Forum Moderators: buckworks
Anyone else run into this?
I'm having a hard time convincing myself that eBay is a viable alternative at all anymore. Support swears left and right that after this formal review i'll be fully certified to sell but i hardly believe that. I think i'll just be a certified glutton for punishment if i stick around anymore. Whats to say next year when i double my sales again that i won't be flagged as fraud? Especially since i wasn't warned about this requirement or "Feature" in advance while opening and paying for an ebay store!
We do not have the problem you have but we get about 10 questions for every sale. Its time consuming and the sales pale in comparison to our Amazon sales. We keep hoping that someday we will do some respectable numbers on ebay but we are getting tired of waiting. It seems that ebay buyers are only looking for really good deals at firesale prices. We are only selling on ebay as an added channel and not interested in losing money.
I just cant imagine how someone who does thousands a month in sales (did good shipping over seas) gets put on hold because "You hit a sales limit and need manual review".
arggg..
Seems to be eBay = LiquidateBay - Dump all your unsold/refurb/returns and hope to cash out.
I have found I get more "offers" then I do sales, so I think you are right when you say many just want an uber deal.... what is funny is when they find it they are so skeptical of it that 10 questions roll in before a sale.
There is a similar problem I have seen trying to sell stuff on a social networking site. Tons of questions, people calling from who knows where, wanting a discount of a couple dollars or no deal, extended inspection visits with haggling over a couple dollars. Finally figured out that there was something else going on here...
The big point ebay missed, if you raise up selling prices and pay pal selling charges to a whopping 20% in some cases, who pays for that expense? Buyers or sellers?
The good sellers ended up moving, the good buyers are following and what is left on ebay? Not much at all. I would not be suprised if their quarterly results will be way down compared to last year.
"you can't always sell what you list" .... hmmm shold be a rolling stones song maybe? -> you can't always get what you want
Now 90% of my traffic is organic and 10% PPC.
There are some items which cannot be sold on the web site and are much better on eBay. Just have to know which ones. (one item is scrap widgets) which can fetch a nice price if you can find a buyer - eBay does that. You have to research final values so as to not to give your item away and start with a reasonable value. I add a buy it now option of about 20 % higher than start price and almost always sell buy it now.
There is the non paying bidder also - the one who buys but doesnt pay for 10 days after repeated notices. I have no patience for that!
I guess you may pass on the listing fee to the S/H part of the price - I try to do that when I sell scrap widgets
Oh well, may be they will change, their stock is taking a beating and they recently have been taking losses according to their financials.
The only things I found sold on there were cartoon character themed merchandise that was no longer in production, I could end of lines for half the whole and sell them on there.
Apart from that its a waste of time, too expensive.
I still can't list and if i don't sell these quick i end up paying taxes on it all.
I've focused all my advertising/marketing on my website. eBay can stick it where the sun don't shine.
BTW, they "Froze" me because i sold 10,000 dollars worth of stuff last week. Yeah, when you sell big dollar items it ads up. Why would an ecommerce platform FREEZE AN ACTIVE Seller WITHOUT warning to "Verify integrity" even though my feedback shows it.
grrr.. eBay.. i'm so done with you.
[edited by: lorax at 7:37 pm (utc) on Dec. 22, 2007]
my wife sells sports type toys big time - the admin is horrendous, the ebay & pp fees extortionate. also the stream of petty complaints combined with the constant threat of negative feed back is mentally debilitating.
example of recent neg feedback - postman left parcel outside my door & the packet got wet - is this for real?
its a push button society & most buyers' don't realize that matter transporters have not yet been invented or never will be as far as royal mail is concerned.
come the new year - no more ebay - a proper bricks & mortar shop would be a fraction of the hassle.
btw also she sells similar volumes on amazon with without any real problems so is there some kind of of ebay mentality out there?
I sent 2 emails with "What is going on, how can i become a verified seller as support is telling me i need to do before i can list items" and never got a response to those emails, never got a phone call, never got anything but now i can list items.
Moving on indeed. eBay wasn't the core of my overall strategy but to cut off a chunk of my market in the last throws of the holiday season was simply mind boggling.
Its also mind boggling they can verify their concerns without even contacting me or letting me know the findings.
Live and learn i guess
She bid on an item she wanted for a gift to a relative. She though she had it, but, being a newbie, was surprised that she lost to a last-second bid that beat hers by a buck.
But what really steamed her is that the auction winner put the very same item up for bid... just two hours later.
In her view, the site's filled with speculators, buying stuff they don't care about, bidding up prices and then selling to other speculators, who do the same thing. (Just like the housing market, 2001-2006!)
Can't say I disagree with her.
I also suspect that the 2nd chance offer is a great way to shill bid their auctions up.
From a press report Ebay is suffering, fewer bids andfewer people stay on the site anywhere near as long as they used to.
We used to test EBAY about every two years. I don't even do that anymore.
By comparison, I had dinner on Friday at a friend's house who also sells on eBay. His product is light, cheap and ships US Postal Service. His product costs are covered by the $3 shipping charge and he is doing 100,000 items per month. When there is an error - even if it is the customer's error - he refunds the money and sends them the new item no charge. He figures that this costs him about 2% of sales, and he doesn't worry about it.
So the final analysis that I come to is this - cheap, easy to ship items work fine. No fraud, no wrong sizes, no problem.
Expensive, hard to ship items do not work. And yes, there is an "eBay mentality"
As for PPC with my products, it has proven so far to be even more expensive than eBay's ridiculous fees..... but that is another story.
