[Porsche-O-Phile]

Why is anyone surprised by this? Ebay has no skin in the game at all and gains nothing by getting in the middle of buyer / seller disputes. They're messy, nobody ever leaves happy, they take a lot of time to resolve and can be expensive propositions as a result. They just want to sit back and rake in fees for doing as little as possible. The more people that buy and sell stuff, the more fees they rake in. Why would they do anything to discourage someone from buying a product on their site (i.e. allowing negative feedback)? The only thing they care about is collecting their fee - if the seller is unscrupulous or misrepresents stuff, whatever I doubt it matters much to them. They stand to make more in the long run by allowing that seller to keep pushing product in whatever way they want (more transactions = more fees). They just have to give the bare minimum level of assurance to keep people from perceiving their site as a haven for scheisters and going to a competitor like Amazon, so that's what they do.

Follow the money.