Ebay Feedback

Part of gradings subjective. Whats F to one person will be vf to another and vg to another. I dont really like the idea of leaving negatives over what sounds like a difference of opinion. I'm a firm believer that if it wasnt bad enough to make you return it its not bad enough for a negative.

If you dont want to leave a positive thats fine just leave none and move on. Like Dave mentioned youll likely just find yourself on a blocked list. In the scheme of things a single review isn't going to make or break a seller with 1000s of sales.




The reason why the negative reviews are viewed so badly though is if you get enough of them you lose out on a 20 percent fee discount for top rated sellers. Now if someone is doing something to deserve that they deserve to lose out, but a difference of grade opinion thats close isn't enough for me personally. Its one thing if they say its uncirculated and send a vf coin, but using your example if you say its vg and they said f that can just be normal person to person variation. Youll see that variation in the grading threads as well as if you ask what an acceptable cleaning method is.

In general barring some terrible action by the seller, if you arent going to give them a chance to make you happy its not worth a negative feedback.

Contacting the seller first is good advice, one thing though, several people have mentioned getting a partial refund I wold NOT recommend asking for one. If the seller offers one you can consider it but as the buyer I would not ask for one. Why? Because there are a lot of buyers out there that buy coins at fair or even bargain prices and then threaten to give the sellers poor feedback unless the dealer gives them a partial refund. This put the seller over a barrel because the poor feedback hurts him as a seller, and can cost him in higher fees. And after all that the seller can't leave anything but positive feedback for the extortionist buyer.

Now I'm sure you aren't intending to extor the seller, but how does HE know that you aren't doing that? So don't ASK for a partial refund, let the seller suggest how to make things right.

Conder: Thanks for the tips. I have no intention of asking for money back, although I suppose I would not turn it down :-). I can see why that would look like extortion! But I'm probably not going to contact anyone at this point (see below)

String: It seems like it's sometimes hard to judge a coin from the photo and people may take it the wrong way. I have been practicing taking very detailed clear, well lit pictures and it really shows the flaws (especially cleaning) a lot more. It's taken many hours of effort (and a fancy lens!). I'm not sure if this will help or hurt when I sell some coins on ebay, but a least folks will know what they are getting. The quality of photos really varies on ebay, a lot.

After thinking about this a lot more, I knew some of the coins were over-graded when I bought them. I made a list to keep track of the coins I bought including the price, grade and seller. However, I put the seller's grade on the list, rather than the likely grade that I thought it was when I was buying it. So now a month or so later, looking back at my list, the actual grade and the grade on my list don't match up!

Perhaps I need several columns on my list: the seller's grade, the grade I think it is when I bought it and the 'actual' grade when the coin arrives. I can then erase the first two, and forget about it. At least know which sellers over grade. One of the coins I bought, now looking at the sellers feedback, he has several pasts negatives accusing him of 'intentional over grading'. Who know if it is true or not.

I agree with you. It probably does make things sell slower but I just go outside and snap a pic, at least that way people wont complain the picture is juiced.




You actually dont have to do that for what your describing. If they said the coin was uncirculated and sent you a clearly worn coin all you have to do is open a buyer protection case. If you win (which you should) all of your shipping fees get refunded to you

Unfortunately the buyer eats the return postage. This has stopped a lot of people from returning an item that a buyer was not happy with.

I sold a model airplane engine last year that was in a mismarked box. The buyer sent me a nasty email demanding full refund including return shipping. I agreed to refund all but the return shipping, mainly because of the nasty email.

He opened a case and got his refund, minus the return shipping. Being the nice guy I am I went ahead and sent him the return shipping even though I didn't have to.

So if you need to complain to a seller start off with nice friendly messages, it will go a lot better if things remain civil. I would have happily refunded the guy's return shipping IF his first email would have been more civil.

Rick

In the early days of ebay you could leave feedback for anybody, even if you had never had any transactions with them. And you could leave multiple feedbacks and all of them "counted". So it was not unusual for groups of people to leave massive amounts of mutual positive feed back for each other just to run up their numbers.

I've never left negative feedback and I can only think of one return I really should have.

It was a mint sewn bag of cents that was "mint stitching still in place" and "sealed." Needless to say the bag was full of holes with coins falling out and about 3 inches of the stitching was still all the way across the front of the bag, but had pulled out of the back. When I contacted the seller he said it was insured and it was the post office that had caused the problem. I looked at the photos on the listing and could see where he had folded the bag so the holes were covered and he had the sewn flap folded over the top of the bag in the reverse photos. All of the coins were brown and green. He also said "I've talked to ebay and you don't need to open a case on this. I'll pay you back as soon as I get my insurance payment from the USPS.

The coins were falling out of the box when I picked it up from the post office and when I weighed the bag it was about half a pound light. I opened a case as soon as I could. The real kicker was having to pay for return shipping on a large Priority box. The box he shipped was in such bad shape (he didn't try to secure or pad the bag in any way) I just taped it back up, put the box in a bag and dropped it in a new box and taped all the seams.

Once he saw I had filed a case with ebay, he changed his mind and gave me return shipping instructions and a quick refund. I didn't give him a negative, but I did explain, in the limited feedback area, what happened, and gave him low numbers on the details of the transaction.

I was still out almost $20 on the transaction. *sigh*

Ben