Solution
Only use Buy It Now ever. Require Immediate Payment.
Not only are the fees lower for Buy It Now than for auctions, but there's no way for buyers to game you. The listing will sit until someone actually pays you.
Fine, eBay. Here’s your $2. I hope you choke on it.
31–40 of 132 posts
Re: Fine, eBay. Here’s your $2. I hope you choke on it.
#32eBay has listing fees, of course you are going to be up for them regardless. Personally I would just set a reasonable price buy it now with immediate PayPal payment required, no need to waste your time then with anyone who hasn't already sent money your way.
I've had a number of attempts at adding a "Buy it now" and some scammer from Nigeria (every time) ends up "buying it" and sending phishing emails. Only to have to wait again to put it up for sale after a few days.
Does that work with immediate PayPal required? How do they get around that req?
Re: Fine, eBay. Here’s your $2. I hope you choke on it.
#33I don't get why the default action of most people is to feel compelled by whatever a company's accounting system tells them to do. Both this and that also-popular cable box story. There are two autonomous sides to every relationship. If you don't value your ability to use ebay again in the future at more than $2, give their customer service department a good-faith 15 minutes of your time to fulfill their elective pro…
The problem with that is that they can forward it to a collection agency, whom when told to screw off, replies by screwing with your credit score.
So at that point you repudiate the debt again, this time to the collections agency. If they insist on unilaterally publicly claiming you owe money without any sort of actual proof, take them to court for slander. Clearly the buck stops somewhere, as I can't just call up a collection agency and tell them that bduerst owes me $1 for responding to his HN comment.
Re: Fine, eBay. Here’s your $2. I hope you choke on it.
#34Using eBay these days feels like playing World of Warcraft. If you're a high level eBay user, it's a fantastic place to move goods, but god forbid someone new signs up to buy or sell something. Just like what it must be like to sign up and play World of Warcraft for the first time.
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…
I mentioned it below, but just to reply specifically here: eBay is very specific about fees that have to be paid regardless of sale, that's cool. I'd understand it totally if the auction just failed to be successful or if I'd backed out or whatever.
But when you fail that hard to provide a good product or service and people ask you for a refund, you give it to them. I've done it cheerfully for accounts up to a hundred dollars in fees even. This is just two bucks, and it's more the principle of the thing than the actual money anyhow.
I didn't just not sell my phone, I wasted weeks of time trying to fight their system to do it, and lost probably a good hundred dollars of resale value due to timing.
Re: Fine, eBay. Here’s your $2. I hope you choke on it.
#35A big problem with casual selling on ebay is you don't know what you don't know until you've already been screwed. I sold some iTunes gift cards and provided the redemption code from the card after I received payment. We both left positive feedback for each other (he already had 18 feedback). A month or so later, the buyer put a chargeback on their credit card, got their money back from paypal, and I had no recourse.…
>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?
Re: Fine, eBay. Here’s your $2. I hope you choke on it.
#36Solution Only use Buy It Now ever. Require Immediate Payment. Not only are the fees lower for Buy It Now than for auctions, but there's no way for buyers to game you. The listing will sit until someone actually pays you.
As someone who uses eBay to buy specific out-of-print books, I vastly prefer the Buy It Now option, as long as the price is reasonable. I'm not really looking for incredible bargains, so auctions are just annoying.
With some items you might not know how much they're worth, but it's easy enough to determine the going price of a used iPhone.
Re: Fine, eBay. Here’s your $2. I hope you choke on it.
#37A big problem with casual selling on ebay is you don't know what you don't know until you've already been screwed. I sold some iTunes gift cards and provided the redemption code from the card after I received payment. We both left positive feedback for each other (he already had 18 feedback). A month or so later, the buyer put a chargeback on their credit card, got their money back from paypal, and I had no recourse.…
Bonanza.com (the site I've been building for about four years now) has become one of the largest non-eBay marketplaces by scooping up sellers like you & the OP. We're now up to 25,000 active sellers and 4 million listings by virtue of having seller-friendly policies.
Admittedly, there is enough gray area in marketplace transactions where determining "right and wrong" can sometimes prove difficult. But I like to think that we start from a neutral POV, rather than the "buyer is always right" mentality that eBay has increasingly gravitated toward.
Re: Fine, eBay. Here’s your $2. I hope you choke on it.
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with that is that they can forward it to a collection agency, whom when told to screw off, replies by screwing with your credit score.
So at that point you repudiate the debt again, this time to the collections agency. If they insist on unilaterally publicly claiming you owe money without any sort of actual proof, take them to court for slander. Clearly the buck stops somewhere , as I can't just call up a collection agency and tell them that bduerst owes me $1 for responding to his HN comment.
The fact that they only offer phone support is not a company doing its fair share to try to connect with me over problems. It's them putting up roadblocks to try to avoid having to deal with me. Given that, I don't feel I have the obligation to attempt to sit through their various roadblocks.
It was honestly far easier and satisfying to just give them the two bucks and then report the facts of my experience onto the internet.
Plus, with any luck someone thinking about selling on eBay in the future will run across this post, think twice, and be saved the trouble I was. So I feel pretty good about that too.
Re: Fine, eBay. Here’s your $2. I hope you choke on it.
#39I wanted to provide somewhat of a counterpoint – I have been using e-bay (Australia) for about 7 years. I sell all kinds of stuff ranging from a broken bookcase for $1, which I didn’t want to haul to the tip, all the way up to a boat for $950. I also run a small business selling items via a website and my e-bay account [1][2].
Overall I’ve found my e-bay experience to be very positive. I’ve only had one person who I suspected of scamming me, when they claimed they didn’t receive the item I posted. The vast majority of users are just normal people looking to pick up a bargain. It helps that some of my items are pick up only and that I am not selling electronics.
Every few years an article like this pops up and I get concerned and start looking at other places to sell my products. What I inevitably find is that no other auction site has the users base that e-bay does, so my items inevitably don’t sell, or the price is significantly lower than what I would get on e-bay. It’s possible to build a better experience than e-bay, but up until now nobody has managed to do it.
Finally, I think what the writer of the article was looking for was an ‘unpaid item dispute’. He needed to open once against the original bidder, and if they didn’t don’t pay within a certain time limit, and then I believe e-bay will refund the fees. E-bay also records unpaid item disputes against buyers and will limit what they can do. [3]
[1] - http://myworld.ebay.com.au/sleemancorp
Re: Fine, eBay. Here’s your $2. I hope you choke on it.
#40I wanted to provide somewhat of a counterpoint – I have been using e-bay (Australia) for about 7 years. I sell all kinds of stuff ranging from a broken bookcase for $1, which I didn’t want to haul to the tip, all the way up to a boat for $950. I also run a small business selling items via a website and my e-bay account [1][2]. Overall I’ve found my e-bay experience to be very positive. I’ve only had one person who I…
OP here. Glad eBay is working out for you! Honestly, there are a lot of tools and useful techniques for sellers to get a positive experience, but they're just hidden or you only seem to learn them after you've gotten burned already. As a seller who hasn't been on eBay for many years though, it's just a very harsh experience filled with hidden pitfalls.
And I was able to submit unpaid item disputes successfully for the majority of the oustanding fees or I'd have been on the hook for closer to $70. However, there was a final $2 that they refused to refund because certain selling fees are un-refundable for some reason, and that's what I got stuck with in the end.