eBay feedback Rating System and feedback Score Under Threat From Scammers

Online scammers have found various ways to circumvent the eBay feedback system.

After an eBay Buyer has purchased an item from an eBay Seller, it is usual practice for him/her to leave a feedback comment about the Seller. And conversely, the Seller also leaves a feedback comment about the Buyer.

These comments - categorised into three groups – positive, neutral and negative – are usually valuable indicators of your reputation as a buyer or seller on eBay as they are included, along with an overall feedback score, in your member profile.

Your member’s feedback score is simply the total number of unique positive feedback reports that you have received minus the number of unique negative feedback reports received.

At first glance, a very large feedback score appears impressive but it is only one component of the member’s feedback rating. Equally important is the feedback percentage, which gives an indication of how well the member is performing overall.

This eBay feedback system has long been the backbone of the eBay buying and selling system as it enables users to ascertain important information about who they are dealing with, by examining a users’ previous transactions, and then deciding whether or not this is the type of person they want to deal with.

Simply put, if a seller has ripped off, annoyed, and/or stolen from other people, or if the seller has a reputation for sending damaged, broken, misrepresented, or otherwise sub-standard products, they deserve and will have negative feedback, and users should avoid them.

Can You Still Rely On And Trust The eBay Feedback System?

Unfortunately, online scammers have found various ways to circumvent the eBay feedback system, either through cheating the feedback system, falsely obtaining positive feedback, or stealing the positive feedback of other members. These eBay fraudsters have found ways to artificially elevate their seller ratings, by conducting transactions with friends or using alternate online identities to post positive feedback about themselves.

There are three types of a shill or fake feedback scam. The first one is when a seller uses multiple eBay accounts in order to increase the number of his or her positive feedback. This is more commonly know as “feedback padding”, and is used by scammers in order to fool unsuspecting buyers into bidding on the scammer’s auction by giving them a false sense of security.

The second type of a shill or fake feedback is called “feedback bombing”. Feedback bombing occurs when a person uses multiple eBay user IDs in order to intentionally damage the reputation of another eBay member by leaving numerous negative feedbacks.  

The third type of fake feedback scam is called “feedback extortion”. It occurs when a scammer blackmails the unsuspecting victim into doing something by threatening him or her with numerous negative feedbacks. In summary this means that scammers can have accounts with high numbers of positive feedback, little or no negative feedback, and the overall appearance of the perfect seller.

Protecting Yourself Against feedback scams

So how can you protect yourself from scammers who have circumvented the eBay feedback system?

All the experts recommend that you shouldn’t only look at the number of positive and negative feedback a seller has, but also look at the feedback comments themselves, look at who the buyers and sellers were, look at what was for sale, find out how much the item sold for, and determine whether the seller is now selling similar items at similar prices. In other words you should:

• Look at Who the Buyers and Sellers Were
• Look at What Was For Sale
• Look at the actual Feedback Comments
• Find Out How Much the Item Sold For

New Software Protects Against feedback scams

The problem here is that all the above tasks are very consuming especially when done manually. Just imagine, for example having to review an eBay Powerseller with a Feedback rating of 5,000.

But don’t worry help is at hand A team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a technique to help validate feedback scores, having analyzed roughly one million transactions between almost 66,000 eBay users. Although they have not yet released it to the public, the researchers developed a software program that provides a trustworthiness score for individual user.

In the meantime, Dave Guindon, a software developer from Canada has developed specialised software to automate the Feedback Review process. The software is called “Feedback Analyzer PRO and is now on sale.

I recently had the opportunity to “test drive” this software and I am in the process of evaluating it. More on this later.

In the meantine, I have determined that it has the following advantages and benefits for both eBay Buyers and eBay Sellers:

• User Friendly – very easy to use
• Very fast
• Available for the 4 largest eBay sites – eBay US, Canada, Australia & United Kingdom
• Fully Automated
• Excellent Camtasia Videos and online Help to install & operate the Software
• Able to save data as a CSV or GRD file for use later
• Able to sort auction items online
• Able to sort auction items data under several criteria. For example:
• By Buyer
• By Seller
• By eBay member ID
• Bs transaction Code
• By positive, neutral and negative feedback
• Built-in AD Creation Tool functionality should help eBay Sellers generate more sales
• Price – originally priced at $77 but now available for $37.00 including Master Resale Rights.
• Lifetime updates and support included in the above price

I highly recommend Dave’s software as a MUST have!

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