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My Yellow StarMay 17, 2010 Over the weekend I got an e-mail from eBay. Mess around on eBay and you'll get plenty of e-mail from them: Your bid has been confirmed, You've been outbid, You won item #13579!, PayPal has received your payment, Seller has a question for you, etc. That's all good, but this one was different. The subject line was "fellowtravellerXX, you're a rising star!" (fellowtraveller, followed by two digits that are not XX, is my eBay user name.) In the body of the e-mail I read:
Congratulations!
You're a Yellow Star!
Congratulations! You've achieved a feedback rating of 10 and that means you've earned a Yellow Star next to your eBay user name.
As soon as I started looking to bid on things (at first they were nearly all fountain pens), I noticed that some items were flagged by a little ribbon and the words "Top-rated Seller." Then I noticed that many sellers had colored stars after their user names: yellow, blue, red, green . . . The stars were followed by numbers, and the highest (at least five digits) were accompanied by shooting stars. Turns out eBay has a rating system, based on the positive feedback sellers get from their buyers -- or buyers from their sellers. Buyers get stars too. I, dba fellowtravellerXX, just got my yellow star, which means I've had positive feedback from 10 of the people I've bought stuff from. At 50 positive feedbacks, the star turns blue; at 100, turquoise; at 500, blue, and so on. The shooting stars start at 10,000. I suspect nearly all the shooting stars indicate sellers. If you've bought 10,000 items on eBay, let alone 25,000 or 100,000 or 1,000,000 (top rating: silver shooting star), you probably need a 12-step program and/or a bankruptcy lawyer. Yes, this is hokey as hell, but I have to admit I was pleased by the enthusiastic feedback I received from my first transactions, and once my purchases arrived, I was happy to leave positive feedback for the sellers. These are all vendors I wouldn't hesitate to buy from again. The single-digit number after my user name inched up toward 10, and this weekend I got my yellow star. eBay is huge, but it's made up of thousands, tens of thousands of transactions a day, week after week, month after month. Transactions between one buyer and one seller. One buyer and one seller who probably live in different states, different countries, different hemispheres. (Most of my pens have come from a fellow in Japan whose user name is engeika.) eBay is huge, but it's a classic marketplace, just like the local farmers' market. I want tomatoes, you've got tomatoes; we make a deal. No one at the farmers' market, or on Martha's Vineyard for that matter, is selling fountain pens, dog crates that I can afford, or the two recently purchased books that haven't arrived yet. On eBay, it's pens I want, engeika who has excellent pens at good prices; we make a deal. Several deals. You can get anything you want on eBay, as long as what you want is tangible and legal and you've got the money to pay for it. At the farmers' market, buyers meet sellers face-to-face and inspect the merchandise up-close and personal. Chances are excellent that buyers and sellers know each other personally, or at least know of each other. On eBay buyers and sellers are usually making deals with people they've never met and never will meet and don't hear scuttlebutt about at the post office or the bar. Prospective buyers can inspect photographs of the goods but not the goods themselves. What keeps the farmers' market, or any market, going is trust between buyer and seller. That's what the stars are about: trust. Encouraging buyers and sellers to believe that total strangers will deliver as promised and work out any difficulties that may arise. From the eBay message boards, I get the impression that many people take their stars very seriously. With good reason: so do I.
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