eBay blocks sellers from posting negative feedback on buyers

In an unusual move, eBay has done away with the ability for sellers to leave negative and neutral feedback on eBay buyers. Earlier in the system before the change, a buyer and a seller could leave negative feedback on each other, which according to reports on Digg have been used in a retaliatory way to get negative remarks moved from both sellers and buyers.

Will this raise the quality of buyers and sellers on eBay, probably not, what is very cool is the back ground conversations on Digg about the issue, more than one is asking for Google to come up with a better system. With Amazon’s auction system all but dead in the grave, and smaller houses unable to attract a viable audience, is Google the answer here?

They have most of the necessary things required, they have a check out system, they have their chat system, they have a robust backend system, bandwidth and data centers around the world. Why would Google want to do this? There is already a large amount of bad blood between Google and eBay over the checkout system in the first place; would Google really want to antagonize their best advertising customer?

Interesting concept but very little concrete to make something like this happen unless it is buried deep within the Google skunk works an no one is talking (which is unlikely, even a word of this would generate more blogging interest than the Microsoft offer to take over Yahoo, or the release of any Apple Product at MAC World).

eBay’s real issue is credibility and fee’s, they have done something about the fee’s portion of the problem. The credibility part of the process is centered on the buyer seller feedback system. Any system is going to have abuses, depending on the level of abuse, or the perceived abused is what eBay is going after.

The perception of feedback extortion seen on any site from Amazon to Alibris to anything else is nothing new. Both buyers and sellers can be over aggressive when it comes to feedback. The one ups man ship can get ugly fast.

Some instances look like the reaction of a startup CEO hearing that their baby is ugly and no one will want to buy it. Some buyers and sellers use feedback as a way to extort concessions from each other. No system is immune, but it would be more important to make a better system, than do away with the system in total.