“Toolhaus is pulling the plug. All things must pass”, is how Win Bent announced that one of the oldest surviving and much loved eBay tools is closing down. Toolhaus was once the defacto eBay feedback tool, enabling you to view any eBay User’s feedback with the positives hidden. Hide the positives and you get to rid all the neutrals and negatives in one place.
There were other tools to see what feedback two users had left for each other and even in later years a tool to see ‘false positives’ – eBay prevented sellers for leaving negative or neutral feedback for buyers and this tool aimed to reveal positives damned with faint praise or outright complaints.
The original negs tool was created in 2001 and went public in 2004 when the toolhaus.org website came online. The tool was free, but many fans have supported it over the years whilst many hundreds and thousands more used it without payment.
It’s fair to say that eBay feedback is no where as important as it once was. Detailed Seller Ratings came along followed by other metrics such as returns and on-time delivery metrics. Indeed, Win himself in his goodbye post said he simply doesn’t care any more. He doesn’t use eBay that much these days (telling in itself), but when he does he relies on what he calls ‘the body temperature’ rule (98.6% degrees in Fahrenheit cos that’s what we people from the last century understand!). If a user’s feedback is less than 98.6% positive then don’t trade with them.
Coupled with Win simply not caring any more and eBay site changes making the tools ever more complex to maintain, it’s time to say goodbye to Toolhaus. It’s been a blast
