It looks like the way that feedback is displayed may be about to change yet again on eBay. That is to say it’s already changed on eBay.com and what happens over there tends to happen in the UK eventually.
The latest feedback display in the UK shows the feedback comment, seller ID and date/time stamp.
However hop over to eBay.com and you’ll find that the item number is missing ad the date/time stamp has been replaced with “Past 1 month”, “Past 6 months” or “More than 12 months”.
Most people won’t care about this, after all feedback is what it is – a past record of green dots for buyers and the addition of the occasional grey or red dot for sellers. As a buyer if you want to see what you purchased you can of course browse your own purchase history rather than your feedback so your own record is intact.
The only people who are likely to want to investigate other people’s feedback are those looking for dodgy buyers wanting to contact other sellers or possibly more legitimately for verification that a buyer makes high value purchases for credit checking.
Of course the shill hunters will be annoyed.
Sellers will no longer know exactly when a particular feedback comment was left, but if it’s DSRs you’re worried about that’s now fully revealed in your Defect Report so you no longer need to go hunting.
I’m struggling to get excited and care whether this rolls out to the UK or not. What do you think? Is there a reason you like a time stamp on feedback or does it not bother you in the slightest?
For those in the US, if you do want to see time stamps then (currently) you can view them simply by using eBay.co.uk instead of eBay.com.
8 Responses
I use the time stamps as a quick way to see when a customer made a purchase – as I automatically leave +ve feedback upon payment from the buyer.
If a customer has a query I can quickly look at their feedback to see when I left my feedback and then the date and exact time of the day they placed the order. Or it can be an indicator for me how quickly my deliveries are taking to get to buyers. It gives me a warm glow if I see feedback with a time stamp before 9am the next day and the buyer is chuffed.
No more warm glow.
That change also effects shrewd buyers such as myself, there is another way that previous feedback could be usefully put to use . . . are eBay actually smarter than you think they are?
If I’m wanting to buy an item from a Seller on eBay that is being continually listed on a “rolling basis” as Auctions I could use the part of the Seller’s feedback that allowed me to scan through for those earlier, completed listings and gauge the typical Final Value from previous Buyers . . then when bidding on upcoming auctions I had my “guide price” to look for the listing that might just fall neatly into my hands at a lesser amount.
Mind you I think some Seller’s are aware of that as quite a few now list these “rolling auctions” with the “private bidding” enabled . . . damn . . . even though the listing is far from “risqué”.
its a shame; I scroll through a sellers feedback to see what others thought of the item I am about to purchase. Its one less weapon in the sellers armory but probably because buyers on tablets and phones dont bother with feedback – ebay are probably working on something that lumps it all together so mobile devices can simply touch a button (to make every seller defective….)
This is yet another awful idea from a firm that has no idea what it’s doing any more. They don’t want “little people” cluttering up the site selling things, they just want business sellers.
There are loads of reasons why I like to know when feedback was left, either by myself or a buyer/seller. There’s no good reason at all to dumb it down to this “I’m an Apple user – keep it REAL SIMPLE. Duhhh. Why are my photos being leaked on the net?” level.
Just yesterday I was trying to find out who I bought some discs from a few years back. I knew roughly when so I worked it out by looking at my feedback from around that time. Now there’s no way on Earth I’d be able to do that. I have 15 years of feedback and 95% of it just says “More than 12 months”.
Time to go eBay CEO. How about giving the job to someone who actually cares about their customer base? You may find your precious stock price goes up as well.
This is now in effect on my feedback on .co.uk – I do have a very old converted .com account though, so it might not have changed for everyone.
Just another tool in the eBay scammers armoury, unreal.
I remember the days when it took you a few minutes to suss out the scammer claiming your item had not been sent, these days with the removal of IDs in feedback, now the removal of dates just makes this impossible.
Is there a particular reason why eBay don’t want us tracking scammers down?
I’m not bothered to be honest, the date of feedback has never bothered me in the past so…meh.