Amazon outpolls eBay
The reputation of online sellers at Amazon carries more weight with consumers than the online seller ratings at eBay, according to a study released today by the University of BC’s Sauder School of Business.
Professors Paul Chwelos and Tirtha Dhar found that the high ratings for merchants on eBay had little significance because the feedback mechanism which allows buyers to rate sellers also lets sellers rate buyers, resulting in a retaliatory system in which everyone is loathe to give criticism for fear of being criticized themselves.
“It is a set of incentives that produce feedback that isn’t very useful or informative to buyers,” said Chwelos, who produced the study, “Differences in ‘Truthiness’ Across Online Reputation Mechanisms” with colleague Tirtha Dhar, in which they considered more than 100,000 online transactions, looking at the experience of sellers who listed on both sides.
The differences in the feedback mechanisms, which allow for a two-way feedback in eBay plus a difference in the ratings scale of the two online selling sites, result in ratings that are inflated on eBay. The same sellers on Amazon garner lower ratings, the study found.
“Everyone looks good on eBay basically because of the way it works,” said Chwelos. “We found about three times the negative feedback on Amazon as on eBay for the same seller.
“There is about three to three-and-a-half times more negative feedback on Amazon than on eBay.”
