NPB Strikes on feedback profile

[This_year]

It would be good if ebid could develop a system where sellers could see the number of strikes that buyers had from other sellers that they failed to pay. It would be useful if this could be displayed in addition to the number of pros and negs on the feedback page.

[gazlannathai]

It's a bit like smarty points in reverse - on eBay, if you get two non-payment "strikes" in a calendar month, your account is automatically suspended pending review - they're independent of feedback and a much more short term pattern tracker.


I think it's also a much more effective deterrant against NPB's than purely feedback ...... otherwise you'd never see people with minus 20 feedback like sometimes pop up on both sites.

[gazlannathai]

The word "strike" is maybe what's confusing you - it's an Americanism and comes from baseball - you get 3 attempts to hit the ball and if you fail all three, you're "out" - each time you swing the bat counts as an attempted "strike"

In this case, each time you win an auction and fail to pay, you have made one strike - make X quantity of strikes and you're "out". Think of tally marks when counting something - you make four vertical marks and then put the fifth as a horizontal mark through the four (to make it easier to count the final total). Think of each mark as being a strike - i.e. each mark increases the score by one. The NPB strikes do the same, but in this case, you are acquiring a negative score. Each strike adds one to the negative score, when you reach the maximum count, you get suspended.

On eBay, they do it on the basis you can have a maximum of 2 NPB strikes per month before being suspended. A good idea in my opinion as it catches the auction wreckers and trolls virtually as soon as they become active, and it can be set so the system does the suspending, unlike the system here that needs an admin to review the user's feedback - that causes delays and failure to identify offenders. Then we all suffer because the penalty system is seen as unreliable by both buyers and sellers.