Quite a few sellers have written to Tamebay reporting that eBay has been experiencing a technical glitch, for quite a few weeks, that means that sellers cannot respond to buyer feedback.
According to one seller who has been in contact, this has been a problem since at least the 6th January and is ongoing. Some sellers have been in touch with eBay’s customer support who have advised that there is no known date for a resolution but it could take as long as 60 days.
Another seller says this is the error you’ll see: “Input Error:” We did not successfully receive all the required information from the page. Please go back and ensure that all the fields are filled in.”
What is very annoying about that message, as one correspondent noted, is that it doesn’t report that there is a glitch and if you’re unaware of this problem then you can waste quite a bit of time going back and forth trying to respond to feedback until you realise that it’s kaput.
Why is such a function important? It’s vital that sellers have the right of reply to negative and neutral feedback so hopefully eBay will fix this problem soon.
15 Responses
There are two schools of thought. Personally I used to never ever respond to feedback (negative or neutral especially).
Responding not only makes the feedback stand out (takes more room on the page) drawing the eye to it, but also the buyer has a right to reply to the reply which often makes it look worse than ever.
The contrary view is that not responding and indicating that you are willing (or have already) sorted the problem out might indicate to future buyers that you don’t care about them. This especially becomes the case if you responded to all negative feedback in the past and suddenly stop (buyers won’t know it’s a glitch).
On balance these days I’d go with the don’t respond as it’s the easier option, it’s not scalable and large sellers tend to cut and paste responses lowing the “I care about you” effect and feedback isn’t worth stressing about (now less than ever, worry about delivering on-time and defects instead!).
What do you think?
Why would you want to respond. It has no effect. only thing it does is make the seller feel a little better. Stay focused on sales, as a seller is there to make money.
Good seller should never get a neg from a good buyer. there is no need. Either the seller is carp or the buyer is.
If anyone in the UK is having this issue just use ebay.com site instead and it should work fine 🙂
its entirely consistent with ebays policy of “feedback is just a tool for buyers to threaten sellers with”. whats the point in allowing the seller to respond to their unilateral beatings?
got punished with a negative (neutral, same thing these days) today, because “item a bit small” despite having perfect accurate measurements in the description.
– i dont have an hour to waste on the phone arguing with some eBay CS that doesnt know their own policies and has zero inclination to help remove it.
I can confirm using .com works like a charm!
Thanks Richard
Sam
I experienced this recently. I spend ages trying to figure out what I had done wrong. Ebay need to put on the ‘error’ page that it is their technical glitch and not ours!
Anyway, I telephoned eBay and was NOT told that this was an ongoing thing. Nope. So I assumed that it was still me! Only today do I find out that it was eBay and not me – via Tamebay! How bad is that?
Anyway, I was told that a way around it was to log into eBay via the .com site and not the co.uk site. That seemed to do the trick and I could then leave my comment.
Isn’t it interesting how eBay never admit to a fault they have created. They are like spoilt children that cannot own up to being less than perfect.
All the “report a seller” links are missing throughout ebay as well
the only time i leave a follow up feedback is if the item has gone missing in the post , i leave a polite follow up comment on the buyers page , saying item lost in the post refund issued
for some strange reason i can leave follow up comment on the weekend but not during the week ?