Researchers from the University of Michigan have identified several common impacts resulting from sellers receiving negative feedback on eBay. Among them:
Stoning
Stoning refers to the phenomenon that buyers are more apt to give another negative to a seller who has just received an unfavorable rating.
This could occur for one of two reasons. First, buyers may be willing to forgive a single bad behavior but wat to punish sellers who exhibit a pattern of bad behavior. Second, a buyer may interpret what happened in his own transaction differently differently depending on suspicions raised by the seller’s previous feedback. For example, if an item appears to be damaged in shipment, a previous negative feedback suggests that the damage was more likely to have been the sellers fault.
Self-Selection
“The seller may stop listing items entirely.” The study suggests that sellers who receive a negative feedback are more likely than other sellers to stop selling entirely. They refer to this as “self-selection” out of the market.
Salvaging
This is where the seller works harder, offers discounts, faster shipping, better packaging, etc. This is in order to earn a bunch of positive feedback and get that negative pushed off that first page of feedback comments in order to mitigate the feedback’s detrimental impact on sales.
Slacking
Some sellers’ service actually declines in quality after receipt of a negative feedback. This is kind of a “Why bother?” attitude. “Slacking could occur for psychological reasons, if the sellers get angry or discouraged after receiving a negative feedback.”
Khopkar, Li and Resnick, “Self-Selection, Slipping, Salvaging, Slacking, and Stoning: the Impacts of Negative Feedback on eBay,” EC ‘05, June 5-8, 2005, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
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