eBay and Me Part I
I sold on eBay for long time and I really enjoyed the community. I really felt belonging there. Quite quickly I became a bronze power seller then silver and finally gold with all the benefits such as dedicated eBay representative. I was quite proud of us.
I got scammed on eBay like anyone else but never for large sum. The best one was when I purchased a New Orleans Style BBQ recipes eBook. I received a one page PDF file of a Google search. That was funny, 99cents for a Google search.
So things were going well for us until…. eBay decided that there was a con artist in every seller. What a big slap in the face. I always agreed on eBay fee increase, but the changes eBay made were terrible. I understand eBay had to protect buyers against fraudulent transactions but eBay totally failed its purpose and in fact eBay made it too easy to help buyers to defraud sellers.
Also, as PayPal is eBay’s sole merchand account and as eBay owns PayPal the situation became very difficult. You get a negative feedback, you get a warning from PayPal, you get two negative feedbacks, PayPal place your account under investigation! But if you do a good job at communicating with your buyers and you resolve issues quickly, there is no problem unless…
Unless, few buyers start using eBay policies at their advantage. In 5 years we had an average of 2 returns per months and they were justified returns or just buyers who made mistakes - we had 100% positive feedbacks on all accounts – not bad at all. We had return policies that were very flexible but limited to 2 weeks and clearly noted in each of our descriptions but after eBay implemented its Buyer is King policies we started to get return requests weeks even months after the item was received and eBay/PayPal accepted the return and refunded the buyers. I told PayPal and eBay that these returns were against our policies and I was told that eBay/PayPal policies overruled sellers’ policies!
The door was open to abuses, the first one was the return 3 months after it was received of a 100″ projection screen that was claimed to arrive broken. Hey it’s possible that the buyer didn’t have time to look at it for 3 months right? The problem is that the screen was written on with permanent marker, definitivelly an artist child who found the screen being an excellent support for its work… Even after sending pictures of the dammaged screen to PayPal we had to refund 100% of what the buyer paid for!
Another good one, we sold a money sorting machine to a lady who returned it without notice 4 weeks later with a note saying she didn’t need it anymore and requested a refund. The poor machine was beaten up so bad by heavy usage that the $9,999 main counter was not big enough to show how much money it sorted. Even with a certified copy of the note and a Police report, we had to give the lady a full refund.
So I decided to try the new eBay by myself when I purchased the touchscreen for the kitchen. I paid, received the screen in perfect condition but complained to PayPal that the touchscreen came broken so bad that it would be very dangerous to return it. It worked, I got refunded! I gave back the funds to the seller explaining what I did and we talked about the new eBay, both of us had the exact same comments to make.
Looking at the financial side, these refunds and fee increase cost us tons of money. Our bottom line on eBay went from 8% to 4.5% in a matter of months.
When I decided to shut down our eBay business, people working with me said they were afraid openning their mailbox in the morning! So leaving eBay was a good call.
