Laurie Borden of repXchange.com wrote to me last week introducing her site,

“As you know, eBay has announced that they will no longer allow sellers to leave negative feedback on buyers. So as it turns out, a fair marketplace has gone by the wayside and eBay has decided the way to reward buyers (good or bad) is by allowing them to leave any feedback they want, yet sellers must suck it up as the saying goes.
   
As an ex-PowerSeller, I am surprised by the changes eBay is making as I can fully remember the pain of dealing with a bad bidder. The latest changes set me in motion. I thought, how can I try to level the playing field? That is when I decided to launch a new service called RepXchange, short for Reputation Exchange.  Today we are re going live - please take a test drive at  www.repxchange.com and give us your feedback, as we truly value any comments you may have. (Do not expect there to be a lot of blocked bidders in the data base yet!)“

At its core, the service allows sellers to anonymously pool their blocked bidder lists, or black lists, and extract a new, custom list of blocked bidders that fits their own business profile.  With RepXchange, sellers can weed out bad buyers, and by extension, save sellers from spending needless time on re-listing, or worse, filing dispute claims.

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After having heard a lot of mention of AuctionBlacklist.com around various discussion boards and blogs, I thought I’d finally take a nosy at it.

Unfortunately it seems the banes of webmasters lives, the spammers, have been attacking the site with a vengeance.  I was greeted with this message -

After nearly a year of fighting with Spam in the database, I have decided to temporarily take the site off line to repair the problems and to upgrade the site.  We will be back better than ever in hopefully about two months.  Sorry if this causes anyone any inconvenience.  This redesign project will be posted for bid on scriptlance, if you wish to bid for this project.

There then follows a banner ad and jobs list for ScriptLance - a freelance jobs and contracts site for website programming and design.  Site owner Steve Miller said in an email this is where he’ll be obtaining the skills for building his new site,

“I have to complete a project prospectus for the site project, which has been a little slow going, due to a lot of other projects I have been working on. I hope to have the project posted by mid next month. I expect it will take up to a month or so to complete the project after that point.

“Some changes to the site, will be so that I can make the site stay within compliance of ebay.  The site will require a free membership sign up.  This will help control the spam problem.  There will be a seller rating page for users to rate sellers.  I am hoping that it will incorporate all the action sites i.e. ebay etc, so that people rating sellers will have to post actual auctions before they can rate a seller.

“There will be free advertising for 98% sellers and above. There will be live news - relevant news feed updates regarding all types of internet fraud.  There will be information posted on the site to help folks understand much of the fraud process, in other words how fraudsters operate on eBay.

“There will be many changes that I hope will allow me to make dynamic changes to the site as I need to, since I am not really a programmer.  All future postings will require a user ID and password, which will also limit the database from becoming hammered by spam.

“I will try to bring the site live, as soon as possible.  I may have to bring some of the features on line slowly, rather than all at once, in order to ensure that the site operates properly and so that  I don’t become overwhelmed with the changes myself.”

Seems like Steve has some big plans for the site, but it also seems he is going the opposite direction to other 3rd party feedback sites - his will be collecting data about the sellers, rather than the buyers … unless he miswrote his email?

Ed

AfterTheGavel was probably the first of the new bunch of third-party feedback recording sites that sprung up after the eBay announcements in late January 2008.   They also operate under the URL www.LeaveAuctionFeedback.com and it seems this is the name that will be taking over (at least according to the current site promotion banners).

I learned of them from a banner on the AuctionBytes website, and decided immediately that here was a service worth promoting on BuildaSkill.

The site is fast, lightning fast, and makes BuildaSkill look like a slug on prozac.  It has a clean and simple presentation that makes everything very easy to find and read, and the registration takes under 20 seconds.  Included on the site is a sellers’ forum area using the popular phpBB open source forum software, which should be familiar to most users.  The site is totally free to use.

The blurb states that currently the site is open only to sellers leaving feedback about buyers (nice counterpoint to the new eBay policies) but it is not restricted to just eBay sellers - sellers from any site can leave negative or neutral feedback about their buyers (the site does not accept positive feedback to prevent the database becoming clogged and difficult to search). 

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