I believe there is potential here to actually make a dent with eBay. PLEASE read this guide and vote it into their field of vision and show them this IS a very serious issue for buyers and sellers alike. If you have ideas about how to add to this that I may not have considered, please do contact me. And I am VERY grateful to those who have already offered wonderful input about how to improve it further!  'You' in this guide refers to eBay.

Short-term testing in Europe is NOT the same as testing in your own country. You should have tested this more thoroughly before applying it to your millions of home-base customers - and by customers, I also mean your sellers - we buy services from you and are therefore YOUR customers.

It degrades the value of existing feedback ratings and helps protect bad sellers - Many of your finest sellers have worked hard for years to get and keep excellent feedback ratings. We've worked hard to get not just positives, but glowing positives, and buyers knew those were sincere. Before, at least some of the discontented buyers stung by scam artists would leave neutrals or negs to help warn other buyers. Now, even fewer buyers will ever leave a neutral, a neg, or even a 'soft positive' for a bad seller, preferring instead to safely ding the stars. And glowing feedback is now as likely to be a 'dont look at me, im not the one who dinged you' front as it is to be sincere. The scammers and gougers are not the ones who are upset about this - they are delighted to know their chances of ever getting bad feedback are almost non-existent now and that their percents will be rising. If the bad sellers already weren't deterred by a fear of neutrals or negs, they certainly aren't going to be daunted by having a lower star rating. Honest buyers have lost their single most powerful tool for assessing sellers, trading a real warning for a nebulous and vague starfraction, and dishonest sellers and buyers have been handed an extra tool for leverage in their scams.

The timing was extremely inappropriate. You knew USPS rates were about to change, yet you put a buyer rating for shipping costs in place at exactly the time frame where buyers would be charged the new rates but either not be used to it yet or not even know rates went up. Pressure to lower shipping costs may cause some sellers to forego any additional packing materials - is that really what you want?

How can we be rated on communication when ebays system often glitches, when many buyers don't use or check the email address associated with their paypal account, and when many mail servers classify ebay messages as spam? How can we be rated on shipping time when we have ZERO control over the speed once we drop it off? Should we all now refuse to ship internationally, since that is boiling down to picking between losing shipping cost stars (for fast expensive shipping) or losing shipping time stars (for cheaper but slower shipping)? Yes, you advise considering some of these factors - you have also advised buyers for years to contact sellers before leaving neutral or negative feedback and yet that is very often disregarded.

The page itself is cluttered, the main feedback rating is totally de-emphasized, and the expanded information makes it even harder than it already was to dig responsibly as a potential buyer to get an overview of the sellers feedback. The eyecatcher on that page should be the actual feedback scores we have worked on for years, and until you provide us with better filters for viewing neutrals and negs, we need a more streamlined display. You have made the already difficult job of gauging big sellers even harder. You had a great system, it just needed a boost to enhance using the information that was already there, and a little added effort in educating buyers on how to assess that information.

The anonymity makes it unhelpful as a tool for sellers to 'improve themselves further' - the person who has to wait three days for shipment may be totally fine with it. The person who pays at 4 pm and wants to know why we didn't leave work early to ship their item the same day, may be unhappy and rate us down. If we get low stars on item description, and don't know WHICH items are in question, we can't even begin to figure out which ones need further clarification. If we don't know what ratings go with what transactions, it is meaningless because we have no way of assessing if it is a legitimate concern or just unrealistic expectations, and no way of associating it with specific auctions or business habits we may need to improve on.  Other buyers can't use it to judge us effectively because they have no way of checking the person who rated us and putting it in context with the item and buyer- before if they saw a neutral or neg, they could get a fuller picture of the transaction. And a buyer with a grudge or an agenda could buy cheap items just to trash someone's star ratings and they would never know. This is especially serious when it is a competitor, because a large seller can damage a smaller seller's ratings with a few items, but even if the smaller seller were to do the same back, it would never have as much of an effect. If we can't identify and block a vindictive bidders, we cannot effectively protect ourselves here as a sellers, and we can't do anything to tip off other sellers they might deal with in the future.

I understand that you want to protect buyers from retaliatory feedback but what about protecting sellers from it? Retaliatory feedback has never been an issue that affects only one side. Sellers are often in situations where some buyers deserve neutrals or negs that we will never give because we don't want an undeserved vindictive hit on our own feedback.

The extreme transparency in showing items and prices is a massive deterrent to this marketplace. Yes, that information was already available - I know that. But there is a HUGE difference between what someone can find out by investing some effort and time when they are motivated, and having all that information broadcast loudly. Some examples that will hurt ebay sales and therefore YOUR fees as well as our income:

•      A buyer purchases a Gay Pride item. They don't care if someone who really wants to dig might see it. But now that purchase is right on their page, in all caps, and quite possibly will be seen by friends and coworkers who were not even looking for such information. A buyer might feel awkward about many items - for example, does everyone really need to know my pant size, or whether I need a particular type of hemorrhoid pads? If I need a book on surviving abuse, a book I may well have come to ebay to buy because I felt awkward buying it in person? If I buy gifts on an id my family uses? Which kid I spent more on? If I am able to buy solid gold cat statues and may have a small fortune in my home? Many of your buyers object to this on principle even though they have never bought a single item they personally feel self-conscious about.
•    As an extension of the above, consider this common scenario: Many people may have occasional items they don't want to announce getting on their feedback page, and surf eBay at work for items they don't care at all about being seen. Now, anyone who surfs ebay from work to shop for innocuous items needs to be concerned that their employer may see more personal purchases (NOT made from work) from a monitoring program that captures their feedback page as a whole. Before all they had to do was not shop for such things at work; now, they may well not do ANY ebay shopping from work.
•     A casual seller collects props for shows and movies, or seeks out complete collections of books or magazines. They may find all the individual items fairly cheaply - after investing hours researching exactly what they need and more hours sifting through all the possible auctions, as well as paying shipping each time. And now that they have their lot together and want to sell it, their potential buyers look at the list of prices they paid, with no regard for their time and effort, and lower their concept of what they are willing to bid.
•     A store seller who used to accept lower than desirable Best Offers, whether due to a financial crunch or trying to cut a deal for a great return customer, will now need to reconsider - because future buyers will see that price and refuse to pay more for a similar item. Likewise, it will discourage use of the sale function. (Please note: This issue HAS been addressed by eBay, thank you! It remains with this note both to give eBay credit for listening, and as a gentle reminder to those who say there's no point objecting that we can make a difference!)
•     A seller who has several items with similar or identical titles but at different price levels will have the same problem, people will see the sold prices for the lower end ones and refuse to pay more for a higher end version thinking they are identical.
•     A crafter or reseller buy materials/bulk on ebay, a choice you should certainly support. They have competitors who would love to know exactly what materials they used so they can create ripoff copies, or offer identical items. Now they have a simple, one-glance commonly known way to see exactly what we bought and from who. Likewise, if a seller is suddenly selling a lot of a specific colour or style - why should their competitors be able to use their feedback page to have a one-glance shortcut to finetuning what to offer themselves?
•    Why create pressure to make more auctions private when shill bidding is such a serious issue? Or more private buyer ids when they make many sellers nervous?

It goes completely against the core principles of the site especially 'We believe that an honest, open environment can bring out the best in people' and 'We encourage you to treat others the way you want to be treated'.

What can you, the people who make up ebays 'constituency' do? This is the biggest problem I have seen in over six years here. There are many possible approaches and ideas for how to communicate your feelings, and I urge anyone who wants to discuss those to go to the feedback forum and participate, as well as contacting eBay directly.

What I do NOT support - Do not refuse to leave feedback for your buyers - this isn't their fault. Do not punish buyers who rate your stars low - they probably aren't even sure how this is all supposed to work yet. Do not assume we can't possibly have an effect - some of the issues from the first versions of this guide have been addressed, and I believe that when the overall effects are better understood, eBay will see this differently than they did going into it, and either remove it or alter it substantially so that buyers, sellers and eBay itself can all benefit :)