Hi,
B= buyer S= seller
As a B, I don't plan to purchase from eBay anymore except as a last option.
On eBay discussion boards, other B's are now boycotting eBay! But it's S's who are most irrate. and Ebay has been removing complaining postings at an ever rapid rate!
I'm not against having a star rating system but...
As an S, the star system is detrimental for at least 5 reasons:
1) it is arbitrary depending on the mood of the B (e.g. seller A sends "same day" gets 5 stars, seller B "sends two days" gets 3, Seller C "next day" gets 4 stars)
2)some B's will only give 5 stars to S's offering FREE S&H, thus forcing me to add S&H to the item price to match the competition raising my eBay fees
3) being annonymous it makes me vulnerable to competitors skewing my ratings.
4) since each transaction is unique & I don't know which transaction was downgraded, I don't know where to improve or who is not 100% satisfied to rectify.
5) buyers who return items or don't pay can still evaluate me and I can't get that cleaned up in protest since I don't know who did it.
6) some S's sell massive amounts, so one downgrade won't hurt; for lower volume sellers, a low star rating will hurt me for a good while.
As a B,
1) I don't want my most trusted Sellers even thinking I might be the 2-faced SOB who wrote that s/he's so great, yet rated her/him down in the stars.
2) no privacy in purchasing
I don't like having a list of my purchases shown to the world so blatantly. I've already gotten a message showing my shopping profile on eBay! it gave recommendations of other listings & sellers I might be interested in! "Since you are interested in...., then...."!! Somehow this message arrived outside ebay which means someone has my email address, profiled my interests and is spamming me! this could be someone I purchased from who has my email address or got it by some other means.
As a B, what i paid for an item is easily determined even tho it isn't shown on my feedback list. For small purchases this is no big deal, but for more expensive items home security concerns me. I DO have a PO box, but many sellers will not ship to a post office box especially high end $$ items.
It used to be too time consuming to develop a customer profile, but now, each customer can be profiled in seconds. If i buy an expensive item, my email address is not too difficult to get and I can hounded outside eBay.
As an S,
I don't like the $$ amount customers paid for an item being shown in a blatant list. Sometimes I list items as a "loss leader" to generate people to my store. Or I run clearance sales. Prices are going up for similar items, yet when customers see how low an item sold for earlier, they more than likely won't purchase as they feel I'm charging too much.
All in all the so-called benefits of the new rating system are low to detrimental to me as a S; while as a B, I won't go by star ratings due to the arbitrary/annonymous nature.
As I do purchasing on Amazon, I will use the % feedback as my guide. I see S's at Amazon with low 90%'s & all five stars, AND I've seen 100% positive S's with 4.- stars. Therefore, I go by the positive percent score.