eBay Boycott Begins Tomorrow: Will It Work?

In response to eBay's recent announcement that it would no longer allow sellers to leave negative feedback for buyers, the uproar has been deafening. How deafening? So loud that a boycott has been planned, set to begin tomorrow on February 18, 2008 and run for (at least) a week.

Will it stick? As I noted in my original post, eBayers who want to auction things have little alternative to the auction giant unless they want to open their storefronts or sell at fixed-price merchants like Amazon.com.

However, a recent poll of eBay sellers showed that a full 90 percent were unhappy with the policy change (though AuctionBytes notes that no one was really happy with the feedback system before the change, either). Though, as the above story notes, "What I'm hearing from a sellers is not, can we afford to boycott eBay for a week, but rather, can we afford to continue selling on eBay once these changes roll out?"

eBay boycotts are nearly as old as eBay itself, and none of those have been effective at getting the company to change its policies. But things may be different now, as sellers appear to be weighing whether to even bother selling merchandise online at all, turning instead to flea markets and enthusiast fairs instead of wading through what many now see as a bureaucratic and expensive nightmare.

Still, eBay may be taking the threat seriously. To mitigate any ill will, eBay is offering a listing promo until the 20th (per AuctionBytes), and its new discounts for media sellers take effect on that day, too. Will people be drawn to a deal enough to overlook a few policy changes? We shall see.