I see so many people say that they would only buy from someone with lots of feedback, but surely even those with a high rating started with a low one. It seems silly to exclude sellers with low ratings.
Sellers with low ratings are excluded because of the shaky gorunds that a lot of people use for trading on Ebay. The biggest deciding factor is their feedback. You're saying that you'd buy from someone with a high negative feedback? That's not very smart from a business standpoint. If you use the feedback system right, your ratings will be in the high 90 percentile fairly quickly, which would mean that there'd be no need to worry about having a low rating or a few bad comments.
When you have 98-100% positive feedback and 25+ or so, and a punk with 1 positive (even if they have no negs) wants to buy from you, you have to consider the situation. If they are a stupid eBay newbie and don't read your auction correctly, or do something that causes them to have a bad experience, such as not being able to pay with PayPal, and then getting mad at you for only accepting it, etc.. You don't want to risk getting an "idiot" negative, especially from somebody who can just make a new account and start over. When your long-term account gets a negative, you are stuck with it because you don't want to start over. If somebody gets a negative on their first or second transaction, chances are they will make a fresh account. I prefer to do business with people who have similar or greater feedback because that way we both have the same reputation to lose if we mess up, and both parties will be more likely to work things out with each other. I have over 50+ 100% positive feedback on my personal eBay account. I don't want to risk messing that up to somebody who isn't risking anything on their part.
I wouldn't say that it's silly to deal with sellers with little feedback... it makes sense, after all. But that it's sometimes good to give those sellers a chance. And with buyers, I agree with Andrew. I guess you don't have much control over who bids on your item, but new buyers who don't know what they're doing are dangerous! lol...
I wont buy or sell to anyone without a few transactions under their belt. If they have a neg with only 25 transactions done i wont bid or let them bid on my items.
I sold to anyone that wanted to buy from me. I would only buy from someone with a high percentage of positivies, good comments from other buyers, and a decent number of sales under their belt. I don't have a specific number I look for.
I sell to buyers with little or no feeback, but I do it with my fingers crossed and a close eye on them (as if there's much I could do if they decided not to play nice). I only buy from sellers with 25+, too.
I've been burned by a seller with low feedback and also by one with high feedback. In both instances, I think it was some bad luck on the seller's part that caused the situation. But the low feedback guy made it good, after some intervention by PayPal. Even so, I hesitate to buy from a low feedback seller again. I know everyone was new once but eBay seems to be attracting scammers by the bucketfull any more.
I prefer to buy from someone with excellent feedback. I have excellent feedback, and have worked to maintain it. I like people who run their ebay business like a business.
