It is a group of individuals who have no connection with each other othe than ebay as a meeting place. Ebay is a online flea market and it needs to understand that without sellers there will be no buyers and many sellers have already reduced the items they were selling or left ebay completly.

No other business would shoot itself in the  foot like ebay does with its sellers and expect to survive. Ebay created the "Buyer from Hell" and is responsible for lost business and both buyer and seller distrust, buyers don't trust sellers who have negatives and sellers no longer feel a loyalty to ebay. 

Common sense dictates that it would have been better to have just gotten rid of the sellers from hell and left the feedback system alone, today there no check valve for mental patients who join ebay, there is no way to identify them or warn other sellers that they may be dealing with a potential nut case.

The right to leave public feedback is something that the buyer should earn as a result of previous transactions based on the sellers account of the transaction. No buyer with under 50 feedback should be allowed to leave any feedback unless it is positive. The power to leave negative feedback should only be given to the members who have 50 + feedback who have been members for at least a year themselves.

This way a new member can better understand and respect the role each of us play in makeing ebay a choice of people to sell and shop.

The Buyer form Hell will destroy ebay from within and sellers will find other venues that are less costly and more seller  friendly.

There is another old saying ebay should take note of

" Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.".