Dealing with feedback - recent discovery!

As an eBay seller who cares very much about providing top quality products with customer service to match, it really does frustrate me when a buyer leaves negative feedback which I consider unfair. It doesn’t happen very often at all, but the knock-on effect on your total % feedback score and the big red dot on your feedback page takes a while to right itself. And I probably take it a bit too personally!

Here’s the story….- a customer bought a personalised embroidered gym towel from our eBay shop. The listing has a full description all neatly bullet pointed – available colours, material details, size etc etc etc and a rather nice photograph of a buff young man with the towel round his neck! The item was produced and despatched within 24 hours, so they probably got it the next day. We had no message or calls from the customer so a week or so later when we had chance to look at our recent feedback, we were very surprised to see there was the red dot and a ’1′ in the negative feedback column with the comment ‘Towel way too small to be of any use’.

I was quite annoyed on 2 counts:
1. the measurements of the towel are clearly stated in the first couple of bullet points on the listing
2. the picture of the buff young man gives a visual scale

Hang on, make that 3 counts;
3. the customer did not contact us before leaving the feedback. They obviously hadn’t read the description properly and thought they were buying a standard towel. Mistakes happen. We like happy customers so would have asked them to return it and we’d have refunded. But they just left the negative feedback.

Fast forward a couple of months to the beginning of March and I get a call from eBay who want to discuss our account and look at how we could improve. I think this might have been prompted by us reaching the dizzy heights of Gold Power Seller status? Anyway, we started by discussing feedback – all good said eBay, apart from the negative one in December. So I told them the tale that I’ve just told you and imagine my delight when they agreed that the feedback was unjustified because the size was clearly stated on our listing.

And so they removed it.

We had quite a chat about feedback generally and I learned alot. For instance if a customer leaves positive feedback and an equally positive comment but scores 1′s and 2′s in the DSR’s, eBay will remove the feedback as it’s a breach of their rules – they assume that the buyer has not understood the scoring system and meant to score 4′s and 5′s to reflect their comment.

eBay won’t remove negative feedback willy-nilly. Customers have opinions after all and are entitled to give them.

But if this should ever happen again and I can’t get a response from a buyer through feedback revision request, I can pick up the phone, discuss it with eBay and let them decide whether it should stand or not.

Result!