One of my biggest gripes about eBay has always been the feedback system and how it works – in fact I have written about it previously and often refer sellers to this post when they write to me asking for feed back. So I was interested to see on the BBC website today that eBay are due to bring in some changes to the system from May. However, the change seems to be to simply not allow anything but positive feedback. It seems that people were reluctant to leave negative feedback for a seller in case they retaliated by similarly leaving a negative score.
The approach taken by eBay is not the solution – what is needed is something similar to that taken by rentacoder. Here feedback is not displayed until both parties have placed feedback and this is done blind. Only when both parties have posted do the results get shown on the website. This way there is real encouragement to leave meaningful feedback without the retaliation that may happen otherwise. Sure this requires work but given the amount I have paid in fees over the last couple of weeks I reckon they can afford to implement it.