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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.

#51

Post by ckrailo »

excerionsforte wrote: post #46
DanHulton wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

So wait, you basically got around $68 back and you posted this blog post ABOUT losing less than 5% (around 3%) from a failed transaction? Whereas there are other people who have legitimate complaints having lost >50% of their item value along with fees. Wow..... I really do want to understand the rationale behind this. Explain.

I think he did it for all the time wasted and dealing with such a horrid experience on top of the $2. It's also opened up a discussion here where people have had even worse experiences. I think it's a great discussion to have.

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

#52

Post by tlb »

Coming into a market as a new seller is always hard. The established merchants have already figured out who the thieves are, so the thieves generally target the new sellers. The established merchants don't want new sellers there, so they elbow them out in various ways.

Your experience would also be bad the first few times selling at a flea market or a street corner. Only with a fair bit of experience can you get your profit margin above zero.

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

#53

Post by mcantor »

callmeed wrote: post #42
wbharding wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You run Bonanza? Cool, I have a bill for you. 2 years ago I caught a lady selling handbags (that she didn't really have) from your site. I caught her because she was having people pay through an account with our service (nextproof.com). Guess who had to eat the chargeback fees? I did Guess who had to call other people, inform them the handbag they ordered as a Christmas gift was bogus, then listen to them cry? I did…

Wow. It never occurred to me that when you provide a service like that, someone could use it to literally ruin Christmas.

That is heavy.

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

#54

Post by Adirael »

damncabbage wrote: post #49
luke_s wrote: post #39

I 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…

http://gumtree.com.au is on the rise for things like your bookcase, but I agree, the market on eBay is much larger.

That's eBay's property too.

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

#55

Post by mcantor »

hkmurakami wrote: post #48
admiralpumpkin wrote: post #31

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.

Speaking of buy it now, I find it moronic that the buy it now button disappears when even one bid has been entered for the item. This weekend I bid for an item, then 1 hour later decided that I wanted to pay the 10% extra for buy it now, discovered to my dismay that the buy it now option was gone, thought that the seller had manually removed it, got annoyed and retracted my bid, then saw the buy it now button come ba…

It's to incentivize buyers to Buy It Now.

If you know that Buy It Now disappears as soon as someone bids, then you're more likely to Buy It Now because if you don't Buy It Now, you can't buy it later; you can only bid on it later, and then you might not get it. So if you want it, eBay wants you to Buy It Now.

Buy It Now.

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

#56

Post by nym »

wbharding wrote: post #37
jeffyee wrote: post #24

A 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…

You should work with Brian Armstrong to allow sellers / buyers to use bitcoins on the site. The advantage is that bitcoin does not allow chargebacks. Their interface is very close to PayPal, and makes it much easier to get started with.

http://coinbase.com/

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

#57

Post by tptacek »

micro-ram wrote: post #50
bduerst wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, how eBay has fought Craigslist tooth and nail over the years.

eBay now owns a stake in Craigslist http://www.craigslist.org/about/press/ebay.stake

It's a hostile stake, isn't it? They bought it from a former principle, and Craigslist has been trying to dilute the stake away.

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

#58

Post by mcantor »

mindslight wrote: post #43
DanHulton wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The choice you made was between the two options they gave you. Either outcome is part of their system, and perfectly fine by them. There was also third option wherein you notify them that the debt is invalid because no services were rendered, and that it is not your responsibility to convince their systems and processes of that fact.

This is true, but who has the time and energy to fight every stupid Kafkaesque battle like this?

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

#59

Post by excerionsforte »

ckrailo wrote: post #51
excerionsforte wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So wait, you basically got around $68 back and you posted this blog post ABOUT losing less than 5% (around 3%) from a failed transaction? Whereas there are other people who have legitimate complaints having lost >50% of their item value along with fees. Wow..... I really do want to understand the rationale behind this. Explain.

I think he did it for all the time wasted and dealing with such a horrid experience on top of the $2. It's also opened up a discussion here where people have had even worse experiences. I think it's a great discussion to have.

Realistically, how much time did he waste over the benefits of the actually selling the item to someone who pays for the item. You take a risk when you enter into a contract without knowing what you are doing. How bad was the experience really? He said he got back MOST of what he wanted, but it appears that he needed to get $2 more in order to close this case, but they would not refund an unrefundable $2, that I would bet is told to you when you hit the confirmation page.

The OP goes to the extreme length saying to never sell on eBay, which is a crap response considering what he got back. eBay is a reasonable place to sell products to legitimate customers. Bad experiences exist everywhere, but it is not the overwhelming culture the OP makes it out to be. The generalization of his "bad" experience is not reasonable, so I'd like to know his rationale for doing that.

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

#60

Post by nym »

benguild wrote: post #8

Yup, I've been writing about how eBay's gone to shit on my blog. Furthermore, between PayPal and eBay's fees, it's like 10% of your sale price now! … Better just to sell via Amazon and use their fulfillment service.

Pretty sure you can still get charged back with Amazon.
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