Both sBay sellers and buyers have very legitimate grievances and I doubt eBay can effectively address the issues.

As a buyer I was outraged at how seller's would withold giving a positive feedback until the buyer gave them one. Under that pressure how can you get the real picture of seller performance. I always felt the buyer should get the positive feedback when they paid for the item in a timely fashion, having fullfilled their end of the transaction. So the new rule stating buyers who pay up can get only positive feedback is a good one.

As a seller, the fees were crippling! The new fee schedule does nothing to really allivate that, in my opinion. I had been selling off my library (2,000 plus books) since I can no longer read most of them. By the time fees and shipping were deducted I might as well have given them away. After two months of selling on eBay I decided to donate the books, minus the first editions and rare ones, to the public library. I should have done that in the first place and saved myself the trouble of dealing with online auctions.

In short, the eBay experience has not been a good one in my case.

The problem that Sellers have, and the main reason for the feedback "extortion" you're talking about, is that as a general rule Sellers have a lot more to protect.

There's some bigtime Ebay Buyers out there, but by and large most Buyers are casual...negative feedback is far less harmful. Many Sellers, on the other hand, are making a serious income...even their entire living...off of Ebay, and it doesn't take many negative feedback posts to completely ruin one's reputation.

What's more, there are Buyers who know this, and engage in a sort of extortion of the Seller (give me extras, ship it free, etc. or I leave negative feedback and ruin your 10000+ rating).

I agree with you, DeltaIce, about the way it *should* be, and I always did so myself when I was a Seller (then again, I also was sure to leave feedback as a Buyer as well). However, when people's livelyhood is at stake, and when people start engaging in underhanded tactics, there's going to be problems.