eBay has forever claimed that it wants to end sellers being abused by buyers, so this is nothing new, in fact, I was able to quickly locate plenty of sellers posting about eBay abusive buyers dating back to 2014 and even before that.  

And, being that we are a couple days away from 2022, clearly eBay has somehow managed to never find a successful way to protect their sellers from verbal abuse, threats of harm, in addition to fraudulent returns and outright feedback extortion, despite endless years of claiming to care.  So, when eBay UK announced in mid-December 2021 a new, "improved abusive buyer protection", sellers have little-to-no faith in any change truly occurring.  

I know, you're wondering what specifically eBay plans to do to offer said "improved seller protection".  Here's eBays comment on the topic:

In terms of addressing verbally abusive buyers, eBay says "We ramped up detection of abusive buyers. In addition to seller reports, we also detect abusive buyer behaviour by looking at claims and returns patterns. We've recently ramped up detection and if we determine that a buyer has violated our abusive buyer policy, we will take action against that buyer."

And, regarding bogus, fraudulent returns, eBay stated, "We expanded our seller protections for false buyer claims. More sellers are now protected when a buyer falsely reports an item as not as described. When the criteria are satisfied, we'll subsidize the cost of the return label (up to £3.50 per return), remove the negative and neutral feedback, defects and the open cases in your service metrics."

Additionally, if a buyer uses an item and decides to return it in used condition, eBay says, "You can deduct up to 50% from the refund to recover the lost value of the item", and, "We will take care of any issues directly with the buyer for you, including removing any negative and neutral Feedback, defects, and open cases in service metrics".

You can read all of the new changes here.

MY FINAL THOUGHTS

These changes seem positive but still do not seem to address the core issues that sellers are facing in terms of abusive buyers.  The reality is, abusive buyers should be removed from the platform completely.  However, it seems like eBay is far more interested in not losing buyers to Amazon as opposed to genuinely helping their sellers.  Regardless, if eBay is truly able to "detect patterns of abuse", GREAT!  But I'm not holding my breath on this one.