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Fine, eBay. Here’s your $2. I hope you choke on it.

blog.danhulton.com

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Re: Fine, eBay. Here’s your $2. I hope you choke on it.

#121

Post by thibaut_barrere »

davedx wrote: post #118
jkubicek wrote: post #66

Scammers, confusing auction settings, limited integration with paypal despite owning them, terrible invoice generation, image uploads that don't work without Flash, etc. I despise eBay. That being said, I'm surprised nobody mentioned selling on Amazon. Blindingly easy to setup your sale, if you choose the lowest price on a popular good someone will buy it within the hour. Amazon will generate an invoice and mailing l…

Yep, I sold a load of books through Amazon a while ago, made a decent amount from them.

Seconded - I sold between 200 and 300 of my old books on MarketPlace a while back.

I reached the point where I wrote a little (Shoes) Ruby app that uses a barcode reader and a headless browser to automate the selling :-)

Re: Fine, eBay. Here’s your $2. I hope you choke on it.

#122

Post by makomk »

ck2 wrote: post #93

I hate ebay/paypal just as much as most people but: http://contact.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?CustomerSupport&#38... Solved, done. Your $2 will return to you. If your buyer agreed to cancel your transaction or didn't respond, you'll receive a credit to your seller's account for the final value fee within 7-10 business days of closing the case. If you want a refund for your credit, see Requesting a refund of your eBay…

That's just for the Final Value Fee. He did that already, or he'd have been on the hook for more like $50 (eBay charges through the nose in fees, particularly for consumer electronics).

Re: Fine, eBay. Here’s your $2. I hope you choke on it.

#123

Post by acedanger »

fafner wrote: post #35
hcayce wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A big problem with casual selling on ebay is you don't know what you don't know until you've already been screwed. Most of the big online sites (Paypal is the worst offender, but the others aren't much better) favor buyers over sellers. Amazon certainly works that way, and, as a result, I'm mostly use Craigslist to sell computers and cameras/lenses. I don't sell all that much stuff, though I do it for family members…

> or in police station lobbies I've never used Craigslist. But is it really common or advised to meat with the buyer/seller in a police station lobby?

I've bought, and sold, many things via Craigslist. I funded a cross-country move by selling the things I couldn't fit into my truck and u-haul trailer using Craigslist.

Having said that, I dislike the meeting-up aspect of Craigslist. For all of the money I've "made" by selling my stuff through them, there have been countless times where the person on the other end of the phone never shows up and leaves me there waiting.

Overall, it's been a positive experience. I'll continue using them for the foreseeable future.

Re: Fine, eBay. Here’s your $2. I hope you choke on it.

#124

Post by DanHulton »

megablast wrote: post #117
GigabyteCoin wrote: post #111

As for all of the second chance auctions being "ignored", I think it's common practice for 99% of ebayers to completely abandon the idea of winning a particular item (and moving on to another) the very second that they notice they have been outbid. "Oh, well!" is what most of them say.

I get suspicious of second change emails. Why did the original buyer not want it? What did they find out? It is probably from having my scam detector turned up to high, because of stories just like this. And also bidding on multiple items at once.

Ugh, I never even thought of that.

It would be nice to have received a "no thanks" from even one of them from the I think six I sent out though. Not so say that I think they "owe" me that, but it would have done a lot to dissuade me from suspecting that most of the bids on my item were fraudulent.

Re: Fine, eBay. Here’s your $2. I hope you choke on it.

#126

Post by b3b0p »

jkubicek wrote: post #66

Scammers, confusing auction settings, limited integration with paypal despite owning them, terrible invoice generation, image uploads that don't work without Flash, etc. I despise eBay. That being said, I'm surprised nobody mentioned selling on Amazon. Blindingly easy to setup your sale, if you choose the lowest price on a popular good someone will buy it within the hour. Amazon will generate an invoice and mailing l…

I've been using Amazon for years to sell. They make it so easy. Also, they have added a slick way to buy shipping now too. I love it!

My only complaint is the fees, but I accept that as the price I pay for making it so easy and painless and such a convenience to sell nearly anything.

Re: Fine, eBay. Here’s your $2. I hope you choke on it.

#127

Post by DanHulton »

As an update, eBay reached out to me and returned my money as a site credit, with a long personally-written letter.

Which is, ultimately, not all that cool honestly. I'll be writing a follow-up about it, but the tl;dr is that it shouldn't take a popular internet rant to get things like this resolved.

Re: Fine, eBay. Here’s your $2. I hope you choke on it.

#128

Post by nanodeath »

btilly wrote: post #100
pseudonym wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you think that "no buyer protection" is just heading too far in the opposite direction? Especially with callmeed's post[1] above... [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4730281

With bitcoin you can do some surprisingly complex things. Such as move money into a fund that the other people can verify are there, which only pays out on a trigger condition.

Where's the best place to learn more about this?

Re: Fine, eBay. Here’s your $2. I hope you choke on it.

#129

Post by arrrg »

megablast wrote: post #116
arrrg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just lucky, but selling stuff on eBay (which I have done a grand total of three times during four years or so) always seems to work out for me. In summer I sold my year old iPad 2 with a broken glass cover (otherwise fully functional, the 32GB/3G model) for €349 (someone bid €350 but told me after the auction that they thought the iPad was not broken – I was already writing off the sale at…

If you do sell broken stuff, mention it in the TITLE of the ad. It is very annoying having to go through an entire listing to find out it is broken. I have had no problems selling and buying on ebay, in Australia and the UK. Maybe US is worse?

Don't accuse me of something I didn't do. I very clearly marked the iPad as broken in its title. It was also categorized as such. I tried it out: When you search for iPads you have to explicitly mark a checkbox to even make broken iPads (including mine) appear in the search.

I'm still somewhat mystified how someone looking for a intact iPad could even have stumbled across my iPad. You have to be pretty explicit about wanting to see broken stuff on eBay.

(Resolving that issue, by the way, was actually a bit annoying. The mistaken buyer wrote me an e-mail, pleading me to not give her a negative review and asking for cancelling the sale. At that point you have to ask them to tell eBay that they mistakenly bought the product, otherwise you won't get your fees back. Offering the product to a lower bidder, however, is very painless and it did all work out in the end.)

Re: Fine, eBay. Here’s your $2. I hope you choke on it.

#130

Post by btilly »

nanodeath wrote: post #128
btilly wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With bitcoin you can do some surprisingly complex things. Such as move money into a fund that the other people can verify are there, which only pays out on a trigger condition.

Where's the best place to learn more about this?

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts would be a starting point.
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