Ebay finally cut its own throat!

[Dave N.]

Well I feel I must post about Ebay as I used to do a lot of buying ans selling there. Mostly selling.

The have hiked fees and also hiked fees in Paypal to a point that selling something will make them a profit and you take a loss.

They also changed the feedback rules as to cannot give a negative or a neutral to a buyer, thus increasing the chance of getting a scam artist bidder and getting ripped off. It?s already starting to happen.

I just recently sold a fender strat and had listed that I will not sell or ship outside the USA. The winning bidder was in Germany and requested the guitar sent to Germany to an APO address. I checked with UPS, Fedex and US postal and not able to insure or track it because it was an APO address, the bidder also paid with paypal and had an unconfirmed address.

Well I requested a USA address that I could ship too and they finally gave me one. I promptly sent the guitar and the newbie bidder left a negative feedback before even getting the guitar, ruining my 100% feedback I had built up over 7 years.
I requested from Ebay to have the negative removed as I felt this was a wrongful left feedback and they replied they could only remove negative feedback under a court order??? WTF...

To top this off I could not leave the newbie Ebayer a negative even though it was her fault for not reading my rules or ignoring them when she bid. Buyer can no longer be left with negative feedbacks... just open them doors for the scam artist buyers Fleabay!

Point being that buyers can get away with giving sellers a negatives at a whim, rip you off and still leave a negative and also I found out from paypal if they file against you, paypal is in the bidders favor and will either take the money out of paypal account or bill your credit card and there is nothing you can do about it while the bidder still gets the merchandise.

There was a boycott against Ebay a while back because of the new rule changes and rate hikes this year. A lot of folks have made videos on Youtube complaining about Fleabay.

My take is TO HELL WITH EBAY and find a new online auction that doesn't create rules to hurt the sellers. Not sure who made the new rule changes but they just screwed themselves royally.

This crap is the final straw for me and I quit Ebay and Paypal. So if any of you plan on selling amp, guitars or any other stuff on Ebay you might just get ripped off by the winning bidder and maybe even get a negative too and Ebay and Paypal will be in favor of them!

Any one else had a bad experience at fleabay lately?

[Godwin]

on a much smaller scale, I am boycotting ebay at the moment, because they sent me a voucher, which they didn't let me use, for no apparent reason.
the only problem was that i didn't find out i couldn't use it untill AFTER placing the winning bid on an item I only bought because I could use the voucher to pay for it. I followed all the instructions, within the time limit, and their customer services led me round in circles until finally just ignoring me altogether.

the feedback rules have always been open to abuse. it used to really annoy me the way that sellers never give you feedback until you have received the item, though i sympathise whole heartedly with your situation.

both ebay and paypal fees are incredible, and the reason why i will never sell anything through it.

[madialex]

I quit ebay 2 years ago because of the paypal refund rule, i got scammed more than once with that crap, also the fees are stupid high, screw ebay and paypal, you wont see nothing of mine on there..

[musicftw]

I'm glad the world is moving away from eBay. It isn't a good platform to sell through now. I've moved onto penny auction websites (Eg. CircusPop and KaChing). Just google them. You may never go back to eBay.

[Sock Puppet]

I never use eBay for selling now, they're too greedy.

However, a friend of mine asked me list a few things and I had no choice...

As the minimum reserve price is now £50, I added this to one of the listings (a pickup):

Due to the new ebay rules with respect to their minimum reserve price, I myself reserve the right to be unable to find the item if the bidding ends below £25 as I'm selling this for a friend who is parting with it because he'd rather have a little money in his pocket.

I'll check out those sites (thanks Musicftw) or use Gumtree from now on.

- Found Gumtree through eBay funnily enough but yes, that's one throat that needed cutting.

[Sock Puppet]

Well, it got even worse - I sold a P.Bass USA GAS, 9 hole with screws for the same friend and the clown that bought it disagreed that it was "Very good condition" and wanted to return it despite the listing stating no returns accepted.

He sent some hi-def (macro) photos of damage to the thing and I thought it must have been damaged in the post so I agreed to take it back.

So it was returned and was in exactly the same condition as when I posted it, same wrapping too! and I had to refund the money, my recorded delivery postage and his return postage.

It maybe didn't have enough scratches on it so might not do the job properly

His feedback?

Good eBayer, thanks.

Mine to him?

Accomplished eBayer, thanks.

I was just too pissed off.. sorry to rant.

eBye.

[tubeswell]

That looks like a damn nice scratchplate too. I'd probably buy it if I had a P-Bass to put it on.

[rockin roy]

Ebay isn't so bad.
It gets a ton of trafic so you get the best price in the shortest time.
Fees just get rolled into the final price so yes you do have to pay for the stall but everyone just looks at the end price anyway.
I think USPS is what sucks. I would just charge more for shipping and only use UPS or Fed Ex. They provide time definate dilivery, signiture service and E-Mail alerts.
I don't know how I would have handled an APO. It is technacally a US address. You might have been able to use DHL since it is owned by the German post. You need to add it to your list of places you don't send too.
As far as feed back, the customers on EBay are all bottom feeders and everyone knows it. They scratch thier ass no matter what you do. Sorry about losing the 100% positive but if you are over 90% most buyers understand.
Last, don't oversell it. Just take the picture, make no gurantees, sell as-is and let the buying competition sell you item.

[madialex]

Well I went against my own rule of not ever selling on ebay again. I have not sold anything there in 2 years. I sold a few things and from what I can figure with my math is ebay and paypal are now getting at least 10% of the sale, more like 11.3% but whos counting. Thats insane!!! An item I had sold for 350.00 and in total ebay and paypal got right at 40 bucks of it!!! so I actually sold it for 310.00 if you think about it. I am totally done with ebay and paypal, ebay owns paypal you know. I mean really, 10%!! And they dont do anything but provide a website to sell something. I am going to check out those others that someone mentioned, Thanks BTW!

[Alex R]

His feedback?

Good eBayer, thanks.

Mine to him?

Accomplished eBayer, thanks.

Just saw this ..."Accomplished Ebayer" ...nice one.

[bay4hotrod]

I'm strictly a buyer on Ebay - live so far from anything that if I need ANYTHING, it's somewhere on there.. thing that tickes me off to no end is when you are looking for something, it takes 20 minutes just to weed out all of the redundant advertising. I remember when Ebay first started it was people were selling their stuff to people.. Now you've got 5011 'stores' with their chinese crap plugging up the flow from you to me *^%@!! I need to sell anything , I do it local.

[mort]

I've never had too much trouble with Ebay. Once I made an error in my description, buyer called me on it once he got the item(a guitar neck) and I took it back, no big deal for either of us. I was amused at his style of alerting me though. He emailed ranting and raving that the neck wasn't nearly as 'clean and virtually unused' as I had claimed, that it had finger gunk and even light fretwear. He was extremely hacked off and 'demanded' a refund and started going off about getting ripped off and the quality of sellers and the state of America blah blah blah. he was correct about my error in description(I failed to edit the full description from another of my ads) and when I responded to his hostile email I said "I'm not sure who you've dealt with before that left such a bad taste in your mouth, but my name is Jeff, I'm a normal human being and I have never met you before, online or otherwise, so let's start off a little friendlier ok". He calmed right down and we handled the problem.

I've had a couple other people try and tell me that there was a problem with music related gear. When I asked for *easy to provide* proof of said problem I never heard from them again.

As a buyer I don't think I've EVER had a problem.

And as for taking away the ability for sellers to leave negatives, I think that it only makes sense. Who really cares what a buyer's rating is anyway. Are people going to cancel bids if they see someone has neg feedbacks? Probably not even 1% of sellers would do that. What really matters is DO THEY PAY FOR ITEMS WON. What is it, 3 no pays gets 'em suspended or booted? Works for me.

And what if the person is both a buyer and a seller? Say I'm the buyer/seller in question. I buy something and it turns into a bad transaction with a bad seller. I get pissed and leave the seller a neg rep. He/she gets pissed back and negs me, even though I've done nothing wrong. Now when I go to sell something my percentage is marred as a seller but the neg had nothing to do with me selling anything. Doesn't make sense does it?

Anyway, Ebay isn't so bad as long as you know what to expect in the way of fees, shipping costs, and human behavior.

[Bill Moore]

I probably haven't bought half a dozen things from e-bay, and most are buy it now. I pay for the thing, and recieve it. Then I start getting e-mails wanting my feedback. I see no use to send in a report that the deal went exactly as expected. If there was a problem, I would have already contacted the seller, and hopefully resolved it.
It seems to me like a teacher giving the kid a gold star for doing the minimun amount of work.