Just a quick note about this — I was happy to see that eBay announced on Thursday that they will be retracting 2 of the disastrous changes that they made to their feedback system earlier this year.

First, neutrals will no longer count “against” sellers when their “positive” percentage score is calculated. This is good. That eBay decided that a “neutral” was the same as a “negative” was asinine in the first place, and certainly buyers never got the memo that leaving a neutral would negatively hamper a seller’s score.

Second, eBay will be re-instating a form of the Mutual Feedback Withdrawl system to let buyers change feedback after they’ve left it. Until now, feedback left under the new system was absolutely final. Again, buyers didn’t get the memo. Their news write-up pains itself to say that it will not be the “same” system as before — after all, that would admit that they were wrong in taking it away in the first place. God forbid. Among the biggest change is that a dissatisfied buyer will actually be able to change a negative feedback into a positive one, which was not possible under the old Mutual Feedback Withdrawl system.

As cynical as I am of the auction giant, it’s good to see that for the first time this year, eBay isn’t biting the hand that feeds them. (To eBay: I’m talking about the sellers, who actually pay you, despite your new president’s claim that the buyers are eBay’s customers, not the sellers.)

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 12th, 2008 at 6:28 am and is filed under eBay. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.