LCD panels -- buyer beware

[rlk at alum.mit.edu (Robert L Krawitz)]

   Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 22:30:35 -0500 (EST)
   From: "Rich Braun" <richb at pioneer.ci.net>

   Even on a $250 purchase, I'm not sure I want to submit negative
   feedback--it might feel cathartic for me but it won't affect the
   dealer's 4000+ rating.  And scrutinizing his recent feedback really
   doesn't shed light on a situation like mine: the guy is being a
   turd, plain and simple, and you won't see that fact in his sterling
   99.1% feedback rating.  I'm sure many other unsatisfied purchasers
   have had the same dilemma, and declined to enter the deserved
   negative feedback.

   Bottom line: I think you can put the most trust in a feedback
   rating between 10 and 1000, with a score above 96%.  Customer
   counts above/below that range make the tool relatively useless.
   Maybe a rival to eBay will come up with a better system.  But even
   the oldest such system--the Better Business Bureau--has been
   corrupted by large-dealer leverage of the same variety.

Personally, I like to see a feedback of well over 99% (say, 99.5%)
before making a significant purchase of equipment (and I haven't had
any trouble during my recent piecemeal upgrade of my Inspiron 8000 to
an 8200).  If even a handful of people leave negative feedback, that's
a warning sign.  96% to me is an extremely low feedback rating; that
means that 1 person out of 25 has had a problem, which is poor odds.
Granted, if the seller has only 25 feedbacks or so there's a
statistical problem there, but even so I'd look very carefully at that
kind of situation.

There are sellers with 100% feedback with over 10000 ratings.  I don't
know if eBay rounds to the nearest .1% or rounds down, but either way
that means that no more than 1 person out of 2000 leaves negative
feedback.  It's also useful to read the negative feedback; sometimes
people do that for really silly reasons where it's clear that the
buyer didn't even try to resolve an issue with the seller, for
example.

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>

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