If something has “gone south” with your winning bidder, you realize that you are in a predicament. If you leave Negative Feedback before they have left feedback for you, you are inviting Negative Feedback from a disgruntled bidder. If you don’t leave feedback, you are doing others an injustice that may have to deal with this bidder in the future.
In general, if Negative Feedback is deserved, it should be left. The timing may be important to ensure that you are treated fairly, but it is still important that others know your successful bidder was less that pleasant to deal with in some way. There are no guarantees or methods to ensure that you don’t receive negative feedback, however, if you do, you MUST ALWAYS respond to this feedback so others have insight to what happened. You do this by leaving a ‘reply to comments left for you’ and a ‘follow-up comment’ for the feedback you left for your successful bidder.
If you are really paranoid about receiving Negative Feedback, but still want to do the right thing and leave Negative Feedback for this bidder, determine the exact time and date of the close of your auction and try waiting to post the Negative Feedback before the expiration time for posting feedback on this auction. At the time of this writing, feedback must be posted within 90 days, however eBay indicates that feedback can potentially still be left after this time if the auction remains in their databases so this is not a sure fire method, just a little less risky. Unfortunately the delay will only hurt those who have to deal with this bidder in the future.
If feedback abuse occurs, eBay will remove the feedback, however eBay has strict guidelines for feedback removal. For more information review eBay’s Feedback Abuse, Withdrawal and Removal page.