Empire Liquidators doesn’t tell you via e-mail that “they don’t issue refunds until you first leave positive feedback.” They only say this over the phone. They’re smarter than that.
How do you “complain to eBay”? I do feel that eBay should know what this company is doing (if they don’t already know). Is it “allowable” to only issue refunds contingent upon the customer first leaving positive feedback? Is this something eBay would want to know about…or even care about? Something else Empire Liquidators does is whenever anyone leaves a neutral or a negative comment, they immediately leave the customer a negative comment and say, “Please call us so we can fix this for you.” Then, when you call, they say, “We’ll remove our negative if you remove your negative.” It seems to me that this company is wildly abusing the feedback system and artificially pumping up their feedback score. There’s a ton of negative feedback left for this company, but interestingly the vast majority is “mutually removed”. And when you check the feedback for the buyer, they always have a reciprocated negative feedback.
eBay is changing the feedback system and I wouldn’t doubt it if this company wasn’t at least in some small way responsible for the change. But, even with the change, I could still envision this company refusing to issue refunds until the customer either first leaves positive feedback or agrees to remove the negative feedback. Empire Liquidators is very good at manipulating the feedback system to their benefit. They’re feedback is 99.6% positive. But, if you considered the mutually-removed negative feedback, it’d be more like 95%.
One more question, if I wait to leave negative feedback for this company until after eBay changes the feedback policy, will they be able to reciprocate the negative?