05-08-2025 4:31 AM
Is Ebay aware of Ebay's, almost without exception, highly negative reviews on this website? Does Ebay care? Apparently not.
05-08-2025 7:02 PM
I'm pretty sure they are aware.
About once a week someone posts an over enthusiastic but vague sickly sweet 5 star review on there extolling the virtues of simple delivery and how fantastic and helpful Ebay staff are which stinks of undercover Ebay agents or AI generated attempts to keep the ratings from fully dropping through the floor.
05-08-2025 7:25 PM
Ebay don't care as long as they fleece buys and sellers with simple delivery etc but time will tell.
05-08-2025 7:41 PM
Why would they, they are making millions. Most big companies have a one star rating on trust pilot, doesnt seem to effect any of them because they have reached a point of "too big to fail".
Of course this will only last so long, and over decades competition will enter the market and take more and more of the share, until eBay is obsolete. But the CEO will still be taking his multi million redudancy package, so he's more than fine with it.
Also trustpilot is more of a UK thing and ebay is based in America, for the most part I doubt they even know or care about trustpilot.
05-08-2025 7:42 PM
Personally I wouldn't trust a Trustpilot review as far as I could throw it, which, given that it is intangible, presents it's own challenges.
As Juvenal said "Quid custodiet ipsos custodes ?"
05-08-2025 8:56 PM
Place I used to work employed somebody, the only job was to get trust pilot to remove any negative reviews. Its probably changed a bit like eBay feedback has but I wouldn't trust the site at all, I know for a fact some of the reviews they removed were 100% true as I dealt with the customer and saw the mess.
05-08-2025 9:05 PM - edited 05-08-2025 9:06 PM
Have you actually looked at other similar sites?
Amazon for instance has abysmal revues.
The problem with this kind of thing, is that it tends to be those who have a reason to post, which is generally when they are very unhappy with something.
But at the end of the day, what does it really mean?
The reviews aren't really about Ebay, but about what has happened to the customer etc on the site.
So your going to get a lot that isn't happy with the way their seller/buyer has treated them etc and these have little to do with Ebay itself.
I really do think having Trustpilot reviews on sites like Ebay, is utterly pointless.
05-08-2025 9:05 PM
'....Ebay's, almost without exception, highly negative reviews on this website?'
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I don't think there's any point in trusting that crustpilot (or similar) reviews are a reasonable overview of any company!
Very few people go to a site like that and leave a good review (*unless* they're being paid to , of course...).
After all, who makes a big song and dance about something that went exactly as it was supposed to and it was advertised as?
Therefore you logically end up with 99.9% unhappy customers......... (bit like these forums really 😈)
07-08-2025 11:18 AM
I think you are correct.
I've left a few reviews on Trustpilot - some good but mostly bad and i find it Interesting how many replies to this thread are trashing trustpilot.
07-08-2025 11:57 AM - edited 07-08-2025 11:59 AM
People don't generally go to one of the review sites, such as Trustpilot, if they've bought or sold something and it went through without a hitch, they tend to go there with an issue, thus any stats will not be worth taking into consideration, they'll be extremely skewed.
Years ago I did take a cross section of negative reviews from Trustpilot and another site and looked at each complaint in some detail, and nearly each issue was due to a fault on the part of the reviewer. For example, the most common being that they'd sent out something without a tracking number and had to refund, or the buyer messaged them and asked them to ship to a different address (lots of scammers trying this at one point and sellers falling for it), deposits paid for non existent vehicles (tractors were very popular for this scam at the time I was checking), buyers realising that the one year warranty offered by a seller was only ever going to be as good as their ability to enforce it when required.
From what I recall the outcome was 97% user end error, there were very few low reviews in which eBay was actually at fault.
I later did the same for issues being reported and discussed on Reddit. Same outcome.
It's a human failing, people find it almost impossible to hold their hand up and say "I goofed, I didn't read up on how the selling platform worked", instead they must find somebody or something to blame.
Quite interesting, really. It's like when people fall for the romance scam and send tens of thousands of pounds to a complete stranger who's sent them a photo of Brad Pitt. They all blame the banks for letting them do it, even though the banks flag up money transfers to a stranger and ask you to read and accept the 'this could be a scam' document before allowing you to go ahead. But it's the big companies fault, not theirs. 😀
So, to answer the original question - do eBay care? - no, the stats are completely insignificant.
26-08-2025 5:59 PM
I have been an Ebayer for 20 years, I am now closing my account. What was once great, it now terrible.
They don't even care. See you at Vinted.
27-08-2025 9:13 AM
There is a link on all Trustpilot pages to list all the reviews that have received replies, in eBay UK's case, that is a big fat 0. I doubt that any company the size of eBay is unaware of their reviews - I think that they just don't care - for them, it isn't about keeping customers/users happy, it is about profit and if they can continue making a profit even when a significant number of users are unhappy, why worry? Contradiction follows.
As for the reliability of the reviews, I fully admit that I am rarely moved to write positive reviews (though I do). If a company just does what is expected; i.e. what they have been paid to do, I don't feel the need to praise them - occasionally, some transactions with some companies are above and beyond and I want to tell the world. However, contrast eBay's reviews with Evri's reviews. Evri is a company whose name is almost synonymous with bad service yet they have a current Trustpilot score of 4.2 compared to eBay UK's 1.2.
Earlier, smarts-gaming mentioned that eBay is 'too big to fail'. That is surely a misunderstanding - companies that might have that opinion of themselves, i.e. rest on their laurels, do fail, often spectacularly. The concept of 'too big to fail' refers to the belief that some entities, particularly financial institutions, are so integral to the economy that they must be rescued using government (i.e. taxpayers') money.
Unless there is a grand plan that I (we) are unaware of or do not understand, eBay UK is pursuing policies which are effectively deterring its 'traditional' user base and regardless of one's political ideology, it is difficult not to think of Budweiser and Jaguar. It fits a pattern which I mentioned elsewhere of how a company dies yet cannot help itself from dying. By dying, I don't necessarily mean coming to an apocalyptic end but possibly just a far less relevant entity than the market domineer that one used to be.
The way things are going, that is the best that I can hope for because when eBay has completely shafted its 'traditional' users in favour of business users, and the ones who refuse to comply eventually stop using it, something will emerge to fill the void. It is literally down to market forces.
27-08-2025 9:52 AM
As harry_j-allstar said above - see you at Vinted.
I started listing there 2 months ago and have made 41 sales. In the same period on bay just 8 sales (though I have not added any new listings on ebay since 'dumb delivery' was enforced).
27-08-2025 9:58 AM - edited 27-08-2025 9:59 AM
They are all as bad as one another.
If you go by the ratings on Trustpilot, you wouldn't want to buy or sell online anywhere.
27-08-2025 10:10 AM
Anyone would think looking at Evris score they had a paid manager account with TrustPilot where they can proactively request reviews and manage the removal of fake reviews.
27-08-2025 2:11 PM
I've had many problems with Evri and whilst their customer service was worse than useless (they wasted a lot of my time and energy and still did not sort the problems out), they did at least respond to my scathing reviews.
27-08-2025 7:16 PM - edited 27-08-2025 7:17 PM
I agree with you it is pointless leaving bad revues, reading them, or thinking that they're a balanced cross section of user's opinions.
Except perhaps in one way.
That, as you point out, ebay's rivals revues are equally and just as unrelentingly abysmal.
Which does go to show that giant corporations in general couldn't care less about customer satisfaction or providing anything close to customer support with powers to sort out problems and that they all fail thousands of customers day after day
Perhaps it's just another of those 80% / 20% things and if they can make billions out of the 80% of happy (or at least not too unhappy to tip them over the 20% acceptability threshold), they're not interested in improving on their record by spending any money trying to.