As a seller and occasional buyer on eBay since 1998 I am proud of my 100% positive FB rating. I leave FB when I ship my items, which I do on the first business day after getting paid, (when possible) I then inform the buyer of the tracking numbers from UPS ground.
Having said that, I will add that some categories will naturally be more prone to attract more scams and flakes both bidding and selling than others, and result in more neg/neutral feedback.
One downside of sniping is that the seller has no opportunity to review the buyer's history untill after the auction has ended...And personally, I like to see if an item is going to sell, but that's jsut me. Hypothetical situation... Seller ships UPS and doesn't take Paypal and says so in his/her auction.
Newbie buyer (ya gotta love 'em) with sniping program sees auction, wants item really, really bad but doesn't read the entire auction, wins item and pays with Paypal, has a PO box for his/her shipping address. What is the seller to do..?
Side note about UPS shipping. I sent an item out around Sept 6th. 2001 to an address in NYC via UPS ground, left the feedback, and sent the notification of being shipped. I never heard anything back, so just after the 9-11 disaster I tracked the package and found that it had been delivered on 9-12!.. Well that piqued my curiosity so I looked up a map of the address and found that it was within
2 blocks of ground zero!...granpaw
"I'd druther be scalped by a blackfoot as skun by a dam nabob!".. D.Sommers 1835