eBay Feedback With Pictures Now Publicly Visible To Buyers
eBay continues to rollout "enhancements" to the feedback experience, allowing buyers to add publicly viewable pictures with their feedback comments left for sellers.
The new feedback feature was first tested in April 2023, with an official phased rollout starting in November when eBay said they had already collected almost a million pictures in feedback but that they would not be made visible to buyers until the rollout was complete.
Liz Morton
Starting this month [November], sellers will be able to preview feedback images on their own sold items. At this time, other eBay buyers and sellers will not be able to view images in your feedback. Existing policies related to feedback and feedback removal will also apply to images. Once this rollout is complete, we’ll be expanding image feedback visibility to buyers.
With these updates, your potential buyers will see your most engaged buyers’ feedback and be more confident about their purchasing decisions. Richer text and images in feedback may add credibility and drive sales by instilling additional confidence for interested buyers as they shop. To date, we've already collected almost a million images and the vast majority are associated with positive feedback and showcase the great products and positive experiences buyers have with our eBay sellers.
Sellers voiced their concerns about the new policy and attempted to get questions answered by the eBay Community Seller News Team, but unfortunately, eBay did very little engaging on this important, business impacting topic.
And in an update posted December 18th, eBay now says they are expanding visibility to allow feedback with images to be publicly viewable by all buyers and sellers - just in time for the holiday season.
Over the past few months, we’ve been working to improve the feedback experience for buyers on eBay. We are making these changes in order to give potential buyers better insight into your products.
Starting last month, eBay sellers have been able to preview images on their sold multi-quantity items feedback. With the success of the program thus far, we are starting to make those images available to buyers as well. We will continue to test images on feedback into 2024.
Currently it appears the feedback images may only be showing when feedback is viewed on the mobile app, but not on the desktop site.
One seller in the eBay community posted screenshots of how the picture feedback was displayed on the seller side of things, raising concerns that because the image showed a free gift they had sent with this particular order, other buyers might expect to receive additional items that wouldn't be included for future orders.
Good news: It was very positive.
Bad news: It shows a free gift I sent with this particular order.
I hope all buyers don't expect a free gift.
While other community members could not see the picture left with the feedback at the time, it is now publicly viewable when accessing feedback through the mobile app.
The app displays a small thumbnail of the image when scrolling through the list of feedback and if you tap on it, it expands to full size.
Buyers can also use the filter option to narrow feedback down to only the ones that include images.
Seller concerns about possible abuse are certainly understandable - just ask anyone who sells on Etsy.
Liz Morton
Unfortunately, existing feedback policies may not offer much protection to sellers when eBay far too often falls back on buyer feedback being an "opinion" that is not eligible for removal except in very few circumstances...unless of course the seller is a big brand like Reebok, in which case thousands of negatives can be scrubbed instantly with no trace and no official explanation.
What do you think of eBay allowing publicly viewable images to posted with feedback? Let us know in the comments below!
