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How
to Check an
eBay Seller's
Reputation |
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How to Check an eBay Seller's Reputation (and
Why You Should Do It).
When you buy something from an eBay seller, you
are giving them your money and hoping that you will get
something in return. However many guarantees of safety eBay
might make to you, nothing is certain: if you just give your
money to scammers all the time without doing any checks then
the chances are you won't get all of that 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 each item's description page, there is a box
in the top-right hand corner about the seller, with the title
'Seller information'. This contains the seller's name, their
feedback score, and their positive feedback percentage, as
well as any stars they 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 click on the seller's name, you can get
to a more detailed view of their reputation - their 'member
profile' page. This page shows the total number of people who
gave them a positive or negative rating, as well as a
breakdown by time. You can also see a complete history of all
the comments that have ever been left about them, 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.
Take a look through the first visible page with
the most recent transactions: are there any negative comments?
What do they say? Take others' experiences into account, as
they could happen to you if you deal with this person. Be
careful not to punish sellers unfairly, however, if they did
bad things in their past on eBay but have improved since. You
should look at the breakdown by time and ignore any negative
feedback that was left a long time ago. Equally, though, you
should sit up and pay attention if a seller seems to have been
left an out-of-character amount of bad feedback in the last
month or so.
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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