How To Remove Negative Feedback From Ebay

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Transcript

Rob: What’s up, guys? In today’s episode, we are talking about how to get negative feedback removed on eBay.

Melissa: We’re going to talk about how it’s possible, when you can do it, when you can’t do it, and kind of the different circumstances that happen to sellers. So, and talk through that.

Rob: That’s right. But before we do that, what is feedback? You guys might be on here getting ready to start selling on eBay and you don’t even know how the whole feedback, stuff happens and how it works. So let’s jump into that first.

Melissa: So feedback is really big on eBay, more than almost any other platform. Like it is big. It’s how a buyer can see that you’re a legit seller. So, but it is valued more on eBay than most of the other platforms.

Rob: That’s right. Ebay has been out the longest. And this is the way that eBay has always recorded, your seller status, I guess you could say. People can go and look at different transactions that you have either sold or you have bought, and they can see exactly how you corresponded with your buyer or with your sellers.

So, the name next to the seller name or the buyer’s name, there is a number on that. And that is how many feedback you actually have, that somebody has left you feedback that you have next to your number. That’s how many feedback or interactions that you have had.

Melissa: You’ll see after a seller’s name is their number with a little star.

Once you hit different levels, you get different colors, stars. So if you’re a top rated seller, you get different. Sometimes stars and badges, but yeah, so that number is very important. It’ll show you how many transactions they’ve had and then how many of those have been successful and somebody has left positive feedback.

Rob: That’s right. And they will give you a percentage on how many transactions they’ve had total and how many of them, those transactions have either been negative or positive. And then you’ll see an actual percentage next to that number for people that were happy, who interacted with that seller or that buyer.

Melissa: So, so the goal is 100.

Rob: Absolutely. When you are selling on eBay, we are sellers on eBay. We buy as well. But the majority of what we do is that’s how we make our money is selling on eBay. We want to show those potential buyers that we are legit, that we know what we do we’re doing, and we want them to, have a reassurance of, okay, these people know what they’re doing.

I’m getting probably, I’m getting exactly what II’m buying or, you know, the way that this item is listed.

Melissa: And if somebody is a high volume seller and you see, you know, thousands of transactions and they have a 99.9%. They’re still they’re doing good. They, you know, there’s people, the circumstances are kind of, you know, crazy.

You can’t know every circumstance. So when you’re dealing with a little bit higher volume, you’re going to have to deal with it a little bit more.

Rob: Absolutely. That is a great point because it is a lot of sales going through. You’re not going to make everybody happy no matter what. When you’re dealing with lower volume, for us, we typically sell anywhere from probably 75 to a hundred items a year. That is all we go through on eBay. Those items are higher profit items, but, we don’t do as much volume. So ours show a lot more. If we get a negative feedback, it really, really jumps into, cramps our style because it lowers our average a lot by just one negative feedback.

Now, somebody who’s doing thousands. They can get one and it’ll barely even touch them because they have thousands and thousands of transactions going through eBay.

Melissa: For that, just to, for reference for that, you know, 80 to a hundred items that where it’s about like, what’d you say, 70 to a hundred items.

Yeah. We average around 75 to a hundred thousand dollars for that. It’s like we’re close to, you know, 800 to a thousand dollars per transaction. So it depends on the year, but.

Rob: Exactly, but that also shows when we get a negative feedback that it hurts because we do not do that many transactions, and it pulls down our average greatly if we do get a negative feedback.

So jump us into our next one. Can you get negative feedback removed on eBay?

Melissa: So, yes and no. So it depends. The answer is it depends, which is a lot of the answers to some of these questions. So there are definitely instances that you can get it removed. So what would be something that somebody can get it removed?

Absolutely. Now we have had negative feedback in the past and we have had it removed every single time that we’ve got it on to our name. So it is possible to do. But you have to be selling the right way. You have to be advertising the right way. You have to be doing, the right way. I mean, your, your descriptions have to be accurate.

Your pictures have to be accurate. You do not want to, falsely advertise something. You don’t want to, show something better in better condition than it is. And then I get a buyer who is upsetwith the item when they do get it. So.

We want to under promise and over deliver, right?

Rob: That is our famous saying.

We always want to under promise and over deliver so that buyer’s going to be happy with the item. And we’re going to get positive feedback when they do receive. So.

Melissa: Do not say an item is brand new and mint condition. If you, if it is even remotely, even if it’s new in box, don’t say it. You never want to give that seller or that buyer that thought.

Rob: That’s right.

Melissa: That it’s brand spanking new with nothing wrong with it.

Rob: Absolutely because we are all different. We have different ideas of what mint condition is, what perfect condition is, what great condition is. So it is subject to the buyer, the seller, whatever it is. So you never want to really describe your items with those terms because you might end up with an upset buyer and you do not want that. They will leave you negative feedback. So, but if you are accurately listing your descriptions, if you are taking proper pictures, and you do all that to the book and how you’re supposed to do it. And then for whatever reason, a buyer leaves you negative feedback. Yes, you can get it removed. Now, what is the process for getting it removed? You have to call up eBay, you got to get a rep on the phone, in the feedback department and you have to tell them exactly what’s going on. And you have to convince them that it was a feedback that was not warranted. It was not a legit feedback for whatever the item was.

Now you can’t go on and do it through the computer. You can’t do it all, what’s it called? Where you just go out and fill out all the forms? Yeah. But you want to call them up. It is way easier to get a remedy on the phone, on the phone and talk to them so they can, they can understand what exactly that you’re talking about.

And you want to get them to agree with you, for sure.

Melissa: And if you can’t get them, if you can’t find a direct number, the number you have doesn’t work or whatever, you can go to their website or just go once you’re logged into your account and you can have them call you and they usually call fairly quickly.

So within, I mean, usually five to maybe 30 minutes at the longest. So depending on how busy they are, but they’ll usually call you right back and you can get, you can ask for the feedback department and get somebody. And the feedback department’s actually pretty good to work with. So, you can get somebody and talk to somebody and they’ll, you know, they’ll work with you.

And a big thing is if somebody comes after your character, that is one thing that people get upset, for whatever reason, you know, people get upset or people just have a rough day and they take it out on you or whatever. But if they come after your character and you’ve done everything right, and you’re in the right, then you can definitely get that removed because they even won’t stand for that.

Rob: So, Absolutely. So that is one thing that you do not want to have happen is somebody come after a character. Any of those things that are a bad experience, if now you ship something out late.Typically, like I said, if you’re following to the book of what eBay requires then you’re having stuff shipped out on time, your descriptions are proper. Your pictures are proper. The buyer knows what to expect, and then you should not get negative feedback unless that buyer is doing it out of spite for whatever the reason is. And that is the feedback that you can always have removed.

Melissa: And something like as far as you said for the delay, like, even if you can, shipping is kind of crazy because we can’t control how long the carriers take.

Sometimes they take longer than they say, they’re going to, even if we ship it out the same day, it might take longer than we said or longer than whatever they formalities, especially. So if you can, eBay knows that you shipped it out within a day or two or whatever your policy is, you shipped it out within the time.

They cannot leave you negative feedback for late shipping because you didn’t, you shipped it out on time. So that would be an example of, I mean, they’re not, not attacking your character, but that they’re upset that it’s late, but it’s not your fault. So.

Rob: So that brings you to that question. What if you call eBay up and eBay’s like, yeah, I don’t agree with you. No, this is the buyer’s experience. And they have the right to leave this negative feedback. Do not take it that that is the only result, that you are done, you can’t get the feedback removed. There are thousands of maybe hundreds of reps at eBay. And you’re going to get a different rep when you call up the phone, the majority of the time. Now you might not

be able to convince the first rep that you talked to, of your side of your side of the story. You might not be able to do that to where you might actually have to hang up the phone, and then call back an hour later, later on that evening, the next day, whatever it is, and get another rep on the phone. If you do this three or four times, and you actually can not get anywhere with the reps.

Well, I would actually say your second time, if you can’t get anywhere with that rep. Talk to a supervisor and get a supervisor on the phone and tell the supervisor your story. Like I said, if you’re arguing something that is your fault, you’re wasting your time. Don’t mess with it. If you take a picture of something and you don’t show scrapes or scratches or dents, and it shows up that way, and that is your fault, you’re not gonna get that, that negative feedback removed.

But if you’re not, and legitimately you have a reason for getting the negative feedback removed. You can have it done by talking to the right rep. And like I said, don’t take no for an answer with the first rep. You talk to them, talk to a supervisor. If you have to call back and get another rep. Cause sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

That’s what happens is you have to, you have to put your time and you have to do it, to get them to side with you. So sometimes it takes a little while, but you can get it done if it’s not warranted, if it, they do not have the reason to leave you negative.

Melissa: So, what if you did make a mistake and you realized it, they left you negative feedback and you can’t do anything about it, but so basically that’s a great learning, a learning experience, you know, you’ll never do that again.

And you’ll, it drops off after 12 months. So. It does leave your name after 12 months. So just know that it will be removed after a little while. So, especially as you have more traction under your belt and you’ll get more feedback and then the percentage will go down. So hopefully that’s your only one at that point.

Rob: And one thing we did not talk about is you can only leave negative feedback if you are the buyer, the seller has no, and this has happened, probably 10, 15 years ago, where the buyer and the seller were doing it in recourse or retaliation. When one of them left negative feedback, the other one left negative feedback, and it was a very, rough situation. So eBay stopped the sellers from being able to, leave negative feedback for the buyer.

Now say your buyer buys an item and they don’t pay. You can’t go and leave him negative feedback. You have to open a non-paying bidder on that. And ebay keeps track of that. And then they will suspend the buyer if he keeps doing it to multiple sellers.

Melissa: You know what they should do, they should do like what Airbnb does.

So you can’t see each other’s feedback until you’ve both left feedback or until like two weeks have gone by. And then that would work. That would be good, but people would retaliate when they would leave negative feedback and then they would go back and leave negative feedback. So.

Rob: So if you are the seller, you cannot leave negative feedback for the buyer for the experience.

Only the buyer can leave negative feedback. Both sellers, can leave positive, neutral? I think as a seller, you can only leave positive.

Melissa: But you can leave positive with a comment. So you would still, they would still get positive, but you can leave a comment saying whatever happened. If the person like, if they’re really trying to, if it was a bad experience on your end and you, it wasn’t your fault, although you should be able to get it removed.

So, but you can leave, you know, if they were difficult buyer, you can leave say that in the transaction. So, but it’s still under positive and you can reply if somebody left you feedback, you can reply. And also say comment, say, so say somebody was upset and you offered them maybe a partial refund for something.

You can explain that whole thing right under, I don’t know how many characters you get, but you get to a line underneath there to explain that for any future people. So they come to your profile and be like, okay, well she’s got 99.7%. What happened? And they go and look, that’s the only negative feedback.

And it, it looks like you have a response that you tried to fix it and whatever the virus is difficult. So you can do that.

Rob: But typically, if the buyer is just being difficult, you can’t have her removed, you can get the right person on the phone and you can get it removed. So that’s the answer to the question. You absolutely can do it, but sometimes it is not as easy as just calling up eBay or filling out the form on eBay to get that or report that buyer or get the feedback removed.

You have to do it. It might take a couple of times, but you can absolutely do. We have done it a couple of times throughout our career, I would say at least probably four or five times throughout our selling career. I have done negative feedback. Typically we do not get negative feedback, but when it has happened in those occasions, we were able to get it removed.

And the other thing that helps you out a ton in this, the more that you’re on eBay, you’re selling, you’re buying and you’re part of the community. That is going to help your situation.When you call and talk to a rep, if you’re new to eBay and something happens, you don’t have the track record of being a good seller, being a good buyer, whatever it is exactly.

It’s going to be harder until you build your reputation reputation, that the reps can actually see, okay, this is a legit person. They’re selling some good items with making some good money on eBay. We probably need to listen here and see exactly what happened in this situation. And it might warrant them siding with you, like I said, so this is where you have to pay your dues, spend some time, building up your feedback and building up the good experience experiences for the buyers, that they will side with you over that.

So that’s a great point.

Melissa: I was going to also state that, so there are other benefits to having, more feedback. Like you want to get more feedback, like you said, then people know that you’re a legit seller and eBay knows so that they are more likely to side with you if you’ve given them a good experience in the past.

But also when starting out, if you have low transactions and low feedback, they’re going to hold you. So they’re going to hold all your transaction or your money on hold when you sell stuff. They could do it up to 21 days. They don’t typically hold it that long, but they could, if you know you’re new or infrequent seller, they could do that and you want to get your money soon.

So you want to get that feedback up, get those transactions going. And also another reason is you want to eliminate, you can’t eliminate, but it almost eliminates all the scam requests that you get. When you first start out, you get like, at least when you have under 10 feedback, you’re getting all these, I’ll pay you more if you can ship it to here, here’s my PayPal. Go get a gift card, all this, all the scammy stuff. So that goes away though. I can’t think when’s the last time you got a request.

Rob: Yeah, they don’t happen to us that much.

Melissa: Yeah, they go away. I mean, you might get one here and there, but they pretty much go away. Cause they can be frustrating when you’re first starting out, because you’re like, okay, is this real?

Is this a scam what’s going on? But they pretty much, once you have established that you’re a seller, they leave you alone. They’re going out to the people that have low feedback. So I would say it’s more towards 50. And once you get to 50 that’s when people know you’re legit, a lot of scammers, not always.

Rob: A lot of them will die off once they see you are in there, you’re selling and you know what you’re doing. So yeah, once you get to that level, then you won’t deal with as many scammers. Now, like most I said, we don’t deal with them that much at all. If maybe once a year we might get one, but typically we don’t deal with any on eBay now, other avenues, totally different story.

You will get those scammers that will reach out to you. Definitely Craigslist, OfferUp, Facebook marketplace. There are scammers all over the place on there that they will actually reach out and try to get you on those platforms as well.

Melissa: So what are some ways that you can build your feedback quick?

Rob: Absolutely. That’s a great question. Now you guys can go in and buy items that you would normally buy on Amazon, that you get them super quick when you’re buying on Amazon, but change it over and buy some stuff on eBay. The cool thing about feedback on eBay, when, somebody is checking out your feedback, they merge the buying and seller feedback together.

So next to your name, my name. That number right next to it. It doesn’t matter if you have 200 feedback, that’s a mixture of your buying and your selling. Now if the buyer or whoever clicks on that 200, they can go on and they can, they can separate it and see what is buying, what is selling and get a better idea if you’re actually a buyer or a seller and understand your feedback a little bit more in that, that aspect of it.

So, but the best way to build it is buy those items that you would normally buy on Amazon. Or sell items that you have in your house that you don’t really care about, the items that you still get.

Melissa: Good items, they’re not like junk.

Rob: But you donate them to salvation army.

Melissa: You don’t care if you make any money on them. So exactly.

Rob: Don’t lose money on shipping, list them on there for a penny and then whatever it’s going to cost to ship it because you give it away in. Do that, and then start building your feedback that way. Oh, that’s the best way to build up some feedback.

Melissa: And then you get some experience with shipping and all that good stuff.

So that’s fun. So, yeah, so that’s pretty much, you can get negative feedback removed if it, if it’s attacking you, if it’s not something that you did and if you were legit in your transaction. If you weren’t and you didn’t do a good job, or you were trying to scam somebody. No, you can not get it removed.

Rob: Take it as a lesson and move forward and keep going with it and it will

Melissa: be gone in 12 months.

Rob: Exactly. It will drop off, so you absolutely can get it removed. Don’t be that seller out there who gets negative feedback and they’re like, oh great. I’m stuck with it for 12 months, do not be that seller. If you’re a good seller, you’re legit and you’re doing it to the book, you’re doing the stuff the right way, then call up, ebay get some people, some reps on the phone, get to the right rep who actually will remove it.

They can remove it right there for you. If you get to the right rep and you tell them your story, you’re confident in your story, you can absolutely have a removed and get it taken off your feedback immediately.

Melissa: Yeah. So we love doing these topics with you guys.

If you have an idea that you want us to talk about and share more, share more information about, find us on Instagram and it’s at fleamrktflipper so it’s fleamarketflipper, but there’s no vowels in market cause that’s all that was available when we started it. But flea market flipper, we’re pretty easy to find on Instagram.

Just DM us and let us know. We’d love to talk about it. We want to do a like a session like this, a podcast episode, at least once a week, just us. And then we were trying to interview on two times a week, at least, other resellers. So yeah, DM us. And then if you have anybody else that you want us to interview, yeah, DM us and shoot them our way, let us know.

We’d love to get them on the podcast.

Rob: Absolutely. All right, you guys rock have a great day. We will see ya on the next episode.

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