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Kent Rasmussen
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Greetings from Southern California I live in Thousand Oaks, California--a quiet, sunny community about 20 miles due west of Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley. My interests are broad, but when it comes to buying on eBay, I have a special interest in materials (especially books) relating to Mark Twain. I began buying on eBay in 1998 and got seriously into selling books there two years later. I did tolerably well but stopped selling after a few years because I didn't have time to keep up with the business details. In 2007, I returned to selling books online--mostly on Amazon Marketplace (as "Samuelclemens"--see the link below my picture), with an occasional listing on eBay. Have you read any of my books? Although I live in Ventura County, I work full-time as a reference book editor in Pasadena, 50 miles to the east. (Yes, I have a nasty commute.) I've also been writing books myself for more than 30 years. My most recent books include Critical Companion to Mark Twain, Bloom's How to Write About Mark Twain, Mark Twain for Kids and The Quotable Mark Twain. However, I'm probably best known for Mark Twain A to Z, which went out of print after Critical Companion came out at the end of 2007. Perhaps you've seen one of my books. For more information on me and my publications, visit my personal website through the link on this page. The link to Amazon.com will take you directly to a list of my own books that is much more up to date than the information on my personal web site, which I need to replace. My long-distance commuting has helped make me a regular "reader" of unabridged audiobooks. In fact, I review them regularly for Library Journal. You can read some of my reviews on the journal's own website. |
 This picture of me, taken in at Columbia University in 1994, will help you to remember my real name. In case you're wondering, I take my eBay nickname "Uncle Dynamite" from a P. G. Wodehouse novel about a character named Ickenham, on whose eccentric behavior I try to model my own. |
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Thoughts on feedback blackmail on eBay On another matter ... I've been fighting a losing battle with eBay to get them to provide buyers with more protection against dealers who post retaliatory feedback. If you look at my feedback numbers, you'll see that I've received two negatives, including one that is (as I write) fairly recent. Both were posted by sellers, the only two people for whom I have ever posted negative feedback. I posted my feedback only reluctantly, after futile efforts to get those dealers to make good on unsatisfactory transactions. In the more recent case, the DVD the dealer sold me did not match the auction description. I immediately notified the dealer (well, not exactly immediately--as the same dealer waited three weeks before mailing the DVD to me after I had made an instant payment) and asked for a replacement. The dealer eventually acknowledged his error and apologized but never offered me a replacement or a refund. Since I noticed that he consistently posted his own feedback only after his customers posted theirs, I sensed that posting negative feedback would be risky and made a great effort to persuade him to make good on our transaction. After repeatedly writing to him and even asking for eBay's help, I finally posted negative feedback. What else should one do? Then what happened? Not only did the dealer post a negative feedback about me, he said: "Communicates thru feedback. Beware!!!" What a hypocrite! Later, I got a notice from eBay saying that the dealer was offering to withdraw his feedback if I would do the same! I declined the offer on principle. This sort of thing infuriates me and is one of the reasons I've been buying and selling less frequently on eBay. Over the years, I've frequently written to eBay and offered suggestions for giving buyers more protection from dealers, but I've always been greeted with silence. It shouldn't be difficult for eBay to have dealer feedback records show whether they post their feedback before or after their buyers do. When I was selling regularly on eBay, I always tried to post feedback immediately after receiving my customers' money. What else are buyers supposed to do to earn feedback? Kiss the dealers' feet? What reason do dealers have for withholding feedback until they see what their customers have to say, unless it is to discourage them from posting negative feedback about them? I'm sure that I'm not the only person infuriated by eBay's feedback system. It's frustrating to work hard for years to keep one's feedback record perfect, only to have unscrupulous dealers stab one in the back, while eBay does nothing to help. From my own experience and observations, I see no evidence that eBay much cares about anything other than maximizing profits. Caveat emptor, indeed. July 2008 I see that eBay has finally started reforming its feedback system by not allowing sellers to post neutral or negative feedback about their buyers. A good idea, but I could wish they would make the policy retroactive, as the negative feedback those dealers slapped on me may have hurt my sales because of another change in the feedback system: Now, eBay posts feedback percentages for only the previous 12 months. That may be a good idea for big dealers, but it can hurt those with less frequent transactions. Before eBay made the change, my feedback rating was 99.6%. Not 100%, as I think it should be, but pretty good. At the moment, my score has dropped to 95.8%. Why the big difference? Because my previous score was based on 454 positives out of 456 ratings. Now it's only 23 of 24. I'd have to have 76 more positives to get back to 99%, and that isn't going to happen within 12 months. Perhaps this doesn't sound like a big deal. However, in my years of buying and selling on eBay, I've come to think of any rating below 99% as a warning flag. A 95.8% rating sounds downright bad. In view of the fact that several of my recent auctions of high-quality and high-interest books didn't do nearly as well as I had expected, I can't help but wonder if part of the reason is my feedback rating. All because a jerk DVD dealer dinged me for a three-buck transaction that he failed to make good on. Incidentally, that same dealer now has 35 negative feedbacks over the past 12 months, but his rating is 98%. Who says that size doesn't matter? Enough whining. |
Favorite Links Visit my personal website Amazon.com's list of my books Amazon Marketplace list of books I'm presently selling |
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