How far would you go to protect your feedback score?

While I was at the UPS Store, the manager and I were chatting about eBay and shipping errors. He mentioned that one of his customers had sold a bumper on eBay and eBay said the item would ship UPS ground for a set amount. Turned out that the bumper had to be sent by freight. He said that his customer still shipped the item to the buyer (to protect his feedback), even though he was losing $200 on the transaction.

How far would you go to protect your feedback score?

This is a question I think we all face at times. The shipping thing is kinda the guys own fault from the sounds of it for not knowing what size packages are considered freight but if ebay doesn't tell you that kinda sucks.

I think more common is the buyer who tries to extort free shipping or extra stuff. Now ebay has somewhat improved in allowing us sellers to have some recourse to report buyers and get feedback removed. If your just selling some stuff here and there I wouldn't bend too much for people, if you actually run a business where ebay is a main source of your livelihood a couple hundred bucks isn't the end of the world if it allows you to keep your feedback score.

Bad feedback affects you negatively in search rankings which hurts you in search and you won't sell as much. Also you could potentially lose your power seller and top rated seller status which hurts shipping discounts as well as fvf discounts so if you sell alot of volume and ebay is important to you losing a few hundred here or there isn't worth stressing over if you keep discounts and search ranking which means thousands of dollars.

Good question. I would not ship an item and loose money on it to save my feedback. If I make a mistake on shipping and it eats into my profit I will ship it but not if I would actually be losing money. I will always try to make buyers happy to avoid bad feedback. I always list items as no returns but if I receive a complaint I always let them return the item or give a partial refund if their complaint is valid. In December I sold a platter for $15.00 and accidently had the free shipping box checked. It was going to cost me 12.00 to ship it plus bubble wrap etc...I canceled the sale, refunded the payment and sent them a very apologetic email saying that I had pulled it out to ship and found it had been damaged. I don't know if they can even leave feedback after the sale is canceled but in any case they didn't....and I kept the platter. $15.00 was a steal for it anyway. Maybe I'll sell it next December....

Good question. I would not ship an item and loose money on it to save my feedback. If I make a mistake on shipping and it eats into my profit I will ship it but not if I would actually be losing money. I will always try to make buyers happy to avoid bad feedback. I always list items as no returns but if I receive a complaint I always let them return the item or give a partial refund if their complaint is valid. In December I sold a platter for $15.00 and accidently had the free shipping box checked. It was going to cost me 12.00 to ship it plus bubble wrap etc...I canceled the sale, refunded the payment and sent them a very apologetic email saying that I had pulled it out to ship and found it had been damaged. I don't know if they can even leave feedback after the sale is canceled but in any case they didn't....and I kept the platter. $15.00 was a steal for it anyway. Maybe I'll sell it next December....

This practice is against ebay TOS and could get your account shutdown. If you make a mistake its your fault not the buyers you shoudl honor these sales. If you did this to me I would leave you bad feedback adn I'm not one to leave bad feedback generally unless I'm outright scammed and someone doesn't ship an item. I saw one seller had underpriced an item. I recognized it and bought out his last 3 listings. He wound up losing over $200 on the sale but still honored it. Now had he nicely asked me to cnacel I probably would have but none the less I got a great deal.