Feedback is an important part of Ebay's system, and knowing how to interpret it will help you have a smoother ride on ebay.

From the ebay help pages:

"Feedback represents a person's permanent reputation as a buyer or seller on eBay. It is made up of comments and ratings left by other eBay members you bought and sold to. There are three types of feedback ratings: positive, neutral and negative. The sum of these feedback ratings are shown as a number in parentheses next to your User ID."

The feedback rating appears as a number near an Ebay user's name. The higher the number, the better, but keep in mind a very high number does not always mean good news. You should now look at the percentage of positive feedback. For example, I would trust more someone who has 50 positive feedback rating with 100% positive , than someone who has 50,000 positive feedback rating with 95% positive. The latter basically has received 2,500 negative feedbacks! I would proceeed with caution when dealing with somebody with so many negatives. So, you've seen that a low feedback rating can sometime be better than a much higher one, depending on the percentage.

Now that you know the rating and percentage, are you done? No! Even a high rating with a 100% positive score can be misleading. You should hit the feedback link for that user and actually READ his feedback. Do not be lazy! this will save you a lot of trouble. Things to look for when reading the feedback:

-Read the comments themselves. Does the seller ship on time? Are items as described?

-Are the feedbacks from buyers or sellers? (It will say in the feedback link) If you are buying something big, yet all of the feedback the seller has is from BUYING rather than SELLING, it means the seller does not have much selling experience. It does not mean necessarilty that he is a bad seller, only that his feedback has a bit less weight in regards to the reaction.

-Click on the items themselves to see the type/value of items the seller received feedback for. If you are buying a $1000 Computer system, has the seller received good feedback when selling computer systems in the past? If you see the seller has indeed gotten good comments from customers buying computer systems, you can feel safer. However, if seller has only sold Pez dispensers and now is selling a computer system, you need to be wary. Value is also important, if seller has 100+ positives from selling $1000+ items than he can generally be trusted for this $1000 computer, but if he has 100+ rating  from selling $5 Pez Dispensers and is now selling a $1000 computer, his feedback has less weight for this $1000 transaction.

Most importantly: Use common sense! 99.9% of the sellers here are honest, but always look for anything suspicious to spot those who are dishonest.

Doing all of this might take a few minutes of your time, but will save you a lot of grief and trouble.

 After the transaction has been completed, leave factual feedback regarding how it went- was item received quickly, as described, how was the communication from the seller?

For more information on feedback visit the ebay help pages at http://pages.ebay.com/help/feedback/questions/feedback.html