The Emotion of Negative Feedback on EBay

The psychology of feedback on eBay digs down into the primeval emotions: resentment, injustice, even outright hate. Nowadays, buyers cannot receive negative feedback, unless they fail to pay. So, no matter how buyers behave, as long as the payment was sent, they are safe. You might wonder, what could a buyer do, beyond not paying, that was bad?

Well, every seller has a tale. One of my mildly annoying experiences involved a buyer who purchased a book, and then sent a snippy email telling me to wrap it with care and send it soon, implying that I was not going to do those things. A series of other commands followed. Then, later in the process, the same customer sent me a lecture on giving feedback, how I needed to take the selling process seriously and give buyers positive feedback.

Well, the fact was that after fielding the emails, I felt like I had wasted a lot of time doing so. I felt that the tone of the emails was mean and condescending. There was no way I was going to give the buyer positive feedback, because the buyer had been rude, and made the selling experience a miserable one.

But I followed rule one of feedback, be nice, go out of your way to help, and never, ever, send a snippy email in return. While I never did give the good feedback, I never let on how annoying the customer had been.

Another time I made a sale in France. I sent many emails to the customer, trying to verify an address, with no response. A few days later, I received negative feedback over the amount of time the shipping was taking. Again, I followed my rule. Never send an angry message. It makes things much worse.

Still again, I got an irate email from a customer, wondering why her book had not arrived but everyone else who ordered on that day had received theirs. She had read the feedback and seen that I had received good responses from other customers. I tried to reassure her that living in Canada, the mail sometimes took a long time to cross over from the US. She wouldn't listen, and gave me negative feedback.

I held my tongue. A day later she received the package and could tell from the post mark that I had sent the book long ago. The mail was indeed to blame. I don't know how she did it, but she managed to withdraw the negative feedback and change it to positive, and she posted an apology.

Had I let my sense of injustice get out of control, and sent a mean email, she never would have done that.

In the end, the best advice is, don't have an ego. When you get a negative, and it will happen, just brush it off, be nice, and move on to the next sale.