When you conduct business in cyberspace, there are so many variables that people do not know whom to trust. They are bidding on an item in a remote location listed by someone they do not know and have no guarantee that the right thing will arrive at the right time. In order to ease some fears and provide some sort of accountability, all eBay sites have a feedback system whereby both buyers and sellers give a positive, negative or neutral response on how the transaction went.

An Example

The system is actually quite useful as prospective eBay users can get a pretty good idea of how the seller or buyer has performed in the past. Let's demonstrate the eBay Belgium, ebay.be feedback system with an example:

Raymond has a feedback score of 11 and he was the winning bidder of a Swarovski crystal swan at an eBay Belgium auction. The seller, Jessica has a feedback score of 395 and also has a star next to her username which says Power Seller. Raymond was thinking about bidding on Jessica's swan and another one listed by Timothy who had a score of only 1. The price was the same so he opted for Jessica because she had a proven eBay Belgium track record. Timothy, however, had only conducted a transaction with one buyer and hence he was still new at the game.

On the other end, Jessica had put a condition in her listing not to allow bids from any buyers who had unpaid strikes which means that they had won an auction but not paid for the item. Raymond had a positive score of 11 which means he had completed 11 successful transactions and had paid for all the items he had purchased, and hence he was a suitable buyer.

Another number which appears next to the username and feedback is the percentage of how many feedback comments were positive. A sample feedback for Jessica on a site like eBay Belgium might be:

Jessica (395) Power Seller 98.4% positive

This means that 98.4 times out of 100 she received a positive response in terms such as fast shipping, item as promised smooth transaction, good communication etc.

If a person doesn't pay or ships an item which has defects not mentioned in the listing, or ships too late or gives inaccurate information of any sort, he can receive a negative feedback. The feedback comment is posted on his feedback page for anyone to view. This can make other buyers suspicious of buying from him because he has performed poorly in at least one instance before.

Therefore feedback is crucial on eBay Belgium as well as all the other eBay sites because it is sometimes the only measure by which anyone can evaluate an eBayer as they like to be called.