Product reviews hard to leave. Very silly.

[niau341]

Two objections. 
- Some products you cannot leave a review for. Or it is incredible difficult to. Ebay should not make it so hard to leave a product review.  Amazon is so powerful because of the reviews. As there is a complete torrent of products, reviews are very powerful for helping people navigate. Bloody annoying that I cannot leave reviews for bad products. 

- Why is item feedback restricted to 30days? If I buy something and don't get around to trying it out, I can't go back and tell sellers which items were great quality. 

A couple smaller others:
- you cannot filter ebay items by product reviews. 
- Sorting by lowest price gets hijacked by people with a range $10-$125
- Also no matter how many times I make Australia my location, it resets to "default", I don't want to wait 6+ weeks for items from china to show up. 

Big companies die. Look at Kodack. Tread carefully ebay. 

[twyngwyn]

product reviews.....the seller concerned probably does not use eBay's catalogue in order to list the item:

Product reviews | eBay

[imastawka]

You can leave feedback up to 60 days, not 30

[jellybirddesigns]

Kodak failed for various reasons.

People started buying digital cameras and stopped needing film. My husband was one of them. The last physical camera he bought was in 2011.

Also, Apple invented the iPhone, which had the built in camera.

And then Instagram was created and we haven't looked back since.

All of this is irrelevant to Ebay which is an entirely different business model. 

The chances of Ebay failing are not great. Not saying it's out of the realms of possibilities, but highly unlikely.

I never look at product reviews on this platform anyway, as Ebay is driven by buyer feedback.

Amazon is driven by product reviews.

[lynsh84]

There are plenty of product review sites that would be far more informative than ebay.

I would check them out before looking to buy anything from any online site.

Once I determine that I want the product then I would look for the best seller.....whether from an ebay seller or another seller.

[springyzone]

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@niau341 wrote:

Two objections. 
- Some products you cannot leave a review for. Or it is incredible difficult to. Ebay should not make it so hard to leave a product review.  Amazon is so powerful because of the reviews. As there is a complete torrent of products, reviews are very powerful for helping people navigate. Bloody annoying that I cannot leave reviews for bad products. 

You're probably right. I haven't tried to leave a review for an actual product although I usually leave feedback. I think part of the problem-it may not apply now, I am not sure, but I think it did in the past-is that on ebay, reviews that showed up weren't always for exactly the same product or brand of the product. That's pretty useless because as we know, brands can differ in quality.

What I would suggest though is if you are after a commercial product and see it on ebay, don't just press the buy button. Look at it on other product review sites and also push the shopping tab to see what it costs elsewhere. 

I agree re amazon reviews. They are useful. I was looking at a product on ebay, saw it on amazon, read a review and decided that brand wasn't for me at all, I'd rather a different brand a reviewer mentioned. But I won't necessarily buy it on amazon either.

A couple smaller others:
- you cannot filter ebay items by product reviews. 

Reviews are only subjective opinions.

- Sorting by lowest price gets hijacked by people with a range $10-$125
- Also no matter how many times I make Australia my location, it resets to "default", I don't want to wait 6+ weeks for items from china to show up. 

Yes, I agree, that is one thing I wish they would change so you could set Aust only as auto default.

Big companies die. Look at Kodack. Tread carefully ebay. 

I think ebay is probably being hit by changes but my guess is a lot of the small second hand stuff is what has moved to other sites such as marketplace etc. With ebay's claim system, I'd say second hand things are probably a bit of a headache for them in the case of a dispute. To me, it looks as if ebay is slowly trying to change its image from garage sale type items to 'new, professional seller' type status with room for good second hand collectables etc

[*sons_and_daughters*]

I don't even trust the product review sites these days. When they first started, people would buy something, then write a review after they'd used it a few times. These days, it's usually only people who have an issue that leave a review. They want to tell the world how bad the product is.

If you want to check out a new vacuum cleaner, you might find 45 out of 50 reviews being bad. So, you decide not to buy it based on that. What you don't see is the 2.5 million people who bought it and absolutely love it. They don't get the urge to tell the world that they love it, because there is no trigger.

Me personally, I will leave a review for products I've bought, because these sites do need some positive ones too. I did leave one bad review though, because frankly, the item sucked.

[digital*ghost]

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@niau341 wrote:

- Why is item feedback restricted to 30days? If I buy something and don't get around to trying it out, I can't go back and tell sellers which items were great quality. 

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That isn't what feedback was meant to be for anyway, it can be a component, sure, but feedback for sellers isn't the same as reviews for items (hence why they are separate things). Feedback is meant to be a reflection on the seller's customer service, that's why you also get asked to leave ratings for how accurately the seller described the item, long it took them to post, their communication and so on - it's all focused on the seller, not the item. 

I don't think eBay has prioritised the review system all that much, the site just had seller feedback for so long, which resulted in FB that was a mix of seller and product reviews, a lot of people have had difficulty separating the concept on eBay - there are reviews that are actually just seller feedback, and more often feedback that's just an item review.  It seems to have left eBay undecided on the usefulness of the review feature, maybe - they introduced the "see feedback for this item" function, which sort of encourages the concept feedback is for product reviews, anyway; maybe that's why they dramatically increased the character limit on FB a while back.

[zanadoo_56]

With the restricted time frame for feedback on eBay hopefully if Chinese sellers REALLY want to chase feedback they wil have to provide a faster delivery service! 

From my experience lately, if the items are held in Hong Kong and posted from there, not only is the service faster, Aust Post accepts HK tracking from the start.

[springyzone]

anyway; maybe that's why they dramatically increased the character limit on FB a while back.

I had not thought of that but I bet you're absolutely right.

Over the past 20 years, half the feedback you see given to sellers has been about the product rather than the transaction. It's a losing battle to separate the two so it makes sense to give buyers extra room in feedback to do the lot there-comment on the transaction and throw in a word or two about the product as well.

I suppose the only difficulty is if a seller sells 5000 other products and you really only want to read a review about the item you are interested in. There may be a way to quickly filter for it, I am not sure.

I agree with tipping point in that on any review site you get a lot of people who only pop in to give negs.

Doesn't matter how good  a product is, it will have some who '1' star it.

The way I use review sites is I just read to find if there seems to be a commonly mentioned problem or feature.