I have mixed feelings about this one. As both a buyer and a seller on eBay, I know there were problems with the previous feedback system. If you got a deadbeat buyer who never paid, and left them negative feedback, they could just retaliate and do the same for you, hurting your score. Fortunately, that never happened to us because we required bidders with at least one positive feedback to bid, but it’s still an issue (as you’ve seen). The problem I see with the new system is the lack of recourse for sellers. What happens if you get a deadbeat buyer? I know eBay has a policy regarding these issues, but in my experience they don’t punish the bad buyers and PayPal seems to always side with the buyers. Maybe the changes will work out better in the long run, I don’t know… we haven’t had any issues with them so far so we’ll see. I think that maybe having hidden feedback temporarily would solve the retaliation issue. If the buyer and seller could not see each other's feedback until both posted and it was final, then neither would be able to retaliate against one another. There would need to be some sort of deadline, 15 or 30 days. After the deadline, any feedback would become public and if you had not already left feedback, you would be unable to do so. I think that would solve the retaliation issue and still leave a public method of feedback which is part of what made eBay so successful in the first place.