Greasemonkey: eBay mutual feedback

ToolHaus provides a set of tools to check eBay user’s feedback.

The mutual feedback tool helps you to see if the seller and bidder are suspiciously buying a lot of items from one another. This Greasemonkey script inserts a link directly in auction pages to the toolhaus tool with correct parameters [1].

18 January 2006, by Mortimer

1The problem

Some sellers try to improve their rating on eBay by selling a lot of small items and buy them directly, using another “fake” eBay account. Thus, they can give themselves a lot of good reviews and have a good seller ranking.

In the same way, sellers also use these fake users to push up the price of their auctions.

There are a few — more or less simple — ways to check this trick:

check if the majority of one’s comments come from the same buyer,
check if the seller has many feedbacks with exactly the same comment. Often, they do not take the time to write a different one for each of their bid,
check the time of the comments, if they are really close to the bid end, it is suspicious: the comment was send before the product had time to be shipped and received by a real buyer.

This script provides a direct link — with the correct parameters — to the ToolHaus mutual feedback checker which helps you check the first point.

2Installation

Get Firefox
Install GreaseMonkey
restart Firefox
If you liked the script, think about helping me back and consider a small donation, click the paypal button on the right.
Click on the following icon and select "Install"

435 download(s) since 25 July 2007

3Note

I did try to make this script work on the page listing all bids for an item, but it does not contain the seller id, so it is not possible to call corectly the toolhaus tool.

4Bug, Wishes?

notes

[1] ToolHaus seems to have problem finding the highest bidder if you only provide an item identifier.

Make a Donation

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Donation don't have to be big to make a difference. I already received donations ranging from 0.50£ to 10£ and all of them made me happy. Think of it, if the thousand users of these tools made a small donation, it would not make a big difference to them, but it would to me.

You will probably enjoy using what you download from this website and if so, you can decide to make a donation. Making a donation is optional but will help to develop new tools and support the existing code.

All the software, scripts and other tools distributed on this web site are distributed under open source licenses and are available to download for free. Making the code free and available to all doesn't means it's of lower quality. The tools provided here are fully functional and their author invested some of his personal time to develop them and provide support to their users.

Think about it.

4 Forum messages

Greasemonkey: eBay mutual feedback
5 April 2006 14:29, by Alexandros Tsoukalas

It doesn’t seem to be working.

eBay must have changed their page format again.

Would it be possible to fix the script, please?
- Greasemonkey: eBay mutual feedback 5 April 2006 17:23, by mortimer
  
  Ok, I did update the script and think the corrections should work now. Could you check?
  - Greasemonkey: eBay mutual feedback 8 April 2006 03:19, by Alexandros
    
    It’s now working, thank you very much!
    
    The mutual feedback function seems to have a bug though:
    
    It always assigns the string ’undefined’ (without the quotes) to the UserB variable (the bidder/buyer’s ID) [*], whether a high bidder/buyer exists or not. Consequently, if you click on it, you always end up with the mutual feedback between the seller and someone with the ID ’undefined’. If a high bidder/buyer doesn’t exist, the UserB variable should be left blank/undefined.
    
    Anyway, Toolhaus seems to be able to retrieve the seller and bidder IDs on its own, if you provide the item number ONLY, so why get into all the trouble and define both UserA and UserB too?
    
    [*] I’m talking about the URL here, i.e.: http://toolhaus.org/cgi-bin/mutual?UserA=Seller_ID&UserB=undefined&Item=Item_Number&Check=Check&Limit=30
    
    P.S.: BTW, for some reason, the typographic shortcuts in this blog are not working in my Firefox (1.5.0.1). There’s also this line over this message box (posting/editing mode), that probably shouldn’t be there:
    <script type="text/javascript" src="spip_barre.js"> <p class="spip">Perhaps there’s a bug here too?</p> <p class="spip">I hope this helps.<img src="plugins/frimoussesIV/smileys/face1.png" alt="sourire" class="smiley"/></p>
    - Greasemonkey: eBay mutual feedback 8 April 2006 18:29, by mortimer
      
      Ok, I corrected this undefined problem. If there is no bidder, then the μ will not appear at all.
      
      I had to do that when I created the script because ToolHaus was buggy and couldn’t extract the bidder and seller automatically. It seems to work fine now so I removed the search for the seller id; it should fasten the load of the page.
      
      (I also fixed the typographic shortcuts, some paranoiac security filters was blocking the javascript (hence the line that was not supposed to be there))

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