Ebay - why do they make things worse than they need be?

Ebay is a brilliant idea.

But any unregulated marketplace is a scary place. From very early days, those organising street markets made sure that someone offering a pound of butter actually gave a full pound. And any Stock Market (which must be about as pure a marketplace as exists) would act immediately if the person offered a particular type of stock was fobbed off with something inferior.

Arguments about condition of items are probably insoluble. I can understand why eBay stands back from "It was perfect when it left me" disputes.

Yet there are a couple of areas where eBay seems happy to sit back and watch customers being treated badly when there are simple (and low-cost) remedies they could apply. eBay doesn't like feedback (there seems no way to tell them what they are doing wrong) - so I am trying to obey my "don't moan unless you have let people fix it" rule by writing up my ideas here.

Checking on Poor Feedback
The Feedback system is the only protection that the customer has against low-value ripoffs. The customer can happily check the feedback rating for a buyer or seller. They can see total statistics. And they can scroll back through recent comments. But there is no way (or none that I could find) that allows you to read just the neutral or negative comments. Given the very blunt tool that the Feedback system represents, the subtleties of comments are crucial.

Obvious Solution: eBay need to offer an option to list just Negative, just Neutral or just Positive feedback. Why don't they? It would cost peanuts to program, and it would help customers feel more confident in buying through eBay. What does eBay have to lose?

VAT and other Sales Taxes

eBay allow sellers to show prices that exclude Sales Tax, and to bury a statment that "Sales Tax will be added to the final price" as obscurely as they wish.

I got hit this week with an item where the intention to add sales tax was buried in a mass of other terms. I pressed a button that said "Commit to Buy" opposite the price I expected to pay, and then - after committing - I got told the actual amount I had promised to pay.

Does eBay think that customers won't care about this? My loss was only a few pounds, but I felt really stung. The destruction of my goodwill towards eBay - and the cost to eBay of my telling the cautionary story in the pub - is far higher than the possible benefit to them (in that I might not have bid if I had realised the true cost).

The taxi driver in a large city has a clear economic interest in ripping people off because they will be financially better off by taking the money from a person who is unlikely to be using them again whether happy or upset. (That is not a criticism of taxi drivers, just a reflection on the outcomes of the "game" that applies in that context).

But the game for eBay is different. Make me nervous about buying through eBay, and they lose out on the commissions on my possible future purchases.

Given that every buyer is registered with eBay, and therefore their location is known, there is no clear reason why all prices could not be displayed as inclusive of applicable sales tax. At the very least, the taxes need to be shown explicitly immediately after pressing the "Bid" button but before committing to buy.

eBay doesn't need to listen to customers. But it would perform better if it did. Its owners are losing value by allowing the management to discourage users from telling them how they could make more.