When you take it upon yourself to purchase something from eBay, you are essentially giving them your hard earned cash in the hope of getting something in return. Despite all the guarantees of safety eBay may assure to you, nothing is certain. If you continuously give your money to scammers without doing all the necessary checks, then there is a good chance you might not get all your money back.
That’s why you should always check the seller’s reputation, or ‘feedback rating’. This is a quick and easy-to-read summary of their history as an eBay seller, which gives you some idea of whether or not you should trust them with your money. Buying anything is a calculated risk: you want to minimise that risk.
How to Check Feedback Ratings
On the description page of each item, there is always a box located at the top right hand corner about the seller, under the title ‘Seller Information’. This contains the Sellers username, he/she feedback score, their positive/negative feedback percentage as well as any stars that they may have earned.
Different coloured stars are given to eBay sellers depending on their rating, in this sequence: yellow, blue, turquoise, purple, red, green, shooting yellow, shooting turquoise, shooting purple, shooting red. Anyone with a ’shooting’ star is an experienced eBay member who you should be able to trust.
If you take it upon yourself to click on the sellers name, then you will receive a more detailed view of their reputation – their ‘member profile’ page. This page will show you the total number of people gave them either positive or negative feedback, as well as breakdown by time. You can also access a complete history of all the feedback comments that the user has received with the most recent first.
What to Look For
You might assume that anyone with a very high number can be trusted, but that isn’t always true. It is more important to look at their positive feedback percentage – and you should really consider anything below 99% to be a red flag and investigate further.
Look at the first viewable page with the most up-to-date transactions; are any negative feedback comments present? What has been written? It’s always best to take other peoples experiences into account because you could be faced with the same issues if you decide to deal with that seller. Be truthful, try not to punish sellers unjust fully, although, if they did do some bad things in the past on eBay but seem to have improved since. You should be wearier about the time the comments were made and try to ignore negative feedback comments that were left a very long time ago. However, you should pay close attention if it appears as though the seller has been left numerous out of character bad feedback comments in the last few months.
Now that you know who to trust, it is worth learning a little more about how the different kinds of auctions work, so that you don’t accidentally slip up and make yourself and your feedback page look bad. Our next email will be about the different kinds of auctions you can expect to encounter during your time on eBay.
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