eBay sales woes [RANT]

[maestrokev]

OMG OMG OMG

For those of you who don't have a lot of ebay experience FYI, do NOT do this - trust me once you get paid w/ paypal, you can still get it revoked - I have sold things, then 2 months later, paypal takes it away due to buyer chargebacks and even though i have receipts / tracking numbers.

What! PayPal revokes payment? How the heck does that happen? Freaky, never happened to me but the stories here are worrying. I know PayPal requires both the buyer and seller to be verified addresses in US, UK or Canada otherwise they won't cover. Was this what happened to you?

I'm looking at selling my MB and MBP but I get so many jokers on Craigslist that I thought eBay was safe if we're all verified buyers/sellers.

 

[Michael CM1]

And did ya know eBay is getting rid of all negative feedback? They're turning into the Microsoft of online auction sites. I've never sold anything there, but I have bought a couple of things. Without negative feedback, how do you figure out if someone isn't, well, Nigerian?

 

[spaceballl]

As others have said, if selling on eBay:
Fixed Price listing only

Then why use ebay? i think auctions are fun

As others have said, if selling on eBay:
Immediate payment required

Yeah obviously - just because you require it doesn't mean people do it.

Verified Address only

While this definitely helps, just do some google searching. Paypal has def screwed people over, even when shipping to verified addresses.

 

[spaceballl]

I'm looking at selling my MB and MBP but I get so many jokers on Craigslist that I thought eBay was safe if we're all verified buyers/sellers.

May i recommend offering free shipping for money order / check payment? This way the money is for sure yours and you don't have to pay paypal fees.

Trust me - paypal chargeback sucks. I had a small business going on paypal a while back. After I got paid, i'd transfer to my bank account. One day i woke up with negative $1.2K in my account.

 

[maestrokev]

Then why use ebay? i think auctions are fun

Yeah obviously - just because you require it doesn't mean people do it.

While this definitely helps, just do some google searching. Paypal has def screwed people over, even when shipping to verified addresses.

You know eBay's latest changes are that as a seller you can't leave negative feedback for a buyer. That means you can't do anything about the buyer who pays late (because up to 2 weeks for payment is reasonable for eBay), or what happened to me once, the person didn't read my ad and underpaid shipping fees. You're stuck because eBay thinks the person paid. Only thing you can do is refund PayPal payment right away, wait 7 days then open unpaid item dispute ... meanwhile you're losing money because all the people watching the item have left and you can't relist.

 

[spaceballl]

You know eBay's latest changes are that as a seller you can't leave negative feedback for a buyer. That means you can't do anything about the buyer who pays late (because up to 2 weeks for payment is reasonable for eBay), or what happened to me once, the person didn't read my ad and underpaid shipping fees. You're stuck because eBay thinks the person paid. Only thing you can do is refund PayPal payment right away, wait 7 days then open unpaid item dispute ... meanwhile you're losing money because all the people watching the item have left and you can't relist.

I know! This is so ****** - def has happened to me before - waiting til your unpaid item dispute goes through. Geez such a pain.

I really think that the conditions are right for an eBay competitor... People are getting fed up.

 

[AirmanPika]

I just sold my macbook pro on ebay today actually (well yesterday now). Here's the key after years of selling expensive stuff like laptops...

ONLY ship to your local country. Never ship international even if they have a confirmed address.

ONLY accept PayPal payments from confirmed addresses. Indicate in your auction that you will void the auction if they don't have one and also set the auction to only allow immediate payment from users with paypal accounts. Don't accept any other form of payment. This generally stops 98% of scammers.

Be careful of or just entirely deny 0 feedback bidders. I generally allow them now as long as they meet the above but I'm good at judging legit buyers. Also require anyone with less than 5 feedback contact you first or you may void their bid.

When setting up the auction you can specificly block users with negative feedback, who are outside of your local country, who have unpaid auction hits, or do not have a paypal account near the end of the process. I set all of these.

Also since it is a high ticket item splurg on the listing a bit. Get the featured pack (I think thats what its called) for $30. You'll get a highlight, bold, featured plus listing that gets better visibility. Otherwise your auction is likely to get buried and ignored until the day the auction ends.

Set a buy it now price that is competative. Research ended listings with the same specs as yours and what is currently out there. Try and make yours look more tempting than everyone else's. This tends to help snag impulse shoppers. Also separate the price between the buy it now and opening bid prices by about $200-$300 as to not detract from the higher price and make people hold off.

Oh and when replying to any questions you might get ignore all the nigerian crap ones. If you do reply make sure to HIDE your e-mail address. Sometimes they are just trying to mine for e-mails to spam. Strategically post your e-mail responses if they may help your auction. Don't post responses that might detract in some way.

Ship with a major carrier like UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc. Make sure to insure for the full amount. This way regardless of what happens you are double covered between paypal (assuming you made sure the buyer was confirmed and you shipped to the confirmed address) and the carrier.

 

[elmo151]

As others have said, if selling on eBay:

Fixed Price listing only
Immediate payment required
Verified Address only

as a power seller I can add to that list:
use the listing options to specify ship to uS only

use "help" to find seller options. you can specify US only and paypal member only bids.
specify PayPal as the only accepted payment method

 

[harcosparky]

I can't believe all the people having issues on Ebay.

We still do 35-50 items a week there.

And did ya know eBay is getting rid of all negative feedback?

Over the last 12 months I have placed Negatives against 4 bidders, and it is STILL THERE. What evidence is there that Ebay has removed all negative feedback?

On the other hand, I recently bought an item from a seller on ebay, 100% feedback rating. 10 days later, the item has not made it from NC to FL, and seller is not responding to email requesting shipping info. Fixing to file a dispute!

My worse nightmare ... I shipped 5 items on one day - 4 of them went to Europe. One went from Maryland to North Carolina. All the packages to Europe arrived before the package to North Carolina. THe buyer in North Carolina was very understanding, we had tracking information and knew the USPS had the package. At about the time I was going to issue a refund ( 6 weeks after mailing ) is showed up at the sellers home. Of course I was communicating with the seller.


I sold a camera/lens to a Dr in Australia for over $3,000.00 and she paid for it with Bidpay ( Western Union ).

I absolutely REFUSE to accept PAYPAL.

PAYPAL is owned by Ebay - I will pay them to list items, but not pay them to process a payment.

In my opinion Buyers should foot a part of the bill. Ebay is supposed to be an AUCTION site. At brick&mortar ( live ) auctions, buyers are often charged a percentage as a Buyers Fee.

I wish someone would bring on an Auction site like Ebay used to be.

Bottom line, any Ebay issues I have are with EBAY fee structures and not with buying or selling.

 

[HoldFastHope]

I just sold my macbook pro on ebay today actually (well yesterday now). Here's the key after years of selling expensive stuff like laptops...

ONLY ship to your local country. Never ship international even if they have a confirmed address.

ONLY accept PayPal payments from confirmed addresses. Indicate in your auction that you will void the auction if they don't have one and also set the auction to only allow immediate payment from users with paypal accounts. Don't accept any other form of payment. This generally stops 98% of scammers.

Be careful of or just entirely deny 0 feedback bidders. I generally allow them now as long as they meet the above but I'm good at judging legit buyers. Also require anyone with less than 5 feedback contact you first or you may void their bid.

Thanks for the tips, but I actually tried ALL of these. Scammer bought using a hacked account. I saw request to ship locally, when I contacted with shipping price they sent the same generic email asking for shipping to South Africa.

Set a buy it now price that is competative. Research ended listings with the same specs as yours and what is currently out there. Try and make yours look more tempting than everyone else's. This tends to help snag impulse shoppers. Also separate the price between the buy it now and opening bid prices by about $200-$300 as to not detract from the higher price and make people hold off.

To be honest, my buy it now price was in line with ended listings, and there was about AU$500 difference between the auction start and the buy it now. Perhaps I was asking too much? I kinda find it hard to believe that my top of the line MBP has dropped in value 50% in 6 months.

 

[cohibadad]

I am reluctant to sell anything on ebay. I'd rather take the chance buying something because I can sort out the most obvious risks from fairly safe auctions. My last attempt to sell resulted in payment through paypal. I transferred the money I received immediately. The buyer did not want physical shipment of the item and only wanted the electronic key which I delivered. A few days later paypal notified me that they believed the credit card used for the purchase was stolen and soon after demanded a complete refund by me. Fortunately I was able to cancel the frauds key which prompted multiple whining threatening emails. Too much hassle. It seems that any sale is risky. If you restrict sales to those with good feedback you severely limit potential sale price. If you don't you risk fraud. bleh.

 

[darwinian]

Errr... you are kidding, right? I have never seen as many piracy, counterfeit and scam products as I have on ioffer.com... the site has zero credibility in my book. Anyone with a legit product to sell doesn't stand a chance.

Well, good to know -- it was mentioned on a reasonably trustworthy news source as an eBay alternative.

Yeah obviously - just because you require it doesn't mean people do it.

Actually, Require Immediate Payment is an option you place on the Buy It Now that , well, requires that the payment is disbursed immediately from the PayPal account. Otherwise, the transaction will not complete. Basically first person to give you the $$ is the winner. I've done thousands of successful transactions on eBay, and this one cured a lot of those problems. It obviously won't stop "hacked accounts" and this sort of thing, but I have to say, those problems have only affected sellers whom I didn't know personally -- all I'm saying is that I suspect that fewer people are taken by these sorts of scams of true account hijack than one might believe my reading on the web. It's not to say it's (a) not a problem and (b) not getting to be a bigger problem.

You know, I think of eBay scams like viruses -- when I owned a windows box, I never got one single virus. Ever. How the heck are all these people getting so many friggin viruses? I have friends whose family computers have hundreds. Hundreds of viruses? This blows my mind. A little common sense and skepticism goes a long way on eBay (and in the Windows world).

I can't believe all the people having issues on Ebay.

We still do 35-50 items a week there.

Over the last 12 months I have placed Negatives against 4 bidders, and it is STILL THERE. What evidence is there that Ebay has removed all negative feedback?

Well, this is a new policy change. All major news sources have carried it. eBay sent out policy emails about it. You can get all of the details at

http://pages.ebay.com/sell/update08/overview/

 

[maestrokev]

I am reluctant to sell anything on ebay. I'd rather take the chance buying something because I can sort out the most obvious risks from fairly safe auctions. My last attempt to sell resulted in payment through paypal. I transferred the money I received immediately. The buyer did not want physical shipment of the item and only wanted the electronic key which I delivered. A few days later paypal notified me that they believed the credit card used for the purchase was stolen and soon after demanded a complete refund by me. Fortunately I was able to cancel the frauds key which prompted multiple whining threatening emails. Too much hassle. It seems that any sale is risky. If you restrict sales to those with good feedback you severely limit potential sale price. If you don't you risk fraud. bleh.

Hmm, were both you and the buyer using PayPal verified addresses in US, Canada or UK? You're supposed to be covered under those circumstances.

 

[ij3ffy]

I hear ya,

I used ebay for years, then last year it just got bad, I actually ended up cancelling my account. I got the exact same problems people have been listing. I'd post auctions for US only, etc. etc.. and sure enough, someone from nigeria or somewhere else would bid/win. And I don't know how ebay works now, but back then ebay counts it as a complete sale, so it charged me the percentage of the auction plus listing fee. It ended up being an endless nightmare. All of them are horrible. I don't know what to say but I hope you find an easy way to sell it. Stay away from ebay.

 

[Consultant]

Yes had quite a lot of problems here. Probably took 40 hours of research to sell the first high value item after it was won by scammers a few times (and a deadbeat once).

Now I know what to look for. Each auction requires at least 1-2 hour of baby sitting / researching buyers. With the upcoming changes in rules / increase in fees, I think it's a good time to look for alternatives.

I can't believe all the people having issues on Ebay. We still do 35-50 items a week there.

Over the last 12 months I have placed Negatives against 4 bidders, and it is STILL THERE. What evidence is there that Ebay has removed all negative feedback?

My worse nightmare ... I shipped 5 items on one day - 4 of them went to Europe. One went from Maryland to North Carolina. All the packages to Europe arrived before the package to North Carolina. THe buyer in North Carolina was very understanding, we had tracking information and knew the USPS had the package. At about the time I was going to issue a refund ( 6 weeks after mailing ) is showed up at the sellers home. Of course I was communicating with the seller.

I sold a camera/lens to a Dr in Australia for over $3,000.00 and she paid for it with Bidpay ( Western Union ).

I absolutely REFUSE to accept PAYPAL.

PAYPAL is owned by Ebay - I will pay them to list items, but not pay them to process a payment.

In my opinion Buyers should foot a part of the bill. Ebay is supposed to be an AUCTION site. At brick&mortar ( live ) auctions, buyers are often charged a percentage as a Buyers Fee.

I wish someone would bring on an Auction site like Ebay used to be.

Bottom line, any Ebay issues I have are with EBAY fee structures and not with buying or selling.

Perhaps you should actually read some of the official ebay announcements, and some newspaper articles. Changes will happen late February, 2008.

BidPay stopped operation since end of 2007.

Yes PayPal is expensive / pretty bad. Agree with you there.

However, if you never get scammers you are not selling high value / highly desirable items.

 

[dtklamf]

**** ebay
i got my old powerbook on there now I set a high starting bid.basically what i want for it.**** buy it now is just a sign to scammers

 

[maestrokev]

Glad to see I'm not the only one! I had heard of Craigslist but didn't know they had a local site for Sydney. Going to try this next!

Let us know how it goes. I find the Sydney craigslist site pretty quiet compared to North America. Trading Post is too expensive.

 

[hotsauce]

OMG OMG OMG

Dude,
The SAME thing just happened to me - I have begun to lost faith in eBay as an ethical place to buy / sell goods. And don't even get me started w/ Paypal. I could fill this entire page w/ horror stories, but I'll keep it short and sweet in regard to my recent macbook sale.

So I put the macbook up for auction - ten day auction, starting at 1 cent, no big deal. Auction ends - i expect to receive payment as usual, etc. Instead, i get ebay messages from the winner in broken english asking if his friend can send me the paypal money and if i mind shipping the computer to his "mum" in Norway. For those of you who don't have a lot of ebay experience FYI, do NOT do this - trust me once you get paid w/ paypal, you can still get it revoked - I have sold things, then 2 months later, paypal takes it away due to buyer chargebacks and even though i have receipts / tracking numbers. In any case, back to the story - so i relist the item. Then it gets bought buy a buyer w/ decent feedback - okay cool. I await payment / messages from him. Oh btw, i offer free shipping if people send a check / money order so i can avoid chargeback risk. Soooooo... then ebay sends me some generic email about how someone got ahold of the buyer's account and blah blah blah auction is canceled. Okay - fine. So I re-list a 3rd time. Finally an ethical person buys. They pay w/ check to get free shipping. I'll ship the computer on monday hoorah.

But in the end, I had to sell something 3 times before I got an ethical buyer - so one out of three? Like i said, I'm really losing faith in eBay/paypal. If an alternative arises, i'm there.

You know it's possible you got scammed with a check as well. I've heard of checks passing through banks for months before it's declared fraud.

 

[Consultant]

ebay users plots strike Feb 18-25
http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/07/smbusiness/ebay_boycott.fsb/index.htm

ebay rivals
http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/06/smbusiness/ebay_alternatives.fsb/index.htm?postversion=2008020711

some sellers who ditched ebay
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fsb/0802/gallery.ex_ebay_sellers.fsb/index.html

You know it's possible you got scammed with a check as well. I've heard of checks passing through banks for months before it's declared fraud.

Yup. US checks takes about a week to actually clear. International checks takes 2-3 weeks before you know it's fake.

 

[anotherarunan]

And did ya know eBay is getting rid of all negative feedback? They're turning into the Microsoft of online auction sites. I've never sold anything there, but I have bought a couple of things. Without negative feedback, how do you figure out if someone isn't, well, Nigerian?

not totally correct...i think its getting rid of negative feedbacks from sellers...but the feedback from buyers remains. Massive debate about this decision...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7228460.stm

if anyone was in any doubt..

 

[maestrokev]

not totally correct...i think its getting rid of negative feedbacks from sellers...but the feedback from buyers remains. Massive debate about this decision...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7228460.stm

if anyone was in any doubt..

Yes that's a joke!

"If a buyer doesn't pay, the seller can easily contact eBay, we will review any complaint and maybe remove the buyer," a spokesman said."

What eBay doesn't mention is that as a seller you have to wait at least 1 week before opening an unpaid item dispute. Good luck getting a quick answer from eBay. Most common scenario is you have to relist which means you have lost time and the potential buyers who were watching.

 

[johny5]

Its pretty annoying really that paypal can claw back the money from you.
The only "pro" going for paypal is the fact that you get instant funds, and benefits both the buyer and even the seller as you would ship their item quicker.

I think as a casual seller of high valued goods its time i jacked in paypal and accepted direct bank payments or postal orders. Yes its going to take an extra 3 days to process and clear however ebay/paypal dont rape you a percentage and also cant steal back the money at a later date.

 

[noodle654]

I just sold my MB and I had a few scammers who asked if I could send it to Africa. I said "no ****ing way."

The guy that I sold it to gave me a confirmed address and his phone number if there were any problems. The phone helped because he lived in an apartment building and I needed the box to be signed for...however he works 9-7 and wouldnt be able to sign for it. So I shipped it through DHL and they held it at their depot for him. No problems....

Downside...I lost 2.9% THEN pay the listing fee's and then the after auction fee's which added up to about $55. That is just BS.

 

[darwinian]

Wanted to add, not ONLY am I reducing sales on eBay, but I will no longer buy on eBay as well. The only way to get the message across is to stop all trading on eBay, in my opinion. Plenty of deals out there otherwise.

 

[HoldFastHope]

Wanted to add, not ONLY am I reducing sales on eBay, but I will no longer buy on eBay as well. The only way to get the message across is to stop all trading on eBay, in my opinion. Plenty of deals out there otherwise.

I would join you on the boycott of buying... however it looks like I may need to import Rock Band for the PS3 soon.

After that, I'm with ya