It's important to set a fair platform for both sellers and buyers so that transactions happen smoothly. I don't think any of us will deny that.
But for a long time now, the 'fairness' only seems to tip towards sellers. Before you start flaming me, allow me to explain what are the things that are wrong.
1) No Trust: Ebay's policies clearly show that they have no faith in people. They are not willing to work with the premise that most people are honest and sincere. There will always be bad apples and they will need to be continuously weeded out, but there aren't so many bad apples either.
2) Only Buyers are Bad: Several policies are so much in favour of sellers and not fair at all to buyers. The very fact that buyers have to wait so many days before filing a claim of any sort -- after which the seller may conveniently become 'unregistered' and therefore not contactable.
The rules are not fair. Whenever the rules are not fair, it will set a playground for one of the sides -- in this case the sellers. Because of Ebay's policies, it's very easy for a seller to sell 50, 100 or even 300 items valued at Rs 1000 each in a span of 30 days. The seller can ship products worth Rs 50 or 100, which means a successful transaction went through. Now the buyer will complain and the seller will ask him to send the product back for replacement. Finally, he will never send the correct product back to the buyer.
And because the buyer is in constant communication with the seller (as Ebay advises), he doesn't raise a dispute. Finally the seller gets unregistered and he's gone away with 300x1000 (Rs 300000) of illegitimate money.
Of course, not all sellers are like that. This happened to me with only three sellers till now. And yes, two of them had good ratings (which are extremely easy to fudge). Even the sellers will have their bad apples amongst them. But Ebay's policies do not allow for better communication. Ratings can only be positive or negative. There are no scales. Hence, they are used as a blackmailing tool.
I could go on forever, but I think I should stop now.
