eBay ethics

When should you leave feedback?

Initially, my thoughts were clear - the seller leaves feedback for the buyer when payment is received.  That's the extent of the buyer's obligations.  It seems apparent, however, that many sellers consider that the buyer is also obliged to leave positive feedback before they (the seller) will reciprocate, and either wait for this or respond to negative feedback with attacks on the buyer.  Bad decision.

A couple of sellers have crossed themselves off my list of prospective suppliers because of this behaviour.  I really see no justification for this approach, and the 'revenge' comments are a real turn off.  When there's a clear pattern of neutral comments about sellers not responding to emails etc, I tend to believe a buyer who leaves negative feedback about this rather than a seller who resorts to name calling and blank denial of the problem.

On the other hand, I have a problem at the moment - I have a non-paying buyer who may eventually pay up - do I leave feedback for him/her int he event that payment does arrive?  And if so, what can I say without raising their ire and inviting negative feedback myself?

What have I done?

I decided that it really wasn't necessary for me to do all the eBay searching, watching and bidding, so sorted out an account for Joyce.

Where I used to spend a few minutes doing this, my broadband connection is now saturated with eBay requests from the second workstation.  Post-midnight sessions, and very first thing in the morning (pre-breakfast, unheard of!), she's on there hunting for bargains.

Aha, I thought - no Paypal account, so it's safe.  Then in a moment of inexplicable madness, we set one up and funded it...

Back on the road again

Well, not as such.  But we're trying to establish another foothold on eBay.  That's the charitable view.

To be more honest, though, this is just a plan to enable me to sleep at nights - slowly, but surely, we're flogging all of Joyce's murder and forensic books.  I'll be able to relax, safe in the knowledge that we no longer have any guides on how to commit the perfect murder, how to poison your partner and get away with it, how to hire a hit man to get rid of an unwanted spouse (seeing a pattern here?).

On the other hand, I do feel a tiny bit guilty at releasing all this information into the hands of people about whom I know nothing.  Have we just created a new breed of serial killer?

A keeper?

I suspect that Windows Live Writer may just be staying on my hard drive.  If this doesn't get people blogging more, nothing will.  It's rare to come across a product that is at the same time ridiculously simple to use, and yet clever enough to make otherwise tortuous updates automatically.

Or perhaps the clever bit is making it simple.

One of the reasons that I haven't updated these pages is because it needs a login to Blogger to get it working.  However, WLW just ignores all that - asks for the homepage, a username and password (I gave it the Blogger combination, NOT the FTP account for the actual web pages), goes and pulls down what info it can (including the use of the Trebuchet font - not exactly normal) and makes writing this as easy as falling off the proverbial log.

Of course, there's the usual MS bias - one of the tools is a link to Windows Live Local maps - but you can't criticise for added functionality.  It's also possible to insert your own URLs, pictures, or other HTML code, so it's not really a limitation.

Now that's another excuse gone.