New Feature: Item-specific feedback viewing for our eBay auction listings

We are beginning to add a new feature to our eBay auction descriptions and want to tell you about it.

This feature would be for sellers that sell a quantities of the same item, such as retail items, as opposed to sellers who sell unique items that are one of a kind. Basically, we get emails from buyers asking about the quality of a product, and at the end of our response we always tell them to check our eBay feedback profile to see what other buyers have said about the same product. The only problem is they have to sort pages of comments about other products in order to find comments specific to the product they want. Using the RSS Reader Widget from SpringWidgets along with an RSS feed we created, we are now able to include recent product-specific feedback comments directly in the item descriptions of a product. We have only done this on one product so far, our RokAir wireless USB adapter for Macintosh computers. You can see the feature after the first paragraph of the item description in this auction here:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=110242280790

The feature is not automated, in that it will not automatically update comments in the widget box for that product each time a new feedback comment is left for the product on eBay. However it's input is a single RSS feed hosted on our server, and so all we need to do is every few days update the RSS file with new comments and those new comments will automatically appear in every auction we have online for that product (so there are no tedious auction description revisions for each product that have to be done when you want to update the comments- what a relief!).

Our goal is to provide buyers with unfiltered views of other feedback comments buyers have left for the same product they are looking at, even if the comment is neutral or negative. We hope this will give potential buyers an easy and reliable way of evaluating products pre-purchase, and also better enable them to compare one product vs. any other that we sell.

Thanks for reading this blog entry, and feel free to let us know what you think about this feature. If any of you are interested in incorporating it into your own auctions at some point, drop us a line.