Why are sellers not allowed to leave negative feedback for buyers?

[Pinkflipflop]

It really annoys me!

Why do eBay do this?

it enables buyers to leave honest feedback without the need for retaliative neg feedback from a seller.

I guess ebay takes the view if they paid they are good buyers if they don't you can open non paying case

if there is a problem with item sellers job to sort it or ask for return if it did not arrive or arrives broken sellers not buyers problem

obviously there are cases when buyer is lying about something being wrong when it isn't but otherwise it would make buyers scared to complain if I think a buyer is trouble i just add to blocked bidders list

The real question is why are sellers allowed to leave feedback for buyers at all. What's the point?

A bad buyer is one who doesn't read the listing fulling so expects a product in completely different condition from description and then leaves the buyer £61 out of pocket. :(

i have a few phrases that could not possibly be considered negative comments but sort of damn with faint praise fortunately I very rarely need to use them mostly I just do not leave feedback for bad buyers and block them

example

" once completed this transaction was just about OK"

and for anyone who claims item went missing in the post

" sorry item did not arrive, refund has already been processed" which if it genuinely went missing will be the only one if they keep getting similar feedback it acts as a warning if I think they are genuine I may mention something like "polite patient buyer" ie they asked me politely when it was sent, how long should I wait and it was resolved without case being opened

Not sure how widespread a practice it was, but my DF used to be a regular eBayer (buying) a few years back until he had several negative experiences. He received a couple of faulty/misdescribed items and when he sent messages to query, he received emails back threatening negative feedback if he didn't leave positive and/or that nothing would be fixed until positive feedback was left (one even escalated to a genuine threat along the lines of 'I know where you live' but that could be done regardless of feedback capability).

However I understand why it can be frustrating for sellers - I do look at seller feedback sometimes but take it with a pinch of salt, and I mainly look to see if there are comments on the item I'm interested in. I would much prefer to see reviews on items as opposed to the seller.

But how can f/back act as a warning? Unless sellers keep close tabs on bids, then check the f/back as soon as a bid comes in (I am not even sure how that might be possible because bidder names all seem to be anonymised), then if there's bad f/back seller may be able to cancel the auction (only if the bid isn't too close to auction end).
It's a pretty pathetic way to warn sellers about bad buyers.

It's that or searching for lists online of people folk have found to be bad buyers.

Ebay doesn't care about sellers, especially regular people who are just selling on their old stuff.