Q: Tanner,
I just recieved a Negative Feedback from a lady I sold a camera to last week. She recieved the camera and imediatly went and posted a negative feeback for me stating that the product was not as described in the ad. She never even contacted me first to tell me there was a problem or that she wanted a refund.

I dont think that my camera was misrepresented in the ad and I have a refund policy that was posted on the same ad. I would have been happy to return here money if there really was a problem, but she never even gave me a chance.

What do I do in this situation? Is there any way I can get that negative feedback removed?

Need advice,

James

A: Don’t you hate when that happens!!!!!

Is the person a “newbie”? This quite often happens when someone is new and nervous. You know the type that sends four emails between 11:30pm and 11:45pm on a Saturday night and doesn’t know why you didn’t respond.

Your first step is to count to ten and do a few deep cleansing breaths to remove any traces of revenge chemicals that are flowing through your veins.

Next, contact the person. Try to find out what happend and what went wrong.

If you solve the mystery and the person and you come to an agreement then good. If the person is a newbie, then try to explain that it is bad eBay manners to give a negative without warning.

It is very difficult to get eBay to remove a negative feedback. Click on the following link to read their policy for doing so.
pages.ebay.com/help/policies/feedback-removal.html.
If the feedback REALLY bothers you, then you can pay SquareTrade $20 to step in and get it removed.

Instead, I have used the following approach in this situation.

Get the person to agree to update their feedback. What you need to do is go and reply to their negative comment. (You do this by clicking on the link labeled “Respond to comments” while viewing your feedbacks). Reply to their negative writing something like “User didn’t know camera had different models and panicked. Everythings ok now”".

Once you do this, then the buyer can go and reply to your response. They should apologize for giving the negative. If the person is really sorry and apologetic, you may be able to tell them what you would like them to write. Don’t worry about proper grammar, spelling and spacing. Try to use the 80 characters you are allotted.

Now this won’t remove the negative from your record, but anyone reading the feedbacks will see that it was a mistake, and that you were professional enough to keep your cool and not mail them a box of dog poop as revenge.

This will actually help you. Let’s think through the scenario:

1. Shopper sees one of your auctions, wants to buy your item, but wants to make sure you have good feedback.

2. Clicks on your feedback score and sees you have an excellent record, but there is a negative. She will think “What is the story, on the negative.”

3. She hunts through your feedback finds the negative and sees that:
-It was a bogus negative.
-That your customer service is good even when someone “negs” you.
That will actually puts some points into your corner my friend!

If handled properly, this can be a “making lemonade out of a lemon” type situation.

If you are new to eBay, please don’t give a negative until after repeated emails AND phoning the person. Many emails never get through due to all of the SPAM filtering going on. So if it seems totally out of character for this seller to goof up, then do the kind thing and call them up.