The Five Goals of the Feedback System

The primary purpose of the feedback system is to increase trust and help facilitate transactions among strangers. The feedback system is designed to achieve five goals:

1) Credibly predicting future behavior. The feedback system provides a solid indication of what to expect from a member if you enter into a transaction with them. However, it's not a perfect predictor of future behavior, but a credible one. (Everyone will get the occasional “unfair” negative if they trade long enough.)

It also encourages satisfactory trading since the threat of a negative encourages timely payment, shipping, and good descriptions.

2) Encouraging members to resolve issues before leaving a negative. Most people would much rather have successful transactions than receive a negative comment, so the system encourages people to work out their issues. This can also be viewed as a negative aspect of the system, as sometimes people hesitate to express their views about a transaction because of the threat of negative feedback or retaliatory feedback.

3) Encouraging repeat activity. Your feedback score is your reputation on eBay, and most people want to have a good reputation, whether online or offline. This encourages people to keep using the feedback system to enhance their reputation on eBay, and progress to the next feedback star level. As members use the feedback system again and again, the rest of the Community also benefits as the system becomes a stronger tool to evaluate future behavior.

4) A member-to-member system. We are often asked why we won't remove unfair or untrue comments. The reason why eBay maintains the feedback system as a member-to-member system is twofold: cost-effectiveness and legal liability.

Under federal law (the Communications Decency Act), because eBay does not censor feedback or investigate it for accuracy, we are not legally responsible for the remarks that members post, even if those remarks are defamatory.

Determining the accuracy of a comment would require an investigation. Since we receive over 3 million comments every day (including over 20,000 negative comments), evaluating each comment to determine whether it is accurate or truthful would not be cost effective. Further, as soon as we began to evaluate the comments, eBay's legal liability would increase because we could be held liable for the comments, much like a newspaper is held responsible for the content they publish.

However, the law does not protect the person who leaves the feedback from responsibility for it.

5) Help maintain the integrity of the overall marketplace through the feedback system. Occasionally a member receives an unfair negative, which decreases their satisfaction with the feedback system. While we understand and sympathize, we keep the bigger picture in mind, i.e. that the feedback system as a whole remains a viable method for the Community to evaluate transactions and facilitate trust among strangers.

A Brief History of Feedback

February, 1996. Pierre Omidyar, eBay's founder, launched the feedback system, with a letter introducing the feedback system to the Community.

Pierre recognized that the bourgeoning community of members was not just involved in buying and selling transactions, but also was helping one another learn how to trade online. In this spirit, initially the feedback system was a mechanism to provide input on all aspects of a member's activity on the site – not just transactions. For the first few years members could leave feedback for another member for any reason, including receiving help about how to trade. The system was meant to reward behavior that benefited the Community and punish behavior that was harmful.

This approach worked well for a couple years while the Community was relatively small. Over time it became clear that the primary purpose for the feedback system was to evaluate a member's trading activity.

1999. We moved away from non-transaction based feedback by preventing members from leaving negative non-transactional feedback.

Another early principle of the feedback system was that only active members should be able to impact your feedback score. So, any time a member was suspended all the feedback that they had left (positive and negative) was converted to neutral. In 1999 this practice was discontinued, since it created confusion. Converting positive or negative feedback from members with long-standing trading histories no longer seemed the right approach.

March 2000. All feedback became transaction based.

June 2001. In response to our Community we introduced the buyer/seller labels on the Member Profile page, which helped people understand the context in which a member had received feedback.

January 2003. We introduced the Seller Information Box on the item page. This snapshot view of a seller made it easy for a buyer to quickly evaluate a seller's feedback history and positive feedback percentage.

Also in 2003, in an effort to make sure members understood the impact of leaving negative or neutral feedback as well as to increase their awareness of all the communication vehicles available to them, we introduced an additional page that members had to read prior to leaving a neutral or negative feedback comment.

2004. We made changes to the Feedback Profile page and introduced Mutual Feedback Withdrawal, giving members the ability to agree to remove feedback, if they were mutually able to resolve their issues.