Mike Coslo wrote:

I've had two personal experiences with Ebay. 1 buy, and 1 sell. Both
bad. And a friend's fiancé had her credit card info stolen from Ebay,
and the card was maxed out by the lowlife that stole it. Offshore to
boot - what a mess!

Of course Ebay's stock answer is that she could give the guy
negative feedback!!!!! HAR! The answer to all the world's problems is
apparently negative feedback.

The fatal flaw in their scheme is that they are "not responsible"
for *anything*. I suspect eventually someone is going to do huge fraud
on their site, and then the courts may decide otherwise, regarding
responsibility.

Now its time for the apologists to chime in about how they've
*never* had a problem - thousands of transactions and not been burned once!

But what we are hearing these days suggests that the rosy picture
these sellers paint is not so accurate.......

- Mike KB3EIA -

Two bad experiences are not enough to form a conclusion. If you lost your
CC info using ebay, then you are more than a little bit naive in the way you
use the internet. But enough on that.

The biggest problem I see with the feedback system is it isn't blind. If
you give negative feedback to someone like Radio-Mart, he will give negative
feedback to you. I have had a couple of bad transactions where I *should*
have given bad feedback, but the ebayer threatened to trash me if I did. My
feedback number is too low to accept even one bad feedback.

What ebay should do is make it so that you cannot see the feedback given to you,
for the current transaction, until you have sent in your feedback, for that
transaction. It would probably be best to make it so that nobody can see the
feedback from a transaction until both parties have contributed their feedback.
You wouldn't want a bad egg to be able to read your negative feedback from a
shill account. To protect against the large number of "zeros", there should
also be a counter that tells the number of transactions made vs the number of
feedbacks received.

-Chuck