I missed this six months ago, but I guess some huge changes have been made to the way ebay handles negative feedback. This is potentially a huge deal for people that deal-hunt on ebay for things like open-box items, used phones, refurbished devices, etc. Some sellers that have incredibly huge volumes of sales and seemingly stellar feedback ratings have been getting a free pass on wasting everyone's time and lying about the condition of items for many years. Apparently that all changed back in September:

https://www.reddit.com/r/eBaySellers/comments … eedback_if_you/

To Quote the post above:
"The Federal Trade Commission's recent Final Rule Banning Fake Reviews and Testimonials - requires businesses to avoid any practice that could appear to suppress negative feedback. To remain compliant with this and other new global regulations, starting September 3, we'll no longer remove negative or neutral feedback in the following returns situations:

*The seller offered free returns, handled the return, and issued a refund

*An item was returned used or damaged, and the seller deducted an amount from the buyer's refund"

Basically, prior to this change, if the seller offered a full refund to the buyer, then the seller is nearly always able to remove the buyer's bad feedback. So, unless you kept the item and did not ask for a refund, you could not leave bad feedback without it getting removed... as if the seller trying to scam you by selling an obviously rebuilt phone in a fake box as "new" or "open box" was totally okay as long as they let you refund it. Basically, you had to take a personal financial loss just to give others a heads up that the seller was no good, but it was never enough to bring down their feedback rating. If big seller with tens\hundreds of thousands of feedback had less than a 99% rating, it was a sign to stay away because it takes a lot of people being willing to bite the bullet to bring them down by 1%.

I had this happen last year when buying what ended up being a poorly refurbished (and still broken) phone sold as "new, open box" in a fake box with fake accessories... I left the bad feedback and it was deleted immediately. This was one of the top rated cell phone sellers on ebay.

And guys, I think this ebay policy change is making a real difference. The seller "vipoutlet" mainly sells Wal-Mart products that are likely returns, but given the nature of their business, they often send broken garbage that does not match the description. They are basically just putting the possibly-broken or incomplete returns directly on ebay with minimal inspection or testing because they are apparently making enough on the items that people are keeping to offset all of the stuff that people send back. Despite that horrible business model, they've always had a very high feedback score of at least 98%. But that seems to be changing. Look at their 12 month, 6 month and 1 month negatives...

Past 12 months = 6181 negatives

Past 6 months = 5437 negatives

Past 1 month = 1838 negatives

It looks like the policy change was made 5 1/2 months ago, and roughly 85-90% of the bad feedback they have received in the past 12 months has occurred in the past 6 months. Of course that includes the holiday buying season... However, with 1838 negatives in the past month, that works out to a possible 22,000 negatives over the next 12 months. That would absolutely destroy their feedback rating since they have received less than 20,000 positives in the past 12 months (and over 2500 neutrals).

This is a massive change for ebay. It will fundamentally change how these massive resellers do business. Hopefully it will stop them from being utterly horrible. I can only imagine how much time and energy is wasted by sending this garbage all over the country repeatedly, making people stressed out and upset for what amounts to no gain for anyone. Of course, availability of items will have to decrease and prices will absolutely have to increase if sellers like this are going to even attempt to salvage their ratings... but I think that has to be better than unscrupulous sellers getting away with attempted fraud potentially millions of times per year.

Sadly, it will be abused by people who take everything personally even if they are taken care of, so honest small-time sellers are going to suffer from time to time as well, but I think the majority of the impact from this will be on the large sellers that made zero effort to even avoid negative feedback. They knew they could just make the feedback go away by paying for a return shipping label (which they probably have huge contracts for that barely cost them anything per-shipment), where as honest small time sellers rarely have a big corporate cushion to fall back on in the first place so have always tried to avoid negatives.

Anyway, I'm sure there are a lot of deal hunters here and this is likely going to have a huge impact on how big sellers operate.

... or, the corporations behind these massive resellers (probably Wal-Mart themselves in the case of VIPOutlet) will push ebay to make concessions for them and it'll go back to business as usual.