I received automated positive feedback from eBay today. Pretty awesome, as buyers almost never leave feedback these days.
It’s definitely a nice little feature. My current total feedback in the past month is 147 which is quite a bit higher than usual because 96 of that is automated.
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not bad some ppl prolly have alot more tho 
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“no news is good news”
Eventually, the only feedback left by people will be negative
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I’m glad they made the automated feedback count visible to buyers too.
Overall, this seems like it will be a good thing for the majority of sellers, but I also find @koala’s comment interesting. Do any of you anticipate negative consequences from this change? It seems automated positive feedback will introduce a degree of superficiality.
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they are pretty much just implementing what mercari had forever and im sure ppl have complained about it for a long time since hardly any buyers leave feedback (actually its even a lower % on amazon)
feedback doesnt matter to me personally and i think this system has long outlived its usefulness something better to show would be like % of orders canceled, shipped on time etc like what actually matters to ur metrics
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For what its worth, I always check feedback before engaging with a seller; and have left feedback in 90% cases. Those that I didn’t was because of a negative opinion of the transaction. Actually, quite often I have chased a seller for feedback. I don’t like the idea of automated feedback, being potentially generic/ misleading. I agree with the comment that feedback ratings might have outlived usefulness by now.
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Exactly, I do the same thing.
I think some buyers who do this (not saying you) may now be encouraged to leave those neutral and negative feedbacks rather than a seller getting an automated positive after a “bad experience.”
We will also have to be more discerning about seller feedback percentages as more and more automated positive reviews push even the legitimately bad sellers’ feedback back up to previously acceptable thresholds in some cases.
And some of the buyers who were actually leaving positive feedback will now let the automated system do it for them. In my opinion, individualized reviews are more valuable than automated.
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It can create a paradoxical effect where,
- Buyers are disincentivised to leave positive feedback because it has now lost significance
- The overall rating itself now doesn’t weigh much, so then buyers look to negative feedback specifically for purchase risk
Ultimately I think it becomes more punishing for sellers in the long term for negative feedback they cannot roll back, and positive feedback becomes an almost parallel metric to sales count
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Very interesting, I also always leave feedback unless the experience was negative. I’ve always felt too bad to leave a bad review, and also, these people have my address! What if someone totally freaks out and hunts me down! 
But now I would rather leave a truthful statement than auto positive.
Is the only for the US or across the board?
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im not a cynical person but
this may make it easier for scammers to create accounts with lots of feedback. In the past it would have taken more effort and money to create reputable looking seller account.
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Agreed. Automated positive feedback is a terrible idea. These days I actively avoid accounts with high quantities of it.
Guess you are avoiding a majority of large graded card sellers then. I mean PSA vault has 55,000 auto feedback already. We have 7,000. Dcsports has 140,000. Can’t just avoid places that have a lot of auto feedback.
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eBay did include an option to filter out automated feedback, so you can still see just the regular reviews on those larger seller accounts if you want
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I do avoid PSA, Probstein etc, but mostly because of their huge shipping fees (I’m Japan-based).
Filtered them out long ago. I suppose it depends on sales volume, but I find a lot of auto-feedback suspicious, particularly from smaller sellers.
Yeah would guess the ratios are the same though so doesn’t matter. If a seller has only 50 auto feedback all that means is they don’t sell a lot, ratio will remain about the same of sales to auto feedback.
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I agree buyers have even less incentive to leave positive feedback now since eBay will do it for them, but that could make custom positive feedback[1] from buyers more valuable than ever, especially in the absence of negative/neutral feedback. At least that’s the way it is for me using these platforms exclusively as a buyer
Yes, exactly!
And *if*, as @Drew12 noted, buyers are more incentivized to leave neutral or negative feedback instead of allowing eBay to give a bad experience automated positive feedback, then an increased focus on that negative feedback would be even more damaging since there’s more of it.
- More automated positive feedback from eBay
- Less custom positive feedback from buyers
- Potentially more neutral & negative feedback
- Buyers can ignore/filter out the automated positive feedback
- Leaving sellers with less custom positive feedback and potentially more neutral/negatives.
I find this interesting to consider even though it won’t really affect me, so I hope these comments don’t come off as combative
with relevant information ↩︎
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Now it makes me motivated to leave non-positive feedback
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Now that we have Authenticity Guarantee, I have no concerns buying cards on eBay. I don’t think automated feedback will change my buying behavior at all.
I do agree with tidal, though. It would be much better to have statistics on % orders cancelled, % orders shipped on time, % orders returned, etc. than the positive/negative feedback system that we have in place.
I also agree with Drew. There is a worry in the back of my mind that leaving negative feedback on an unhinged seller will lead to harassment. I’ve seen it happen before, and so it’s easier for me to never buy from that seller again and move on without leaving feedback.
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The problem with eBay feedback was that it always reflected a tail-end distribution where the only people who left feedback were very satisfied customers or very angry customers. Sure, some people left feedback out of a moral duty to do so, but my experience as an eBay seller has been that less than 20% of buyers actually leave feedback.
As many eBay sellers can attest, negative feedback is often not the result of a problem on the seller’s part but an overly picky and in some cases fraudulent buyer. Not to say that there are no scammers, but a negative feedback can have an outsized impact when a seller is consistently delivering quality service but only gets “credit” for it less than 1/5 of the time.
I am glad that eBay will now leave a positive review for me on sellers who do their job. I am glad eBay gives me credit for delivering an order to a buyer with zero problems. Especially now that eBay is changing their rules to limit when they will remove negative feedback, automated positive feedback is an overdue and necessary change.
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