I've just read some comments saying that they would not deal with anyone with a feedback rating less than 98%

The seller being discussed was paper-werks, with a feedback of 97.2% (that's 54 -ve out of 2186 +ve's).

What are other experienced buyers recommending?

gkramer wrote:I've just read some comments saying that they would not deal with anyone with a feedback rating less than 98%

The seller being discussed was paper-werks, with a feedback of 97.2% (that's 54 -ve out of 2186 +ve's).

What are other experienced buyers recommending?

98% is my cutoff. No exceptions.  Usually with feedback less than that, you can see a lot of neutrals also, as well as less than stellar positives.  I think two people out of every 100 unhappy is as far as I'd like to go in most cases.   I might make an exception but in most cases, nope.

Also, a rule of thumb I've used, for every neg, there were probably at least three other customers that were displeased enough to leave a neg but didn't due to various circumstances.  So when I look at feedback, 10 negs becomes 30, 50 negs becomes 150, 100 negs becomes 300, etc.

Oh, and always count mutual withdraws as negs. In maybe 1 percent of the cases it was just an honest mistake. Otherwise, it was probably someone like Cougie using feedback blackmail as a way to get the neg removed.

Mike B.

Gotta agree. Setting limits like that in stone makes little sense to me.

That being said, anything below 99 percent gets investigated if the item looks interesting. I like to check things like recent feedback, feedback in the last year, the ratio of feedback from buyers vs. sellers, whether or not I know any of the people who have left negatives, etc., etc. ... I don't do that much buying, so it's all on a case-by-case basis.

If the recent feedback looks pretty clear, I might give a guy at 98 percent a shot. I know what a farce eBay's +1/0/-1 system can be (roughly 10 of my 16 negs were pure retaliation, plain and simple), so I'm willing to cut other sellers a break, too.

One thing that does concern me: the fairly recent trend of sellers with ginormous feedback scores of 15,000 and above but ratios at 97 percent or below. It's not that I necessarily think they are bad people; I'm just afraid my order will get lost.

No argument there. Especially considering that I don't chase a lot of rare items.

I guess I was mostly pointing out that seeing a feedback score in the 98 to 99.5 range wouldn't be an automatic disqualification. But, yes, if I see the same item from a seller with a perfect score, I'm likely to take their listing more seriously.

Sea-to-sky-games wrote:
Basically, I want someone who has something (i.e. their reputation) to lose should they deal with me poorly. But over a certain amount of feedback, like around 1000, it works against them. I figure a) they don't care as much about that one negative I could give them (as percentage of their total feedback); b) they won't take as great care about getting to your package quickly because they are busy with lots of other people.

good point (bold is mine) - reputation is a big deal on ebay. If in doubt read the feedback - positives and negatives.

That having been said I'd never write someone off out of hand. Remember real life gets in the way sometimes and a spate of negs can mean a personal crisis where auctions have been left and never dealt with.