Dear EBay Policy Decision Makers,

I'm a Powerseller that has been selling on E-bay for over 7 years.  My feedback is still 100.0% positive even with your recent feedback policy changes.  However, I think part of your new feedback policy is significantly at fault and therefore on behalf of myself and probably tens of thousands of other unhappy sellers, I'm urging you to seriously consider my comments and proposals for change regarding your new feedback policies which are in the best interest of the Ebay Community.

#1 - I AGREE WITH YOUR NEW POLICY regarding Seller being unable to leave negative feedback for buyers.  Before this policy change feedback for many many transactions would never be left by a buyer due to fear of retaliatory negative feedback.  This ended up in a 'feedback stalemate' and this results in less accurate ratings for both parties, but most importantly for sellers ratings as this is the rating of the party selling the products which is essentially more important than the buyers rating.  Your new policy acknowledges this fact.

#2 - I DO NOT AGREE WITH YOUR NEW POLICY which gives neutral ratings equal weight as negative ratings as far as reducing the positive feedback percentage score.  I realize you had to make this change if you were not going to allow sellers to leave neutral ratings in addition to not allowing them to leave negative ratings.  However I think this is a significant mistake in your policy decision for the following basic reason:

Neutral, by definition, means that whatever is being described or represented as neutral has a value that adds up to being neither positive or negative.  Essentially if every feedback is given a value, positive feedback is +1, negative feedback is -1 (negative number).  Neutral feedback is 0 or 50% positive + 50% negative.

As a results I propose two changes to your feedback policy:

1) Allow sellers to leave buyers neutral feedback

2) Return your feedback percentage rating formula to consider neutral feedbacks truly neutral and not have an effect on the feedback percentage score.  You might term the score 'Feedback: xxx% Non-Negative' or 'Feedback xxx% Positive/Neutral'

This proposal still preserves the new policies intention of preventing the 'feedback stalemate' resulting from fear of retaliatory feedback from sellers. So the goal of making seller feedback more accurately represent the seller's actual performance is preserved.

This change also acknowledges that the majority perception by a buyer when they look at the Feedback percentage is that anything less than 100% is a reflection of negative sentiment from one or more of that seller's buyers in one or more transactions.  This is simply the realistic, common sense acknowledgement of how the majority (not everyone) of members in the Ebay Community perceive the feedback percentage and will continue to perceive it that way.  The minority of users will examine a seller's feedback in detail.  Most will look at the overall score on the auction page.

If E-bay is not willing to adjust their policy to a more fair, common sense policy as I have proposed above, then I would propose that E-bay would consider AT LEAST doing the following.

Acknowledging the fact that the minority, NOT THE MAJORITY look at the total positive feedback percentage on the auction page and do not review the Sellers detailed feedback page, I would suggest Ebay, AT LEAST, list the total percentage for each type of feedback on the auction listing page, such as:

Feedback: 99.3% Positive
           0.7% Neutral
           0.0% Negative

Only listing the positive percentage, especially when less than 100%, leaves the member reading the auction to easily make false assumptions as to whether or not negative or neutral feedback caused the score to be below 100%.  In many cases the neutral or negative feedback could be buried several pages deep in a sellers history who sells many items a day!  So trying to determine if the seller ha d negative or neutral feedback can be inconvenient and time consuming to potential buyers.  Therefore, a summary of the breakdown on the auction listing page would be very beneficial to the buyer and would alleviate some, probably not all, disappointment and frustration with sellers who have seen their feedback percentage greatly drop as a result of neutral feedback being calculated into the percentage score the same was as negative feedback.

In summary, I am proposing that Seller be allowed to leave neutral feedback but still not being able to leave negative feedback to preserve the new policies intention of removing the buyer's fear of retaliatory feedback while at the same time returning the effect of neutral feedbacks on the feedback percentage score to what it was before, truly neutral, no effect.

If this is not possible, the summary breakdown of the feedback percentage should be displayed on the auction listing page to better inform buyers of the sellers feedback percentage without the buyers having to potential  wade through pages and pages of feedback to determine if the non-positive feedback was neutral or negative.