Let he who is without sin leave the first feedback...

I was on the radio last week with Griff and we chatted for a few minutes about the perennial topic of who should leave feedback first.

I could almost hear Griff sigh on the air when I brought up the topic, because he's probably had this conversation about 10,000 times (and that's a conservative estimate).  Everyone at eBay knows the party line:  don't rush to leave feedback for either your buyer or your seller, because you want to make sure that you know how the transaction turned out at the end before you put a permanent comment on the record.

Now many buyers want sellers to leave them feedback as soon as they pay, because (from their perspective) as soon as the buyer pays they've met all their obligations.  Jeff mentioned on the blog that I was going to talk about it on the radio last week and already a thread started up talking about this exact issue.  camino3x2 posted, "The seller should be leaving feedback immediately upon verifying payment has been received."  glenj1 posted, "In my opinion, the seller is wrong to withhold feedback until receiving theirs. If they get my money, especially when paid promptly, that should be sufficient to warrant immediate pos. feedback."

However, sellers are often wary to leave early feedback, because it essentially gives the buyer carte blanche to give them a neg without fear of retaliation.  That was essentially the point that sclotdebrotx, megsunlimited, and valuesavvy made in the thread.  The buyer may get the item and then make unreasonable demands (for example, asking for more than was in the original item listing, or requiring a refund of shipping and handling) and if the seller has already left feedback then they are totally exposed to a neg.

However, the reason why I brought the topic up with Griff was because I wanted to take the opportunity to say something a little different about this oft-chewed-upon question.  I started out completely on the same page as the eBay party line, but after reading literally thousands of disputes dealing with feedback, and talking with sellers who almost well up with tears thinking about their one neg, I've come around to a different perspective.  Or maybe, a different philosophy.

My first point is this:  people take feedback WAY too seriously on eBay.  Feedback is not a distillation of your character, it's not a divine judgement as to your inner worth, it's not even necessarily "true" in the purest sense.  It's just a bunch of comments from people you've transacted with, nothing more, nothing less.  As such, I think we all just need to take a deep breath and chill out about it a little.

Pierre has said in the past that the one problem with the feedback system is that there aren't enough negs.  For the system to really work, people have to be honest.  And right now we're too scared of negs, so we don't give them when they're deserved and we overreact when we get one we don't deserve. 

I have joked in the past that I sometimes think we should send out a "congratulations!" email to members when they get their first neg (particularly if they already have a good number of positives.)  Sort of a "welcome to the club" email.  The message could say, in essence, there are unreasonable buyers out there, and sometimes you may run across one and you may get a neg you don't deserve.  Or, sometimes you'll come across a seller who is mistreating their customers, and they may mistreat you as well.  If you give them an accurate neg and you get one in retaliation, then you should wear that as a badge of honor.  You took one for the good of community.  Good job.

Savvy eBayers will check out a neg on a potential transaction partner and be able to figure out very quickly if it was just a retaliatory neg or a slap from a chronic complainer.  Feedback requires context, and those who know how eBay works will take the time to get that context.  Also, many sellers will only leave feedback after they've received it, which means that they lose out on positives from buyers who forget to leave feedback first.  Our fear paralyzes us, even to the extent that we are willing to harm our reputation to avoid any vulnerability.

The flip side of this is that we should all also be freer with our positives.  Life is too short to live in fear.  If a buyer communicates well and pays quickly, why wait?  Give them the positive.  It communicates something important about our values: we choose to trust, and we believe that people are basically good.  It's really rare for a buyer to leave a neg for a good seller that leaves them a positive.  It doesn't make us vulnerable to take the first step... in fact, just the opposite.  It frees us from the constant fear and worry of being susceptible to the one unreasonable person out there.

I have seen sellers driven to the brink of madness by a single neg they received that they feel they didn't deserve.  For many of these sellers, their 100% positive rating becomes a curse.  They will spend endless hours mollycoddling unreasonable buyers so as to preserve their "perfect" rate, hours that they could have spent listing more items or giving service to non-whining buyers.  And the irony is, if they got the neg, their 99.9% feedback wouldn't affect their business one whit.

So take the risk.  Do the right thing.  Decide to live your eBay life without fear.  Personally, I think we'd all be a little better off.