How to Check a Seller's Reputation on eBay (and Why You Should)
When you buy something from an eBay seller, you're giving them your money and hoping to get something in return. As much as eBay can give you many guarantees of safety, nothing is certain: if you keep giving your money to scammers without checking, chances are you won't get all that money back.
Therefore, you should always check the seller's reputation or "feedback rating". This is a quick and easy to read summary of their history as an eBay seller to give you some idea of whether you should trust them with your money. Buying anything is a calculated risk: you want to minimize that risk.
How to check your feedback rating.
On each item's description page, there is a box about the seller in the upper right corner called "Seller Information". It includes the seller's name, feedback score and percentage of positive feedback, as well as the stars they have received.
Different colored stars are given to eBay sellers depending on their rating in this order: Yellow, Blue, Turquoise, Purple, Red, Green, Shooting Yellow, Shooting Turquoise, Shooting Purple, Shooting Red. Anyone with a "shooting" star is an experienced eBay member you should trust.
Clicking on the seller's name will take you to a more detailed view of their reputation - the "member profile" page. This page shows the total number of people who gave them a positive or negative rating, as well as a breakdown by time. You can also view the complete history of all comments ever left on them, with the most recent.
What to look for.
You might assume that anyone with a very high number can be trusted, but that's not always true. More importantly, look at their positive feedback percentage – and anything below 99% you should really consider a red flag and investigate further.
Look at the first visible page with the latest transactions: are there any negative comments? What are they saying? Consider the experiences of others because they could happen to you if you deal with this person. However, be careful not to penalize sellers unfairly if they have done bad things on eBay in the past but have since improved. You should look at the breakdown by time and ignore any negative feedback that was left a long time ago. However, you should also sit up and take notice if a seller seems to have received exceptionally bad feedback in the past month.
Now that you know who to trust, it's worth learning a little more about how different types of auctions work so you don't accidentally slip up and ruin yourself and your feedback page. Our next email will be about the different types of auctions you may come across during your time on eBay.
Many new sellers don’t realize how important pricing
is when it comes to eBay auctions. Many don’t even
realize that ‘pricing’ needs to be done. eBay is an
auction site after all! But eBay auctions are not quite
the same as the auctions you attend in the offline
world. In fact, quite a bit of work goes into
determining and setting prices
why the article is pending.
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