eBay investigations

I've posted up to my other blog a script that gives the total $ amount of positive, negative and neutral feedback for a particular user. For a while I've had the hypothesis that there may be people rorting eBay by selling many cheap items honestly and a very few expensive items dishonestly, resulting in them being able to maintain a high feedback rating but getting a lot of dishonest money. For example:

• I sell 99 items for $1 each and get positive feedback on all of them. I then sell 1 item for $100 but never deliver it, and get negative feedback. Despite only delivering on $99 out of $199 of items I would end up with a 99% feedback rating!

Does this sort of deception occur on eBay? I'm going to find out. I'll search through 100 eBay usernames and provide two variables as results:

• %feedback, which is the percentage of positive feedback for a user
• $feedback, which is the percentage of dollars of positive feedback out of all dollars a user has transactions for

For the example a few paragraphs above, I would have a %feedback of 99 and a $feedback of 49.7

Watch this space!