FINDING THE BEST & THE WORST SELLERS ON EBAY

Are you frustrated by the number of BAD sellers you encounter when buying? Or do you know of any really excellent sellers who you feel more people should know about?

It’d be VERY useful if eBay contained a list of the BEST and the WORST sellers, because we could then easily and quickly check who we wanted to deal with, and could then also eliminate any chance of possibly dealing with the worst ones in future by error (i.e. if we get excited by an item on sale that’s about to end and we forget, or don’t have time, to check the sellers % score on their feedback panel).

All you can do at present is individually visit the feedback panel of every seller you might deal with to read their feedback and to see their percentage score - you risk your money if you don’t do this, and I suspect that many buyers don’t bother or don’t have time. There are SUPPOSED to be certain penalties that eBay imposes on BAD sellers, but in my experience and in that of all the buyers I’ve heard from even the worst sellers are allowed to continue to trade without any apparent restrictions - so be aware of this please.

Also, the very BEST sellers on eBay are NOT flagged or denoted in any way to show buyers how great they are, so that buyers can put them on their ‘Favourites’ list in MyeBay - you mainly find them by accident via browsing. You need to be very aware that the ‘Power Seller’ icon is NO INDICATION OF QUALITY SERVICE - this is very important to realise. Personally ALL my most serious problems with seller have been with so-called ‘Power Sellers’ - especially the lack of communication, being treated in a very poor rude manner, goods arriving very late and needing to be chased up, very poor packaging, often shoddy goods, poor or no returns policy ,etc, etc. I think all these problems relate to the fact that most of these sellers can’t actually cope with the volume of their sales and so every aspect of their customer service fails - eBay does NOT consider this regarding ‘Power Sellers’ only the VOLUME of sales they make - and a few negative comments in their feedback doesn’t really impact upon their % score due to the high turnover of buyers. PLUS it’s important to note that MANY ‘Power Sellers’ threaten buyers in their terms & conditions that if you leave a negative comment in their feedback (however well justified) you WILL receive a negative in return - which is just like blackmail and very intimidating! Personally I’ve found that some ‘Power Sellers’ have been thoroughly NASTY characters and personally I now avoid ‘Power Sellers’ like the plague and won’t deal with them, unless they’re a legitimate company with a proper full-spec external website too.

When I browse for any item and happen to find any sellers who have a record of over 100, PLUS they have 100% positive feedback I will always list them in my ‘Favourites’ in MyeBay for future possible use, because then I’m assured to be dealing with a Sterling seller. Amazingly there are actually some sellers on eBay with comments over 1,000 AND also with 100% positive feedback!! This is an awesome feat to achieve, yet eBay doesn’t promote them in any way, which is a shocking shame.