eBay Hacks, 2nd Edition

Appraise an eBayer’s Reputation

Quickly decipher a pattern of behavior from the comments in a Member Profile profile to determine someone’s trustworthiness.

Trust is the foundation of the eBay marketplace. Whether you’re a buyer about to make a purchase from an eBay seller, or you’re a seller trying to figure out if a customer is a deadbeat bidder, you can use the feedback system to gauge the trustworthiness of any eBay member in just a few seconds. Unfortunately, the information that’s most useful isn’t necessarily right on the surface.

Click the feedback score, the number in parentheses shown next to any eBay user’s member ID, to view his Member Profile page. At the top of the profile page, eBay shows a summary and distribution of past feedback comments, as shown in Figure 1-1.

Here you’ll see the total number of positive, negative, and neutral comments, as well as how many of each were received by the user in the past month, the past six months, and the past year. These statistics add a little perspective to older entries, especially negative ones.

Each member’s numeric feedback score is also supplemented with a “positive feedback” percentage, which is calculated by dividing the number of positive comments by the total number of positive and negative comments. The problem is that this figure can be somewhat misleading. For instance, a member with 19 positive comments and 1 negative comment would have a positive feedback percentage of 95%. Compare this with someone who, having received ...