By Avril Harper
I’ve had a spate of queries from visitors to my web site lately all focussing on one main topic as will be revealed in this article.

The questions have largely centred around eBay sellers receiving a growing number of requests for refund, usually because a product has allegedly not arrived at its intended destination. Right or wrong, without acceptable proof of posting sellers are expected to refund dishonest buyers as well as losing their product and having to fund the cost of original delivery to the winning bidder. A certificate of posting, even a Recorded or Insured Delivery slip will not always sway eBay or PayPal in your favour. You may still have to refund the individual.

The problem has escalated in the last few weeks, affecting many people I know personally, including myself, and until recently a claim for refund for alleged non-delivery was about as rare as snow in the Amazon jungle.

Nowadays I receive such claims, backed by claims for refund, at least twice a week.

The reason? I believe, having talked with other PowerSellers, the reason is eBay’s new feedback rules, mainly the fact that sellers can no longer leave negative feedback even for rogue buyers. Buyers, no longer fearing negative feedback, can lie and cheat their way out of paying for valuable goods misappropriated from honest sellers.

Do you think I’m being unfair? Do you think it’s possible buyers aren’t cheating sellers today?

Well I put it to the test. I had two buyers, both claimed their product had not arrived and they wanted their money back fast. Frankly I didn’t believe either person so I checked their feedback to see if they’d played the same trick on other sellers. I found both were new buyers without established feedback. So there’s no way to check if these people are telling the truth or just using eBay’s new feedback rules to rob honest sellers. But I’m willing to bet these ‘new’ buyers are actually long time buyers on eBay who are constantly opening new accounts when the old ones are closed down by eBay.

I set a trap. Each of my daughters uploaded items similar to those these two people had purchased from me. Whereas my sales had been for $100 each per person, these items were expected to fetch about 5 dollars. One of those people was the highest bidder on something listed by my youngest daughter. She duly posted the item and guess what? Two weeks later there’s a claim made to PayPal about non-delivery of the item. We used Recorded Delivery and Royal Mail says the item was definitely delivered, and signed for, making this one of the worst buyer types I’ve personally ever encountered. We’ve informed eBay and PayPal and await their comments on whether we will be forced to refund this man! Either way we can still ban people like this for bidding at our auctions.

There’s no way via the eBay system to warn other sellers about this new breed of auction fraudster, but other organisations are coming to the rescue with ideas and scripts, even complete web sites, dedicated to protecting eBay sellers against rogue buyers on eBay!

One such location is Toolhaus.org where today I discovered a neat and very simple idea being developed by eBay sellers to warn other sellers about buyers who should, under perfect two-way trading conditions, be given negative feedback.

Toolhaus talks of ‘False Positives’, ‘FPs’ for short, and basically the system involves sellers leaving negative comments in the location reserved for positive feedback. The seller leaves a coded message, such as ‘FP’ or ‘False Positive’, even ‘Negative’ and using scripts at various sites, including Toolhaus, sellers can search for auction buyers with high False Positive points from which to grow evidence to support a seller’s case against claims made for refunds to eBay or PayPal. So, for example, if my daughter and I leave ‘FP’ feedback for our ‘friend’ mentioned earlier, those comments will be available to others through an easy search at some of these sites.

These comments from the Toolhaus site might help you better understand this neat idea:

“eBay has indicated that in May, 2008, sellers will no longer be able to leave negative or neutral Feedback for buyers. The merits of this will probably be debated for a very, very long time, but in the meantime, some sellers have suggested that they would leave ‘false positive’ (FP) feedback. Specifically, they would leave positive feedback containing the word ‘negative’ or ‘neg’, as an indication of the type of feedback they wanted to leave.

Toolhaus will endeavor to remain neutral on the merits of that tactic, but we’ve added a new option to the Negs tool: A checkbox to enable searching for ‘false positive’ feedback, and reporting the total number of those items found. The report is at the end of the Negs tool’s output, with the counts of Negative, Neutral, and Withdrawn feedback items.”

It’s still not certain if eBay is happy for codes and negative comments to appear in feedback but, as Toolhaus says, they’ll cross that bridge when they come to it!

I’m not sure how it will all pan out in practice but it could help sellers grow a case against having to constantly refund dishonest auction buyers. We’ll just have to wait and see!

Avril Harper is the author of A COMPLETE NEWBIES’ GUIDE TO MAKING MONEY WITH CLICKBANK which you can read about at: http://www.avrilharper.com/clickbank.html.