In this web appendix of our monthly magazine, we feel it is a must to repropose some topics, already covered in our magazine, that are directly related to the Net.
Of these, the most recent concerns the so-called 'feedback'.
What is it?
The 'online auction' channel is one of the most widely used channels for buying vintage and collectors' models today. Of course, when we talk about online auctions we mainly refer to the giant eBaywhich, thanks to its undeniable qualities of functionality, capillarity and diffusion, has managed to attract sellers and buyers from all over the world. With the intention of helping our readers to make the best use of this powerful tool, we will today address a topic that is too often underestimated but of great importance when buying or selling: seller feedback.Feedback is an evaluation consisting of comments and scores left by other eBay users with whom the seller has transacted. It is a system that allows the seller's reputation on eBay to be checked: in fact, the comments are included, together with the overall feedback score, in the seller's user profile. Consequently, trust in a user in the community is mainly based on the opinions expressed by previous buyers or sellers. For each transaction, only the buyer and the seller can judge each other by leaving a feedback comment consisting of a positive, negative or neutral rating and a short commentary note.
The buyer can also evaluate other aspects of the transaction, such as accuracy of the description, communication with the seller, and the time taken by the seller to ship the item. These detailed evaluations, however, are not taken into account for the definition of the feedback score. Of course, by leaving objective comments on a particular user you give other members of the community the opportunity to get an accurate idea of the user's accuracy, especially as the feedback left is permanently embedded in the seller's profile. It follows that one's feedback score will be the higher the number of positive evaluations given by other users. In any case, a user can only increase or decrease the score of another user by 1 point, regardless of the number of transactions carried out with the latter.
So far so good, but with due caution. If we look closely at the deals that have been concluded, we may come across 'constructed' feedback, for example by selling '10 fantastic wallpapers' for 1 euro cent each, or sales and purchases made constantly by the same group of users, who thus continually and reciprocally increase their feedback. All this in order to create a theoretically 'healthy' seller, from whom a not too cautious buyer could also buy, and thus pay for, an object that might later turn out not to be as described. And then the months spent building a nice house of cards might turn out to be aimed at achieving a double demise: that of the castle, and that of the buyer's own money.
Anyone who has had direct experience (positive or negative) of what has been written is welcome to discuss it together...
