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I made $100K from a dick joke

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Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They cleaned up their act substantially in the past 3-4 years. There are still scammers, of course, but they seem to be taking action that favors buyers as well. I just don't see how they can protect everyone from all the various scams. If they accept all the risk, it will be exploited by scammers.

It was always fairly pro-buyer, but it's moved so much more in that direction it's somewhat hazardous to use as a seller. For a lot of stuff, as a seller, I'll just trade-in or use random hobbyist forum buy&sell sections which ad-hoc reputation systems.

imo it's slightly more pro-buyer than it was a couple of years ago. If only because unreasonable buyers have killed off most of the value of having 100% positive feedback.

Remember losing it a few years ago when an obvious scammer tried to bully me into a partial refund for an item he had already resold at a 50% markup.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#152
I get that this is all fun and I don’t want to jump on the purity spiral but the letter accompanying the glitter prank really is really horrible.

If I received one of those I would definitely give serious consideration to finding the nearest bathroom and having a good cry.

When it’s impossible to know whether you’re exacting glitter justice or amplifying a bully, why not just take a neutral stance? (For all I know though, send your enemies glitter is running an arbitration service and only sends glitter to the truly awful?)

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#153
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the exact experience selling an iMac on eBay about 10 years ago. Buyer clicked buy it now, my listing was removed, they never paid. They deleted their account shortly after (it was some .ru email address.) eBay had nothing to say other than “try again after X weeks”. Why, so it can just happen again? They admitted they have zero protection against it. I deleted my account and sold it on Amazon instead. How anyo…

FWIW, eBay no longer works like this. When you put up a listing there’s now an option, enabled by default, to require payment at checkout. This situation may still occur if you are taking offers on an item. In that case the buyer has to pay within 48 hours of the offer being accepted or the listing will become eligible for re-posting.

Our national buy/sell platform (aquired by ebay twenty or so years ago) has a similar system now where they will handle the payments and exchange of currency on confirmation of reception of items etc, I believe it's very successful, but they had to do something because nobody was trusting the site anymore for trading anything valuable.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found ebay more reliable, interesting and smoother than Amazon. Amazon screwed me over for 40 USD now they are nagging that I should sign up for "Prime" (I ordered a bunch of stuff, maybe 800 USD. They decided the order is fraudulent, and canceled it, without ever telling me. When I moved into my new place, there was nothing. No sheets, no nothing from Amazon. That this order was "canceled" without any email seemed…

Last time I ordered from amazon, I repeatedly declined prime. My bank called me the next day about a suspicious charge for a year of prime. I had to cancel my card and get a new one. The banker told me they'd had dozens of similar problems where amazon was charging people for stuff they never ordered. When I got the package a few days later, the $150+ set of cello strings I ordered, sold and shipped by amazon, were c…

Amazon is the American version of Temu, Aliexpress, etc nowadays; I wouldn't use it for anything but their own products (Kindle). For specialist items like the cello strings you mentioned, music shops are thankfully still a thing, both online/webshops as irl ones. I'd go there instead. Same with books.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please be understanding. Bezos needs the money!

If there was ever someone worthy of getting a bag of glittery dicks, it's Bezos.

The Amazon HQ address is public knowledge, but I doubt he opens his own mail:

Mr. Jeff Bezos, CEO

Amazon dot com, Inc.

410 Terry Avenue North

Seattle, Washington 98109-5210

(206) 266-1000

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#156
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if he was trying to resell your laptop and wasn't going to pay until he got an order for your laptop

ebay charges something like a 12.5% commission. It's easily over $100 in fees to sell a decent laptop on ebay. So, the seller would have to be charging quite a bit more for that to work out.

It's not commission free for private sales here in Germany.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#157
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cant believe ebay hasnt been disrupted yet...

For those in europe - check out vinted.com

My wife uses Vinted (UK) for selling hers and the kids clothes, usually single-to-double digit values at most (or she uses Oleo to just give it away). It works _fairly_ well from what I've heard, but she does have the occasional issue with people complaining about things and sending them back for obtuse reasons, often hardly worth it because the value was so low, the cost of the shipping there and back eclipsed the value of the item.

I wonder at times whether this is their game, hoping people will just tell them not to bother sending it back and they get a refund anyway.

As for ebay, I stopped selling anything on there years ago, well over a decade, when someone tried to scam me out of a laptop but failed. If something is valuable enough for me to sell, I sure as shit am not selling it on eBay.

More often than not, I give away my valuable tech that I'm done with, because I'd rather get nothing for it, and give it to someone who'll appreciate it than risk being scammed by some scumbag.

This way, friends and family get my hand-me-down PCs, laptops, phones, etc for nothing and they're still, by the time I'm done with them far better than something they'd buy with their budgets. When I buy something, I factor its lifetime in my possession into it's cost, I effectively expect £0 value left in it when I'm done or I don't buy it; everybody wins.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#159

I sold a laptop on eBay once long, long ago. Someone did the "Buy it now" option but never paid. I'm trying to remember the exact situation (probably more than 10 years ago), but I had exchanged messages with him several times and he always had an excuse to not pay. Then I noticed he was selling the exact same model of laptop so it was easy for me to realize that he had just "bought" my laptop to remove the listing s…

It’s a shame eBay didn’t help out at all

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EBay doesn't care about fraud unless they think you're going to file a charge back with your card issuer, then they're pretty quickto protect their bottom line. I do know for a fact that eBay can kick a seller off very quickly though. I bought a NES shaped raspberry pi a few years back as a gift. The day I got the item, I went to leave the seller glowing feedback, only to find his account was axed (he included NES ro…

I'm banned from eBay since about 2010. Sold a cellphone which my sister shipped without requiring signature, guy just said he never received it. My sister was working at a Telco so we just confirmed that he had actually received it because he put a SIM card into it, proof and everything eBay didn't care. I withdrew the money from my PayPal account before they could claw it back. PayPal still works for me but eBay is…

Situations like these really annoy me. And the platform's complete disregard is infuriating.
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