eBay Uber-Rant!!

[ReimerFan]

Ebay used to be such an amazing community driven auction site where a buyer and a seller could send each other a feedback rating for their overall experience. Bad sellers and buyers were weeded out, it was not perfect but it made ebay what it is today.

Next - Ebay goes public, owners make a tonne of cash and its not about the product experience anymore its about milking as much money out of it as possible. Fee's went up more restrictions were put in place.

Next - Ebay removes the ability for sellers to leave negative feedback for buyers. Effectively sellers have no leg to stand on, in ebay's opinion buyers can do no wrong and sellers are at the mercy of usually uniformed buyers. By saying uninformed I mean that they don't understand the reproductions of their feedback dsr ratings.

Next - DSR Ratings, micro managing feedback and another way to charge more fees. They word the star ratings so the buyer would think that a 3 star rating would be average yet they ban sellers for a 4 star average. Only the very top get a discount on fee's everyone else pays a lot more.

Next - Introduction of diamond sellers, bulk retail sellers getting an enormous discount selling NIB products where virtually no one could compete with them. Ebay's migration from an auction site to a Azamzon.com like site is in full force. They could care less if they lose the little guys, their system is set up to not have small sellers, it's not worth their time or where they want their business to go.

I used to love ebay, then i liked it, then I was indifferent, now I hate it. These days it should have a warning label stating "use at your own risk, only sell what you are willing to lose". I feel for you, ebay screwed me good too, I had over 4000 sales 99.9% feedback and had the same thing happen to me. After taking over 20k from me in a year you would like that the customer "SELLERS who pay the bills" would be shown more consideration, or at least understanding, but then you would be wrong...

[sjw241]

I've stopped caring altogether. Mind you, I've only been selling on Ebay for 4 years, but I'm just sick of trying to please everyone. My DSR ratings are near perfect (2 @ 5.0, 2 @ 4.9) and I have 100% feedback, but they're just numbers to me now. I recently changed all my listings to CDN$ and RAISED my shipping charges to better reflect my costs. Is it going to hurt sales? Most likely. Are my ratings going to go down? Probably. Do I give a ****? Not one bit.

Fact is Ebay is the lazy mans flea market. Very little effort has to be made to sell anything. Why people get so uppity about everything Ebay is beyond me. It's a horribly flawed system and the ONLY thing it has going for it is exposure. And really, 99% of the stuff on there doesn't need to be "exposed".

The reason I get so "uppity" as you put it is because I feel I do provide excellent service to buyers. They can arbitrarily leave me a low rating with no justification. I charge less than it costs me to ship when you factor in postage, and materials. But they don't take that into consideration. The problems I am having with low DSR is shipping charges to USA. until recently USA residents could mail a card to Canada for I think $1.31 or around there. It costs Canadians $2.06 plus tax (13% in Ontario) so $2.33. Already a dollar more. Then the cost of the bubble mailer, for me 12 cents, the top loader or whatever holder the card is in etc.
So the buyer thinks I am charging too much to ship when in reality I charge less, for their benefit. so now, all these people have left me a low DSR and eBay comes along and says, hey sjw241, you are a poor seller, we are restricting you. They don't look at my auctions and say, hey sjw241, we realize you are doing everything you can to keep shipping costs down for your customers and we appreciate that. We like receiving your fees of 1200-1500$ a month so we will keep you around.
Ebay's answer is ship for free. I don't think they understand sports cards very well. How can I send a 99 cent card out for free. the fee on that sale is 46 cents, and the postage is 2.06. Might as well throw my cards out the window, I'd be further ahead.
the other thing is, my shipping charges are all listed in the auction. If you don't like the price then don't bid, its simple. I have nothing hidden, and i ship with the usual bubble mailer, top loader combination, not PWE's and card board etc.
So if I am "uppity" I apologize but I feel I have a valid complaint with the ebay DSR system. It is seriously flawed.

[Star_Cards]

I'm not too familiar with shipping mostly international but with a lot of unreasonable ebayers here in the states it's not that surprising to see low ratings for shipping. On the other hand, for all of the issues that people complain about ebay just ignoring this does prove that they want to provide a pool of sellers that are conducting business honestly and shipping quickly. It definitely stinks and I wouldn't know what to do if I were without an active ebay account. It does seem odd that they wouldn't eventually let you back on if you are an honest seller that pays hi fees. There are people on ebay doing much worse than shipping things slowing.

[Star_Cards]

Ebay used to be such an amazing community driven auction site where a buyer and a seller could send each other a feedback rating for their overall experience. Bad sellers and buyers were weeded out, it was not perfect but it made ebay what it is today.

Next - Ebay goes public, owners make a tonne of cash and its not about the product experience anymore its about milking as much money out of it as possible. Fee's went up more restrictions were put in place.

Next - Ebay removes the ability for sellers to leave negative feedback for buyers. Effectively sellers have no leg to stand on, in ebay's opinion buyers can do no wrong and sellers are at the mercy of usually uniformed buyers. By saying uninformed I mean that they don't understand the reproductions of their feedback dsr ratings.

Next - DSR Ratings, micro managing feedback and another way to charge more fees. They word the star ratings so the buyer would think that a 3 star rating would be average yet they ban sellers for a 4 star average. Only the very top get a discount on fee's everyone else pays a lot more.

Next - Introduction of diamond sellers, bulk retail sellers getting an enormous discount selling NIB products where virtually no one could compete with them. Ebay's migration from an auction site to a Azamzon.com like site is in full force. They could care less if they lose the little guys, their system is set up to not have small sellers, it's not worth their time or where they want their business to go.

I used to love ebay, then i liked it, then I was indifferent, now I hate it. These days it should have a warning label stating "use at your own risk, only sell what you are willing to lose". I feel for you, ebay screwed me good too, I had over 4000 sales 99.9% feedback and had the same thing happen to me. After taking over 20k from me in a year you would like that the customer "SELLERS who pay the bills" would be shown more consideration, or at least understanding, but then you would be wrong...

I won't tell you that I love everything ebay has evolved into, but as a seller and a buyer (majority selling) the bad transactions are so less frequent than the successful ones. Usually the bad deals are just people that don't pay and I'm not out much of anything and definitely not any product.

[leximo]

I think ebay's strict policy on the shipping cost DSRs was initially designed to force a lot of people into offering free s/h. Anticipating that many of those who did switch to free s/h would factor it in to the starting cost of the auctions they list. So ebay would theoretically win (with higher front-end fees and by capturing a percentage of the actual s/h cost the seller paid to ship the item).

Now that they automatically get that add'l percentage (as of April 19th), it wouldn't surprise me if they modified or eliminated completely the s/h fee DSR. I'm not saying they will, but it wouldn't surprise me if they did, and if they do, I'm sure they would spin it up like they listened to sellers and blah, blah, blah. When in reality, if they keep penalizing people and restricting their accounts, it will ultimately hurt the bottom line. That would be the real reason they'd modify or do away with something that is restricting good sellers from selling. I think they have somewhat boxed themselves into a corner with this one.

One more point about DSRs. It wouldn't be hard for ebay to set the default to 5 stars. It's human nature to not leave the star ratings unless there is something to complain about, so I think the entire system is skewed from the start. In other words, there may be 100 people who were completely satisfied with their purchases from a particular seller and maybe only a handful will actually bother to leave good ratings for those purchases. So when one or two unhappy customers come along and ding somebody (rightly or wrongly), it has a more significant impact on the overall rating than it would if all the other transactions would have been counted as 5-star transactions.

I mean, how hard would it be for ebay to provide a comment to buyers when they are leaving feedback that says something like "If you are pleased with all aspects of the transaction, 5-star feedback will automatically be recorded in these 4 categories. If you are not, please change the rating to reflect your level of satisfaction".

[Star_Cards]

I find it odd to have such an important issue left to be interpreted by buyer who who have completely different rating habits. Some people may go in that a 5 is perfect and if a priority package takes 5 days instead of 3 or 4 they knock down a star. You never know what criteria people use. To me I don't think people should dock stars for the cost of shipping because they know exactly what it is before they even bid. If I don't like the price of shipping I simply will never bid on that sellers item. Seems like they could use a different system rather than having people judge 1-5 stars.