Should we maintain a list of suspicious buyers and sellers?

[cyseymour]

Originally Posted by the 'stache

Ebay does have it's way of doing things, and it sucks. And yes, their profits are incredible. But I'm not interested in their profit margin. I'm interested in my safety, and the safety of my fellow Net54 members, when dealing with new members. We can say "well, it's easy to avoid trouble, just read the feedback left for buyers." I'm sorry, I don't want to waste 15 minutes reading feedback every time I want to sell an item when I could bring up a spreadsheet, hit ctrl-f, and enter the user ID and enter, and accomplish the same thing in 10 seconds. And it's not a vigilante blacklist; calling it such somehow insinuates that I am out to get people that have demonstrated poor behavior. Nothing could be further from the truth. I could care less about the people that would appear on the list. Their names would exist just to save me the trouble of having to go through a prolonged appeal process.

There are people out there like Zone91 who have perfect feedback as a buyer even though we know he has not paid for several items in the past (confirmed by members of this forum). And there's really not even any bad comments that have been left for him. People like this would appear on the list.

I guess it's a moot point, as it's not going to happen. And it's too bad, because I think some of the people voting "no" are making a lot of assumptions about how the list would be managed instead of asking questions first. Hell, if it were a concern of liability, put the list on my website. I would be the only person in harm's way. I would be responsible for maintaining the list, and if somebody wanted to shoot off a pissy email, they could send it to me. I have no problem with making my email public.

Remember that most ebay bids are snipes, at least the winning bids are often snipes. So unless you are going to block the person from bidding ahead of time, there is no reason to be checking out feedback. You just hope they pay and go with it. If they don't pay, you run the auction again.

As far as Zone91 goes, I think that he mostly paid but then wound up returning a lot of the cards. That's not going to win any awards, but it's different than being a non-payer.

As far as your maintaining the list, it's more than someone shooting off a pissy email. You'd have to make judgment calls about who is and isn't a good ebayer. That is going off the grid, man, that really is being a vigilante and creating your own set of rules. If you think checking bidder feedback is hassle, try setting up a blacklist and see what a hassle that is!