Feedback means so much to sellers on eBay…
In fact, it can mean the difference between being in business one day, and being out of business the next…
Unfortunately for the sellers of eBay, the same feedback situation is not so true for buyers who abuse the system. Yes, there are buyers who abuse the system and they do it knowing full well that eBay Trust & Safety will do little or nothing about it.
Buyers who accumulate a large amount of feedback on eBay, seem to have the ability to coast under the radar of Trust & Safety.
The account above belongs to one such buyer, yes buyer…”Greenteapass“
The feedback from this account looks more like that of a titanium PowerSeller, rather than a simple everyday buyer. This account has absolutely no feedback earned from sales.
Greenteapass has accumulated 11,436 feedback as a buyer, since joining eBay on September 11, 2006.
This equates to this buyer receiving over 20 feedback per day, everyday for a little less than 2 years. A Superstar buyer in the view of eBay executives? Look more closely at the real feedback numbers of greenteapass and the truth will be revealed. This Superstar buyer has received 147 Negative, 73 Neutral and has had 2 negative feedback removed just in the last year. (Source Toolhaus.org)
Similar feedback numbers would certainly close down all but the highest grossing sellers on eBay.
If a seller were to earn these kinds of feedback numbers, no one would argue that the seller should be pushed out of the eBay system, never to sell again… But what about buyers who do not perform as expected?
The only answer we can find lies in the fact that this buyer still has an active account even though from the previous years history one could conclude that this account should be suspended. Now that sellers can no longer leave honest feedback, there is little chance of that.
What happens if a single eBay account accumulates 147 Negative feedbacks in less than a year? The answer apparently depends upon which side of the transaction your happen to be on. Is this a real system of good business practices? Would a credit card company allow this kind of history from a single account?
Why or how would a buyer accumulate these kinds of eBay feedback numbers?
One theory suggests some buyers buy merchandise from inexperienced sellers and/or sellers on the verge of losing eBay selling status, because of one or two previous negatives, with the intent to ask for partial or full refunds after the merchandise has been delivered. Or using PayPal to charge back purchases on unwitting sellers who do not get signed receipts for shipments.
Greenteapass has disappointed a great deal of sellers with the way he/she or they have done business. The image below had to be compressed considerably just to fit it in this page. It shows the entire negative and neutral feedback history of just this one buyer over the last year.
Remember… With the new feedback system, we will never know about buyers like greenteapass. No feedback trail can track this buyers fraudulent intentions, or any other. We must depend upon Trust & Safety at eBay to keep us safe from these kinds of buyers… Scroll down or follow the toolhaus.org link to see how well that has worked out in the past.
I wonder if greenteapass knows about the new no negative for buyers feedback system at eBay?
First three images below are just screenshots of portions of the bad feedback for this one buyer. The 4th image is a very compressed image of the entire page of bad feedback from Toolhaus.org, just to give an idea of how much poor feedback this one BUYER has accumulated in one year.
For more information about Greenteapass, follow this link to a google search for the eBay name:
Hi Scott,
The list of negs is too compressed for me to read, I’m curious if you can give a general idea of what they are for, is there any sort of pattern?
To be honest, while this buyer certainly has left some unhappy sellers, I’d deal with him, no problem. The overall percentage is still decent (I’ve sold to worse, though I don’t think I’ve ever had a buyer with such a high number) and to block him could cost you a lot of potential business.
The first thing that I wonder though, about the high volume of negatives, is aren’t any sellers filing an Unpaid Item Dispute against the buyer?
Though perhaps the compressed details would answer that question, maybe the buyer pays for everything and then somehow causes trouble for sellers afterwards — I just did go looking though, and went through 28 pages of positives before reaching the first neg, which was for non-payment.
Thanks for posting,
Cliff
Cliff,
If you look at the dates of those positives, most have occurred since the “no negatives or neutrals from sellers” rule went into effect.
Follow the link(s) to Toolhaus.org and read the feedback, I am sorry about the compression of the screenshot image, but unfortunately the original screenshot was over 11,000 pixels in length.
This buyer does not receive unpaid item disputes simply because the buyer pays with PayPal… waits until the item arrives and then the buyer files a dispute with eBay claiming the item never arrived. This buyer knows how to win these disputes when the sellers do not send shipments requesting signature confirmation upon delivery.
The buyer has over 1100 feedback since the no negative or neutral rules went into effect at eBay. Do you think he suddenly just stopped filing disputes with PayPal for non-delivery at the same time?
I understand your reluctance to go looking for bad in each bidder, and I agree. I don’t look at bidders feedback on my items because all I really care about is being paid for what I sell. In this case though, I could be burned just as fast as the last 200 or more sellers in 2007/2008 who actually filed negs or neutrals against this one seller.
Its a problem – and it should be addressed by eBay and PayPal and Trust & Safety.
Cliff,
I added some better screenshots so you can read some of the comments. I cant make room here for all of these comments at that resolution, but I think this will clarify your question on whether you would like to sell to this particular buyer.
Thanks, Scott, that’s much better!
It definitely looks like there was a suspension in effect at one time at least, which is at least good to see.
Good catch, you’re right those 28 pages of positives are all since the new rule went into effect, thanks for pointing out.
(Which stresses even harder the ways around this rule, after scrolling through 28 pages of positives, my first though was, c’mon this guy is obviously good most of the time. Now, we’ll never know).
What I don’t get though, maybe I’m just naive, is that still a gigantic amount of positives he’s racked up. He has to have completed a good deal of these transactions on the up and up, no?
In other words, even if he is gaming the system here on some sales, he hasn’t figured out a way to achieve 97.7% positive feedback though 100% scamming, right?
Or am I totally missing something and even the majority of the positives are a fraud?
This is apparently a buyers agent or buying ring who has a representative in LA, items are shipped there and then forwarded by container to Korea.
You are not dealing with one person. If you were in Korea you would pay them to use the service, get a password and bid. When you get around to paying them they pay on your behalf etc.
The problems arise in that they require their purchase ID number to be written on the outside of the package, not the auction number. This is so they can connect the package to their buyer.
The deliveries to their warehouse/garage whatever in LA are in quantity and quite often the USPS does not scan DC.
They have several high FB ID. I believe geopass is one, greeteapass, how this is compatible with eBay rules is incomprehensible.
Like everything else on eBay these days I guess.
Block em
Henrietta is correct. They are using multiple ID’s. I’ve dealt with the latter mentioned by Henrietta. That one can be googled as well. I had provided a non-paying bidder strike for that ID at one time. Suddenly he decided to pay after all. As far as I was concerned, the deal was over – I then immediately refunded the payment and retained the strike. Shortly thereafter he was NARU – possibly by having received another strike from another seller. About a week later that ID however, he then was active again.
This only happens by persuasion. They constantly send numerous emails to seller to please remove the strike (in very bad English btw.), with all sorts of excuses. Some sellers then actually do give in and remove the strike – they possibly even pay in order to accomplish this – to either stay in business or to have their NARU relinquished.
A Google search on both ID’s will reveal more ID’s connected to this scenario – in addition it may possibly even explain why they are being retained by eBay. Whatever the actual reason may be, I find their practices horrendous!
I’ve contacted eBay about this, and they are aware – but of course are not in the position to reveal any further details.
PS> Correction: I’ve dealt with the first one mentioned by Henrietta.
Last correction: I guess I’m just too excited after reading about this. The actual ID I intended to refer to is: geoctober
Look at this one…The wonderful BUY.COM, that they brought on board. How is giving ALL these customers HORRIBLE service, good for ebay? Granted they sell more, but does it look like they may be going a little overboard to where they can’t keep up, with their auctions? Drop it down to maybe 10,000 auctions, at a time and stop padding the numbers.
http://toolhaus.org/cgi-bin/negs?User=buy&Dirn=Received+by&ref=home
Hi Tracy!
Thanks for your comments!
I think Buy’s feedback is a bit of a different story. Of course when you look at the Toolhaus.org results it certainly appears Buy.com has a great deal of negative feedback on eBay…
But when you compare the numbers of negatives versus positives the feedback rating is actually very high at 99%.
eCommerce in general strives to maintain a 80% positive feedback rating on service. Only eBay requires customer feedback numbers in the high 90’s. For an eCommerce merchant like buy to come into eBay and maintain a 99% feedback number is impressive.
I know it may not seem impressive if you are one of the negative feedback responders but on a whole, with all of the shipping snafu’s and other problems which can occur when a business sells on the scale Buy does, it is not too darn bad.
I buy from Buy.com on a regular basis (the main site, not the eBay store) and I must say they have always had great customer service in every transaction I have completed with them over the years.
My article above was focused on the buyers who are really not performing and how the new feedback system will in effect give amnesty to these buyers because it seems eBay has let them slide, even when we could see the negatives. Now that we can not see the negatives, do we expect eBay to get tougher on the greenteapass’s of the world?