“We have managed to maintain a 99.8% positive feedback”
I think you must be a saint to maintain that kind of feedback as a power seller. None of the large retailers such as Sears are able to do that. I know people who have bent over backwards on Ebay trying to make people happy who have still got a lot of negatives. I know other people who seem nice who have complained to me about some transaction they have had on Ebay where what they have been completely in the wrong and they still left a negative.
It is difficult to stay above 98% since the scammers use the threat of negative feedback to blackmail sellers. Sellers should also always use delivery confirmation. Paypal will refund any claim of a lost item if the seller does not have delivery confirmation to prove delivery. If a seller ships without delivery confirmation for very long it will become known and advertised on the scammer message boards. After that every sale will go to scammers who don’t care how much they bid because they know they will claim it is lost. Then they will wait to file the lost item claim to avoid alerting the seller. Then WHAM, all of them will claim lost items at the same time! Paypal is completely unsympathetic and the seller can’t even leave negative feedback. I am in the process of transitioning to Amazon to see how that works out.
I had a 100% with over 10K feedbacks over the course of several years. However, the items I sold were geared to pet owners and they tend to be a wonderful bunch of people. Plus, we’d go over and above to keep people happy (so we could have repeat buyers).