OK, I came to this late, but there are other solutions. On Dawdle, we spent a ton of time thinking about this. For their Marketplace sellers, eBay does number

OK, I came to this late, but there are other solutions. On Dawdle, we spent a ton of time thinking about this. For their Marketplace sellers, eBay does number one; Amazon does number two. What we do is not three, but something that I think is better: we just rank our users. Look, you can't ask buyers on the site to rank any particular transaction against all others; that's crazy talk, especially as you get into large numbers and people forget about all their experiences ever on a site. But we guide all our buyers to leave feedback of 3 - not 5 or a positive. The hope is that you'll have a semi-normal distribution of all feedback. Then, and only then, do we do all sorts of stuff to that. We have bonus points for good behaviors, some of which we talk about (shipping quickly, using Delivery Confirmation, linking your Dawdle account to Facebook, MySpace, XBL, PSN, etc) and some we don't. Then we just throw the ranks on a five point scale. We call this our Seller Rating, not a feedback rating. Feedback is just the beginning of the process. KFC starts with the chicken - necessary but not sufficient - then adds their 13 herbs and spices. That's what we do, and it's why we don't even allow users to see the individual feedbacks. They're designed to be useless individually, and I don't want some new eBay expat bitching about not having 100% feedback. Does this mean that some people are going to end up with 1s on a 5 point scale? You betcha. And we don't want them anyway - they're more hassle than they're worth. They can go to eBay or Amazon.