Amazon seller feedback - a moral quandry?

i guess you could give them 4 stars if they were satisfactory, and 5 stars if for some other reason you were exceptionally pleased with their service be it delivery time or product quality

I don't use Amazon enough to have given this much thought but people's attitudes re: eBay feedback and the importance they scribe to it is idiotic and drives me nuts. I guess this is basically the same?

A-scribe, that should say

Thanks for reminding me I needed to leave feedback. It's the first time I ordered from someone (via Amazon.co.uk) but had forgotten I needed to leave a comment and some stars. I did a four star review as they were very good (sending it quickly and they didn't *mind* that I needed to send that one order back cause I had ordered it twice from them).

Ste OTM. 4 for okay, 5 for great. I would love a kind of 5 star plus just to work through all the "very goods" and things.

What would count as 'great' though? Beyond delivering what they say they will and on time, how else could they do their job?

Nah, I think the general rule is 5 means no complaints, job done.

You may disagree with this but I believe it barely matters what the seller says they're going to deliver to, if someone gets to me an item 'next day' it's a 5 star reward no args.

Seller says "next day delivery" & Delivered next day = 5 star
Seller says "next day delivery" & Delivered within week = 4 star
Over one week = <4 star

Seller says "1 week delivery" & Delivered within week = 5 star
Seller says "1 week delivery" & Delivered 1 week or roundabouts = 4 star
Well over one week = <4 star

And then you +/- for quality of product if you so desire, obv.

xpost, yeah

id say if they did what you paid them for give them 5 stars because there are people like me who are suspicious of any dealer with less thn 5 stars.

actually i received an email from an ebay express seller asking me to leave feedback for a baby fever monitor i bought. i replied: i didnt receive the item. do you still want me to leave feedback?. no reply. i could leave them bad feedback but what if it really did get lost in the mail. living on an alphabetical street this happens a lot.

Nah, I think the general rule is 5 means no complaints, job done.

OTM. When I was selling CDs, I realized that it was almost better not to get any feedback at all. Fours just drop your rating and make people wonder about you, even though the person giving the four thinks they're doing you a favor. I never asked for feedback... managed to keep it roughly at 4.95 over 18 months.

OTM seconded. I've only ever sold anything via Amazon. Does it prompt buyers to rate sellers, or is it something you have to be a bit proactive about? The reason I ask is I've been a (whispers) bad seller a couple of times, taking a couple of weeks to send a CD, but the buyer hasn't said a word on my feedback.

Which makes me pretty lucky to have a five star rating and a total fraud, obv.

I got some bad feedback once and I don't think I will ever recover. It wasn't even my fault :-(

Four stars is definitely a complaint though.

Ebay buyers have been knocking me down on "shipping prices" (4 stars instead of 5) even though I state shipping up front and don't overcharge like some sellers. If you didn't want to pay for Priority Mail then you shouldn't have bid, dumbasses.

ps. buy my stuff

Jesus, four is a complaint?!? Ah god no, now I feel guilty. I always figured five stars means they include sex in the package. :-(

It's not like you're rating a work of art. 5 stars simply means everything was done exactly as advertised. It does not mean that he was genius about it.

I sold an In The Nursery album to some douche and he gave me negative feedback cos he didn't like it :/

mei: What would count as 'great' though? Beyond delivering what they say they will and on time, how else could they do their job?
sunny successor: id say if they did what you paid them for give them 5 stars because there are people like me who are suspicious of any dealer with less thn 5 stars.

OTM to these! If it arrives, was as advertised and decently packed, and probably sent within a day or two of you buying, what else could they do? Hand-deliver it the second you ordered along with some chocolates and the rest of their record collection free? And an average of below 4 would sound really unpromising overall.

I sent my first two Amazon packages out a week ago and I have no feedback yet :( I fear they've been caught up in the postal strikes and I will get a lousy rating. That or one for possibly overestimating the condition, but the written Amazon guidelines are pretty generous and I got a bit giddy with the must-get-done impulse listing of stuff.

I am totally afraid of bad feedback though, I didn't dare leave any feedback for an ebay seller who recommended paying extra for recorded delivery and then not telling me the tracking number when it kept not turning up (I bought a bunch of CDs which he resent twice + a 12-issue magazine subscription, seems unlikely that NONE of the packages turned up)... but a bad/neutral vote on his 3000 rating is nothing and a revenge vote on my 30 would hurt, so what could I do?

If you're not selling stuff on ebay, a negative is irrelevant. You can only block bidders if they have negative feedback or multiple recent "no-pay" strikes.

Hmm, good point. I kept meaning to sell stuff, but I guess Amazon is less hassle, and I'm not sure I'll even keep going with the Amazon selling.

advice needed here - i sold a rare and therefore quite valuable book through my amazon seller account the week before christmas which i dispatched on either the 21st or 22nd of december. The cost to the buyer was around a hundred quid and i got around £80 from amazon.

just this week (2nd of May) i got an email through amazon from the buyers account. I didn't read the email until yesterday (7th of May) because i had been away on a trip and offline for a week.

Dear C___n,

Please contact me re the redelivery of this item as I have still not received it to date and placed the order before Christmas.

Many thanks,

G___y

which i replied to saying that i would look into it next week when the post office was open. I sent the item recorded delivery, since it was valuable but i discarded the docket probably some time within the last month-6 weeks. three months being, after all, a pretty decent amount of time to keep these things. i don't know if the PO will be able to do anything without a docket although it's possible they can track it down through a post code search, who knows.

I'm totally baffled as to why they are contacting me now - four months and two weeks after the order was placed. What should i do next? is it really possible that i will have to refund this person £80 that i no longer have after such an extended amount of time?

try the post office, you never know.

it is suspicious that they never contacted you prior -- if it were me you'd have had an email in December.

also isn't there some type of statute of limitations on these claims?

i really would have thought that 3 months or even less would be about the limit of when you could lodge a complaint. if the PO can't shed any light on this then should i invite them to lodge a complaint through amazon or sent a pre-emptive email to amazon customer services before they do so?

check amazon's policies w/r/t to refunds. pretty sure 4 months would be well past the statute.

also, since you sent it recorded delivery, it's likely you e-mailed the # to the buyer for their benefit right?

i had a look but i don't think i did send/log the tracking number on this occasion which, admittedly, could pose a problem (although it's not required that you send the item by registered or recorded delivery with a tracking number i just did that for my own benefit).

i kept the docket of course but not for 4 and a half months!

jed, this is from Amazon UK's "A-to-Z Safe Buying Guide":

Timeframe for Claims:

You must wait 3 calendar days past the maximum estimated delivery date for an order (as indicated in the order details in 'Your Account') or 30 days from the order date, whichever is sooner. You can submit a claim up to 90 days after the order date.

Basically, your buyer is out of luck in this instance - they should have contacted you much sooner, and it's now outside the timeframe. I'm not sure if Amazon will let them even open a dispute, but if they do then I'd make clear reference to this.

yeah, there's nothing the buyer can do at this point. you're covered

just fyi, this is all detailed at:

A-to-z Safe Buying Guarantee Protection FAQs

thanks for that info, Bill. i bookmarked that page.

yea, and even if they claim to have emailed you personally about it, it doesn't matter -- that's the timeframe that they had to lodge an official complaint.

it's entirely possible dude needs extra cash and thinks he can squeeze it out of you, too.

how did this turn out, jed?

pls message us soon, wanna make sure angry amazon buyer didn't murder you

i told them they would have to make a complaint through amazon and then i didn't hear another thing about it!

I'm a pretty bad and lazy seller but sometimes I happen to get an order a half hour before I'm headed to the post office anyway, and it's from someone who lives 5 miles away from me. Then they get it the next day and leave me amazing feedback even though it was just a fluke. It's actually happened to me a bunch of times. So this idea of leaving 5 stars only for someone who ships really fast is kind of weird and arbitrary to me.

yea I think as long as it makes it by the projected dates they should get a good rating.

The ONLY problem I have in regards to that is when someone marks the item as SHIPPED on Amazon, and then you get the package, and the thing is clearly postmarked several days after they claimed they shipped it...cuz they're circumventing their agreement with Amazon Marketplace in that case, plus then I think the package is lost if it doesn't arrive in normal timing after you marked it shipped.

this is an underrated thread title

i mostly refuse to leave feedback these days. bad person???

depends, what did you buy?

used CDs or DVDS usually

i mostly refuse to leave feedback these days. bad person???

no, feedback is dumb. it's just for complainers imo.

but then the things I buy on there are mostly a couple of bucks used, so it's nothing to get worked up over.

yeah same here for the most part

yea but if you dont' give positive feedback, you artificially deflate the dude's numbers if the only people who give feedback are ones who had problems.

(then again, teh sellers who try to claim their 88-90 percent ratings are due to this are generally full of shit).

yeah I'm gonna leave good feedback

i always leave good feedback, because i know i won't buy off anyone who's not got decent ratings

one of the last things I bought was a used DVD of MASH; the case was all f--ked up on it though. That person might get 4 stars

If they're knew I'll give 'em feedback, if they've already got 100+, and like 98% positive, then I won't bother.

has Amazon removed the "where's my stuff" button? because on one of my orders I don't see any way of contacting the seller, like I did with another order I did last month. The item hasn't arrived, yet they dispatched 3 weeks ago.

Shows seller profile that's about it, no way of contacting.

so fuck it i gave them 1 star.

amazon's help links & assistance for returns etc was ridiculously obscure on their site as it is. thankfully i've not had much cause to return things from there but when you do it's not easy.