You get a couple of months.
As for the why, I think it goes back to the earlier days of ebay's history. Ebay feedback started off originally more with the idea of reporting about the actual transaction, not the product. Was the seller reliable, did they send your product after you paid? Were they fast or slow? Was the product just as they described it? Worse still, did you pay and get nothing?
For the seller, it was about saying if a buyer paid & did they pay promptly or keep you hanging around with lies for weeks? There was no paypal, feedback was the only real way to report about behaviour of a buyer or seller.
Back in those days, most items were second hand or new second hand, there weren't any 'professional store' type sellers that I can recall. So there was no percentage in giving feedback about the actual item as it was probably a one off. And 2 months was plenty of time to know how the transaction had gone.
Fast forward to today. Most of that feedback is still meant to be more about the transaction, not the item. There is a section apparently where you can do an item comment but I've never seen it or seen prompts to fill one out.
But I agree a lot of buyers do want to give feedback about the actual items these days & that is probably fair enough because most sellers now are selling new items.
I think my attitude to longer feedback times depends on what the actual item is and how much it costs. For instance if I buy something small for about $5, then probably 2 months is a fair time.
For very expensive items then yes, a longer feedback time for the item might be worth while, but I don't think ebay does actual product feedback well anyway.
If you are after information about a lot of products or wishing to give feedback about a particular item, I'd try looking up Productreview website if i were you. You can write a review there whenever you like plus give follow up comments.
