Leaving and Getting Feedback

Feedback is a valuable indicator of a user's reputation on eBay.

You can use calls that are analogous to eBay site pages to enable an end user to leave and retrieve feedback. LeaveFeedback (LeaveFeedback) enables a user to leave one feedback entry associated with a single order line item. The call must be made for each feedback entry the user leaves, so multiple feedbacks require multiple LeaveFeedback calls. GetFeedback (GetFeedback) retrieves a summary of feedback data or summary data plus detailed feedback entries.

A seller can retrieve their detailed seller ratings if the Detailed Seller Ratings feature is available on their site. For more information, see Detailed Seller Ratings.

After the successful end of an auction (or fixed-price sale), the order partners are strongly encouraged to leave feedback for each other.

You cannot use the API for mutual feedback withdrawal, even though this functionality is available on the eBay site.

Subtopics

Introduction to Feedback

Detailed Seller Ratings

Leaving Feedback for Another User

Getting Feedback Left By Another User

Responding to Feedback

Introduction to Feedback

Only sellers and winning bidders or buyers can leave or receive feedback. When leaving feedback, a winning bidder/buyer rates the order experience as positive, negative, or neutral. A seller can only rate an order as positive or neutral or leave no feedback (they cannot give a buyer a negative rating). The user can add a comment explaining the score or expanding on it. If multiple items were sold, the seller can leave feedback for each buyer and each buyer can leave feedback about the seller.

Buyers and sellers can receive a feedback score for repeated order line items if the order line items occur in two separate calendar weeks. Definition of a calendar week is Monday to Sunday Pacific Standard Time. Also, feedback scoring is based on order line item end time and not feedback left time. A member can impact another member's feedback score at most +1 or -1 in a week. Repeat positive or negative feedbacks in a week will not be counted, even if they have more than one order line items between them in that week.

Feedback ratings are aggregated into a summary score that is displayed next to the user ID, e.g. on the View Item page, and returned by the eBay API (see Getting Feedback Left By Another User). For information about the corresponding API functionality, see the CompleteSale call and Leaving Feedback for Another User.

The eBay site does allow a user to retract a feedback. This cannot be done using the API.

For the US site, extensive information about feedback is available in help topics, such as the following:

All about Feedback

https://pages.ebay.com/help/feedback/allaboutfeedback.html

Feedback Forum

https://pages.ebay.com/services/forum/feedback.html

How Feedback works

https://pages.ebay.com/help/feedback/howitworks.html

All about Feedback policies

https://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/feedback-ov.html

Feedback scores, stars, and your reputation

https://pages.ebay.com/help/feedback/reputation-stars.html

The higher a seller or buyer's summary feedback, the more likely others will want to do business with the seller or buyer. However, users take into consideration the length of time a user has been an eBay member. For example, a user with a score of 10 who has only been a member for six months is different from a user with the same score who has been a member for six years.

A user can reply to feedback left by another party. You can provide this functionality to users with the RespondToFeedback call.

GetFeedback retrieves the feedback multiple users have left for a specified user. Neither the API nor the eBay site can enable a user to retrieve all the feedbacks the user has left for other users.

Due to the internal eBay mechanisms that process incoming feedback, there may be a delay of up to 30 minutes between the time that the feedback is left and when it can be viewed. This affects leaving feedback both through the eBay site and the API, as well as viewing feedback through either the site or the API.

Detailed Seller Ratings

When buyers leave an overall Feedback rating (positive, neutral, or negative) for a seller, they also can leave ratings in four areas: item as described, communication, shipping time, and charges for shipping and handling. If a seller has these detailed seller ratings, they are displayed in the seller's Feedback Profile and can be retrieved using the API (see Using the API for Detailed Seller Ratings).

The Detailed Seller Ratings (DSR) feature is available on all sites.

Sellers retrieve detailed seller ratings as averages of the ratings left by buyers. Additional information about detailed seller ratings is available on the eBay sites on which the Detailed Seller Ratings feature has been implemented.

Detailed Seller Rating

https://pages.ebay.com/help/feedback/detailed-seller-ratings.html

Detailed seller ratings provide granular ways for good sellers to differentiate themselves to buyers. The detailed seller rating system is based on a one- to five-star scale. Five stars is the highest rating. Detailed seller ratings do not affect the overall feedback score.

Using the API for Detailed Seller Ratings

In the Detailed Seller Ratings feature, the LeaveFeedback (LeaveFeedback) and GetFeedback (GetFeedback) calls can include fields that contain detailed seller ratings data. Specifically, LeaveFeedback input can include a SellerItemRatingDetailArray container with detailed seller ratings.

The GetFeedback call can return FeedbackSummary.SellerAverageRatingDetailArray, which contains average detailed seller ratings.

Additionally, as part of the Detailed Seller Ratings feature, a GetFeedback call can return FeedbackDetailArray.FeedbackDetail.ItemID (the ID for the relevant item listing) and FeedbackDetailArray.FeedbackDetail.ItemPrice (the final price of the relevant item listing). This information can provide buyers with more information for evaluating a seller's reputation. However, these fields are returned for an item only if necessary conditions are met, e.g., the feedback was left within the past 90 days, the item was not for mature audiences, and the item was not a private listing.

Leaving Feedback for Another User

You can enable a "requestor" (seller or buyer) to leave feedback by using the LeaveFeedback or the CompleteSale call. There must be an order relationship between the users.

That is, the requestor and recipient must have been participants in a successfully concluded listing (concluded no more than 60 days before the attempt to leave feedback). Whichever role the requestor has (seller or buyer), the recipient must have been in the opposite role.

Identify the user about whom the feedback is being left in the TargetUser property of LeaveFeedback. This property takes a value of type UserIDType that is the eBay user name (also called the eBay user ID) for the recipient.

To indicate the order relationship between the requestor and the recipient, specify the item ID for the successfully concluded listing in the ItemID property.

If the listing offered only a single item (i.e., an auction listing or a single-item, fixed-price listing), this item ID is enough to identify the order line item associating the two users. This is because such listings can only spawn one order line item. But a multi-item, fixed-price listing has the potential for spawning multiple order line items, up to the number of items offered in the listing. In these cases, the application must specify the ItemID/TransactionID pair or the OrderLineItemID for that particular order line item. Specify the TransactionID in the TransactionID property, which is of type string. TransactionID is optional, unless the listing for the feedback is a multi-item listing when it is a required input.

The feedback itself consists of a score and a comment that expands on or justifies the score. Specify the feedback score—positive, neutral, or negative—in the CommentType property. CommentType is of type CommentTypeCodeType, with valid input values of Positive, Neutral, and Negative. Specify a textual comment for the feedback in the CommentText property (type string).

LeaveFeedback can be used to leave one feedback. It cannot be used to leave multiple feedbacks, even when the requestor is the seller in a multi-item listing and the recipients all buyers from that same listing. To leave multiple feedbacks, an application needs to use LeaveFeedback once for each feedback.

Some feedback restrictions apply to protect members from receiving false or inaccurate feedback from other members:

An application can give the appearance of letting the end-user leave multiple feedbacks in batches. This is done by allowing the end-user to enter the data for as many feedbacks as desired, perhaps store the information in a database. When the user clicks a button, LeaveFeedback is executed once for each pending feedback.

The result set of LeaveFeedback includes FeedbackID, which is the ID of the feedback that has been left. The response object also contains the fields "inherited" from the abstract response object, such as the field with the date and time the call was made.

Getting Feedback Left By Another User

Applications can use GetFeedback to enable users to retrieve feedback left for them by others. For information about production use of this call, see Compatible Application Check for Specific Calls.

You can specify a valid eBay user ID in the UserID property of the GetFeedback request. This property is optional for specifying the user for whom to retrieve feedback. If no value is specified, feedback data is returned for the requesting user.

GetFeedback can only be used to retrieve feedback other users have left about the user specified in the UserID property (or the requesting user if no user ID is specified). It cannot be used to retrieve the feedbacks the requesting user left about other users.

Working with the GetFeedback Result Set

Depending on the detail level you specify, GetFeedback returns a summary of the user's feedback or a summary with detailed feedback entries.

Adding up the detailed feedback entries results in the summary scores and the total aggregate feedback score. The feedback summary does not include comments from individual feedbacks. Therefore a user may prefer detail entries.

By default, GetFeedback returns only the summary feedback data for the specified user. An application needs to use a detail level of ReturnAll to have the feedback details returned. When feedback details are returned, the feedback summary is returned on the final page of data.

Summary Feedback Data

After a successful call, the FeedbackSummary property of the GetFeedback object (which is of type FeedbackSummaryType) contains the summary feedback data for the specified user.

Summary feedback data contains several categories (see "Elements of FeedbackSummaryType"). Each category is represented as a property of the FeedbackSummaryType object. There also are properties that return simple counts of types of feedbacks: neutral comments from suspended users, unique neutral feedbacks, unique negative feedbacks, and unique positive feedbacks.

The Count property of each FeedbackPeriodType object contains the number of feedbacks received in the period circumscribed by the value in the FeedbackPeriodType.PeriodInDays property. This model is then repeated 3-4 times (once for each time period) for most feedback categories.

The counts of feedbacks received during each of the time periods are for informational purposes only. These counts themselves cannot be used to calculate the user's total feedback score. This is because the counts in each period for a given feedback category are incrementally more inclusive. For example, assume a user has received 1 positive feedback in the past 30 days and 1 positive feedback in the past 31-180 days. The counts for this would be 1 for the 30-day period and 2 for the 180-day period: the positive feedback in the first 30 days is counted in the total for the 180-day period.

To programmatically calculate the user's total feedback score: subtract the count of unique negative feedbacks (returned in UniqueNegativeFeedbackCount) from the count of unique positive feedbacks (from UniquePositiveFeedbackCount). Of course, eBay does this calculation and the user's total feedback score is returned in the GetFeedback result set, in the FeedbackScore property of the GetFeedback object.

Detailed Feedback Data

The FeedbackDetail property contains the still-active individual feedback entries other users have left for the user. Each feedback in this array is represented by a FeedbackDetailType object. The FeedbackDetailItemTotal property of the GetFeedback object indicates the number of individual feedback detail entries that are returned in FeedbackDetail for the current call. For example, an application might display the feedback detail entries in a scrollable user interface control (like a data grid) where the end-user can view them. Or, it might only use them to programmatically calculate values or aggregate the data in an organization different from the feedback summary returned by GetFeedback.

The data returned in one FeedbackDetailType object includes data submitted using LeaveFeedback (see Leaving Feedback for Another User for more information on leaving feedback) or from the web site. Additionally, the FeedbackDetailType object contains information about whether eBay replaced the text of a feedback comment, response, or follow-up.

Responding to Feedback

By using RespondToFeedback, applications can allow users to reply to feedback that has been left for them or post follow-up comments to feedback that they have left for other users. Replies to feedback are typically left in response to neutral or negative feedback, where the user for whom feedback has been left wants to provide an explanation for the non-positive feedback comment.

To use the call, the application must have either a FeedbackID (retrieved by using GetFeedback), the ItemID/TransactionID pair, or the OrderLineItemID for the item for which feedback has been left. In addition, the application must have the UserID for the user who left the feedback that is being replied to or followed up on.

You cannot use RespondToFeedback to automatically leave responses to negative feedback, as this is not in accordance with eBay policy.

For more information on using this call, see RespondToFeedback.