SolveYourProblem
Article Series:
Small Business Guide To Buying Items:
eBay Auctions
How
to Check an eBay Seller’s Reputation
by Jeff Cohen
When you buy something from an eBay seller,
you are giving them your money and hoping that you will get
something in return. However many guarantees of safety eBay
might make to you, nothing is certain: if you just give your
money to scammers all the time without doing any checks then
the chances are you won’t get all of that money back.
That’s why you should always check the seller’s reputation,
or ‘feedback rating’. This is a quick and easy-to-read summary
of their history as an eBay seller, which gives you some idea
of whether or not you should trust them with your money. Buying
anything is a calculated risk: you want to minimise that risk.
How
to Check Feedback Ratings
On each item’s description page, there is a box in the top-right
hand corner about the seller, with the title ‘Seller information’.
This contains the seller’s name, their feedback score, and
their positive feedback percentage, as well as any stars they
have earned.
Different coloured stars are given to eBay sellers depending
on their rating, in this sequence: yellow, blue, turquoise,
purple, red, green, shooting yellow, shooting turquoise, shooting
purple, shooting red. Anyone with a ‘shooting’ star is an experienced
eBay member who you should be able to trust.
If you click on the seller’s name, you can get to a more detailed
view of their reputation – their ‘member profile’ page. This
page shows the total number of people who gave them a positive
or negative rating, as well as a breakdown by time. You can
also see a complete history of all the comments that have ever
been left about them, with the most recent first.
What
to Look For
You might assume that anyone with a very high number can be
trusted, but that isn’t always true. It is more important to
look at their positive feedback percentage – and you should
really consider anything below 99% to be a red flag and investigate
further.
Take a look through the first visible page with the most recent
transactions: are there any negative comments? What do they
say? Take others’ experiences into account, as they could happen
to you if you deal with this person. Be careful not to punish
sellers unfairly, however, if they did bad things in their
past on eBay but have improved since. You should look at the
breakdown by time and ignore any negative feedback that was
left a long time ago. Equally, though, you should sit up and
pay attention if a seller seems to have been left an out-of-character
amount of bad feedback in the last month or so.
Now
that you know who to trust, it is worth learning a little
more about how the different kinds of auctions work, so that
you don’t accidentally slip up and make yourself and your feedback
page look bad. # # # # # SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
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