How not to respond to eBay negative feedback!

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Whether or not to respond to negative or neutral feedback has been a long standing discussion for eBay sellers.

Responding sometimes looks worse than not responding, especially as the buyer has the final right of reply to leave a final comment after your response. Not responding might be construed as a seller that doesn’t care about their customers.

There’s a drawback to responding which is that it makes a non-positive feedback stand out even more on your feedback page as each response takes up extra lines and so makes the feedback stand out even more.

The reverse is also true, that if you’re really miffed with a trading partner leave your feedback in capital letters and use all the available characters and it’ll run over two lines and be more prominent than using lower case letters.

Today however Tamebay reader Daniel pointed us towards a classic feedback response from a large high street retailer.

Feedback Reply

It’s obvious from the comments that two things have occurred. Firstly this is a very happy buyer who received their item in record time, the product was in perfect condition, they think the seller is a great eBayer… they just somehow managed to click the negative feedback button instead of positive and promptly ignored the warning on the interstitial page to work out any problems with the seller before leaving feedback.
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The second thing that happened is that the seller responded to all their negative feedbacks with cut and pasted a boiler plate responses, apologised and said that they’ll make sure the situation doesn’t happen again. What are they going to do? Make sure they don’t ship fast, don’t supply superb goods and try not to be a great eBayer?

In the words of Homer Simpson… “D’oh!”

10 Responses

  1. confirms that no one cares about feedback, both buyer and seller are just ticking boxes

  2. On first pass and in isolation, i thought it was a humorous reply to feedback left in error, but if they leave this for every negative feedback then perhaps not.

    Lee

  3. i make the mistake of leaving honest replies, it looks terrible.
    if i see other sellers who dont reply, that also looks terrible.
    your example looks terrible. – even when they fit the complaint, stock responses look terrible.

  4. No win situation. I try to be unfazed as possible. What can you do? 9 times out of 10 it is wrong or inaccurate.

  5. I don’t think that there is a way to automatically leave a response, so I see it as a clever way to make the buyer look like a right plum, and allow potential buyers to see that the seller is not some sort of knuckle-dragging bedroom seller that challenges every issue with threats and expletives. And lots of exclamation marks!!!!!!!

    I think its a clever response.

  6. The only customers in my experience who look at your feedback are the ones who have an issue with an item they have received and want justification for beating you up! They delight in including their message “and I see looking at your feedback that I am not the only one who …………………..”
    Only thing is they overlook the 120,000 positive feedbacks we have!
    Customers….,don’t you just love some of them?!

  7. What if you were to monitor your feedback with a solution like Zendesk and then trigger automated responses back to customers based on pre-determined settings? So if you were to receive a negative or neutral eBay review your Zendesk account would receive a notification and you can react accordingly. It is not as preemptive as you may like but it will definitely help alleviate some of the issues when trying to respond to an upset customer as quickly as possible.

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