Ebay's New Feedback Format

This morning I decided to catch up with leaving feedback for some sales made over the past month, I had several to leave for. In the past I have simply entered a comment like 'Great Transaction' etc, copied and pasted that for each sale, it saves a bunch of time.

Well apparently ebay doesn't like that now. I am supposed to share my 'experience' with each individual buyer. Their system is not allowing me to use the same feedback twice, I have to alter each comment slightly in order for their system to accept it. I don't know if I cold have exited the page and returned to nullify this, that still eats up time.

Ever notice that these people never change anything to benefit the customer?

hit space bar after pasting feedback comment. Unless it has changed for sellers, I use the same feedback comment on all purchases. It wont highlight leave feedback button till after space bar is pushed. Hope this helps.

Or if you're just using the mouse like me, hit Positive, paste your comment, and then hit Positive again before the finish button. But I agree with you the new system sucks.

I'm not sure why but I just left 10 feedbacks and was able to paste in my typical response with no problems.

So did I.

They're probably doing A/B testing, where different cohorts of users receive slightly different pages, so they can compare user response to the changes reflected in the different pages.

I've noticed recently when I did not have a store subscription I couldn't leave feedback in bulk, but when I do have a store subscription I can leave it in bulk with all the same message. I prefer the bulk method especially when I have to leave several hundred feedbacks in a day. One at a time? That's madness.

Oh I gave ebay feedback on their new feedback system - told them it horrible and slow.

I HATE the new system. I have no trouble cutting & pasting when leaving multiple feedbacks, but in the past, all I needed to do was click the comments bar and my laptop remembered my previously left comments regardless of how long ago I left them. All I had to do was click one of those and it would fill in the comments bar. This no longer works, so at least one feedback has to be fully typed out anew before cutting & pasting can be done for those remaining. An added step(s) that is really irksome and a time-waster. One probably unintended consequence of this that I've found on the selling side is that buyer-feedback is either short and without any helpful comments (eg "thanks"), or buyers simply blow off leaving any feedback at all since its such a pain.

Instruct buyers to leave feedback for one item in a combined order. Additional feedback after the first item in an order has no value. On the sell side I use the SixBit eCommerce Solution to minimizes contact with the ebay web site and I don't have time to look for anything to buy.

Application and database designers typically do not allow 'cut and paste' or other types of batched data entry. This kind of data entry results in data that is considered unreliable. Users have asked me for years to allow them to do this kind of batch data entry; these requests often would represent significant amount of time and money. But from a quality data perspective, it is considered 'cheating'. Allowing 'mindless' data entry greatly reduces the resulting value of the data.

Forcing users to consider each line item in an order independently is an additional cost, but a cost which is considered a good investment in quality data by every Fortune 500 company.

I understand why some folks want to batch data entry but those who rely upon the resulting metrics would rather no data get entered then to have to assume that a large percentage the data was 'cut and paste'.
Don

I wonder if ebay has considered the cost of its users just not bothering to give feedback at all, if they make it so inconvenient?

But back to the OP. Does the problem posting feedback occur in every browser, or only one browser?

Don, I don't question your notion that copy and paste is bad if employees are filling out on-line forms to capture data at the time it is being generated. I can also see the use in forms like on-line tax returns that must be filled out completely and correctly. However, ebay buyers are not employees and they are not filling out tax forms. Feedback is a courtesy and is not compulsory. If it is true that feedback cannot be pasted, it is likely that some buyers will stop posting it. I haven't seen many web applications that block copy and paste, even on-line tax forms.

HipStamp has a feature where past feedback can be memorized and reused if selected in the web form.

Feedback is first and foremost an ebay marketing tool. From ebay's perceptive a silent transaction is a good transaction, they got paid, they did not have any additional support costs. Life is good.

And there is the other side of this coin too; just it is makes it easier to legitimate use of the system it makes it easier for illegitimate use of the system. Want to build accounts for resale or to use as one of your 40-50 shill accounts? Just buy and sell cheap items between your accounts for a few hundred transactions and cut and paste feedbacks.

From a seller standpoint, what is the value of a cut and paste feedback? Other than learning that the buyer could not be bothered to type 12 words, what seller would spend any time considering a cut and pasted feedback comment? A rubber stamped feedback could easily be interpreted as the conversational equivalent of 'whatever'.

In my opinion, a good transaction deserves quality feedback. When I buy something from a seller greater than $25* then I take the time to drop them a thank you note with a few sentences about the experience.
Don


*Honestly, ebay really need to disallow feedback for small transactions. There are hundreds of thousands bogus small transactions which have been used only to build accounts.

But when leaving feedback as a seller for multiple items bought by the same buyer, how does it make sense to leave different feedback for each item??? They paid for them all at once.

If the feedback is positive there is usually nothing of interest to say.

Its just overkill. They should make it optional and set it up for o0nly when there is something to say.

Jack Kelley