OK So You've Received Your First Negative or Neutral Feedback Rating...?
Dealing with Your 1st Negative or Neutral Feedback Received...

 So you have received your first negative feedback rating. Now what? You may be feeling any number of things right about now...

You may be feeling:

    Pissed Off!
    Upset!
    Frustrated!
    This was Undeserved & Unjustified

    Buyer/Seller is a 'Newb' Ebayer
    That You've Worked Hard to Keep a 100% Feedback Rating
    Unsure Why this Feedback was Left for You?
 These and other feelings are normal, hey you've worked hard on keeping your feedback at 100% and this transaction was no exception to your customer service. Maybe you feel that this feedback was undeserved and unjustified. This may be true, it may be undeserved and the buyer/seller may be new to Ebay, but the fact remains that you do have a negative feedback rating now. Here's what to do aferwords to try and deal with this situation...

Try to take an unemotional route to this situation - Too many times after a spotless record seller (or buyer) has received a negative feedback is an emotional response is given to add to the situation. Try to act in a more professional matter, try not to retaliate. If you have already left a negative for the person, what you can do is try emailing the them, explaining the situation and try to understand why the feedback was left for you. Many times if you talk to the person in a reasonable manner, he or she will agree to mutually withdraw the feedback. Try ebay's Mutual Feedback Withdrawal procedure found here. My advice before initiating the form, is to email the person and explain the situation, ask questions if you feel the feedback was unjustified.

The road rage syndrome - This is where things tend to escalate out of control with the whole feedback system. Granted the feedback system is not perfect to say the least. However we have to learn to live with it and abide by the "Rules of the Road". Many times, retaliation is taken, whether it's an emotional retaliation feedback given, or further worsening of the situation. I've heard sellers and buyers who continue down this road to the point of buying items from a seller just to leave them loads of negative feedback. This doesn't help anything, and can lead to future issues and more negatives down the road.

Ask yourself why the feedback was left for you - Take a "devil's advocate" view on it. Why would such a negative be given to you? You feel that the transaction went smoothly, communication was excellent etc, then why was this feedback given? Try to answer these questions for yourself and sometimes you'll find out possibly why this happened. Perhaps the person on the other end has email issues, perhaps a spam and trash setting that prevents any of your messages to come through. These and other reasons could be the cause.

Do what you can with the transaction in trying to get the feedback removed. However, if the situation remains, use it as a "learning experience". Try to pull some positive "lessons learned" from it. Perhaps in the future you will add delivery confirmation to your items, or add an email receipt to your communications. These and other ideas can only make you a better Ebayer for the experience. Hopefully you will be able to remove the negative, however if you aren't able to: Realize that this one negative in the grand scheme of things doesn't really hurt that much. You don't NEED a 100% rating, heck buyers I've seen sometimes purchase from sellers with an abysmal record (not recommended). Add to this the fact that with Ebay's Feedback 2.0 system (coming to a theater near you soon) will change the system to include only feedback in a users LAST TWO YEARS. So any feedback older than 2 years will not be counted in the users feedback rating percentage.

Hope this helps in recovering from the "sting" of your 1st neg feedback rating given. I went thru all this with my 1st neutral as well a couple of weeks ago.

Thanks for reading and hope this has helped you.

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= )