Feedback is a valuable indicator of a user's reputation on eBay. Only order partners (i.e., sellers and buyers,) can submit or receive feedback for one another. 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 choose to leave no feedback. Sellers cannot give a buyer a negative rating. The user can add a comment explaining the rating or expanding on it.

You can use calls that are analogous to eBay marketplace pages to enable an end user to leave and retrieve feedback.

  • LeaveFeedback enables a user to leave one feedback entry associated with a single order line item.

    Note: LeaveFeedback supports only one feedback entry per call.

  • GetFeedback retrieves a summary of feedback data and/or detailed information about one or more feedback entries.

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

Feedback ratings are aggregated into a summary score that is displayed next to the user ID on the View Item page and returned by the eBay API.

The higher feedback score that an eBay user has, the more likely others will want to do business with that user as a seller or buyer. However, eBay users also need to take into consideration the length of time that 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. This functionality is available through the RespondToFeedback call.

The eBay marketplace does allow a user to retract a feedback, but this cannot be done using an API call. Additionally, the API cannot be used for mutual feedback withdrawal, even though this functionality is available on the eBay marketplace.

Note: 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 marketplace and the API, as well as viewing feedback through either the marketpmace or the API.

For additional information, refer to: