WebUser Asks the Questions You've Always Wanted to Ask eBay

eBay reserves most of its interviews to reporters from the financial press who lack a deep understanding of seller issues. That was not the case with a recent article in UK magazine WebUser in which reporter Vicky Woollaston had an opportunity to ask some questions that are on every seller's mind.

Woollaston asked eBay's Head of Seller Communications for eBay Europe Patrick Munden, "Why can't sellers leave negative and neutral feedback? and Why does your Resolution Centre protect the buyer more than the seller?" Munden answered in part, "We want more buyers, and one of the biggest things stopping them buying was the feedback structure," and he said eBay created the Resolution Centre "to increase trust and to deal with problems before negative feedback needs to be left."

Woollaston followed up by asking how eBay made sure the seller is also protected, to which Munden replied, "We have many more buyers than sellers, and you'll always get unreasonable buyers, so there's a team that looks into that. We also have eBay Seller Protection and work closely with PayPal, so there are measures in place to protect both sides. We watch out for malicious feedback and can ban sellers, and our team looks out for patterns of negative feedback from certain buyers."

The reporter also asked eBay UK's head of seller PR whether the company was neglecting its online auction roots and asked why eBay had introduced restrictions on what sellers could charge for postage.

Another issue that sellers frequently raise both in Europe and in the U.S. are sellers from abroad who claim to be domestic sellers. Woollaston asked, "Why don't you ban sellers who claim to be from the UK but are actually based abroad?"

To this, Munden replied, "We don't want sellers saying they're in one place when they're not. It's misleading for buyers and we take it very seriously. We track the performance of those types of sellers and we do close stores. If any readers see examples of this, they can report them and we can then restrict those people from selling."

The article appeared in Issue 281 of Web User magazine, but eBay UK reprinted the fulltext of the article on its website, Your eBay selling questions answered.