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Eh. Writing a letter to eBay is
like asking your dog to type up your emails for you - you can ask all you
want, but if you get an answer it won't make any sense.
The problem as I see it is more like this
-
Both buyers and sellers can "retaliate" with the
system as it is - it's a level playing field.
But too many buyers want the "nanny state" - big
business, big government, mommy & daddy, whatever - to hold their hand
for them and tell them what's okay to buy, so they don't have to have the same
responsibility they would say, if they bought in person at a flea market, to
know how to tell real from fake, to know what's too good to be true usually is,
etc. They just can't handle a level playing field, and most don't
understand that a neg or two on a buying account doesn't hurt you, because once
you get some feedback built up no one looks at the percentage or how many negs
you have. They'd rather be able to just neg willy nilly, blame the seller
for everything from their monitor color being off a bit to the post office
misrouting the package, and not have to stop and consider the consequences of
their actions. Even though in today's eBay a seller with more than 2 negs
in 30 days can have his account restricted even if the negs are retaliation from
deadbeats.
eBay, now that it's a public company, needs to
grow, so it can't afford to let us sellers tell those people to pound salt and
go to Wal-mart - so they make it harder on us. They have simply accepted that a
large percentage of buyers are idiots who need a nanny to hold their hand.
>From the buyer's aspect, I personally find it insulting, but having been a
seller myself for a long time I know there's a lot of people out there that are
still a few IQ points short of being even mouth-breathers. Not everyone
can help being stupid, and their money is just as green as anyone else's,
so...
Of course what they miss is that most sellers are
also buyers - and all sellers are their actual customers - and the harder it is
to sell, the more will leave, never to return. With each seller who
leaves, taking a unique line of items with them, more buyers leave as they can't
find those unique items any more. And because you can essentially walk
away from ebay without closing the account, the result may not be noticed for a
long time.
But I have read their goal is to slim down into an
upscale online shopping mall with a set number of high volume retailers.
Which is fine, except when I want new made in china crap, I go to Wal-mart,
Harbor Freight, or the shopping mall. Not eBay. Even CDs and DVDs..
I go to Amazon, where anything over $25 the shipping is free, and if I buy
used/below cost from one of their marketplace sellers, I pay like $3
shipping on the average item. So if they really want to become that online
mall I wish them luck - I sure won't shop there.
There are about a dozen alternatives for those who
want to sell via online auction and it's just a matter of evaluating which
is best and starting accounts at all of them, for the day that Amazon or
Microsoft (or even Google) decides to go after the collecibles sellers eBay is
screwing, and rather than develop their own brand new site, just buys up one of
the existing ones.
From what I have gathered, Overstock.com is a waste
of time; they don't support the auction side because it competes with the retail
side, and it's done nothing in 3 years. (Their motors section consisted of
a used K-car and a boat trailer when I looked at it). Ioffer looks nice,
but is full of fraud - people with made in china fakes of things like high end
purses, electronics, and so on. And their customer service makes
eBay look good, which I didn't think was humanly possible, your account can just
dissapear for no apparent reason and that's that, there's nothing you can do
about it.
Sites that look good and don't have much bad
said about them include ecrater.com and onlineauction.com. OLA has a
good motors section, they're cheaper than eBay at $8/month for unlimited
listings and sales, but they run around 1/16th the total listings eBay
has ePier.com looks nice, but is too small, and the one listing I
tried there I couldn't even find myself to look at. But I do like their
name, if you're all wet in eBay climb out on ePier and dry off.
Bill K.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, March 21, 2008 10:47
PM
Subject: RE: [FWDLK] Those of you who
sell on eBay
I made
a suggestion once to eBay.
- To
prevent retaliatory negative feedbacks, once the buyer posts feedback, the
seller can no longer post feedback. The seller should only post feedback
based on the buyer?s payment. The seller has plenty of time for feedback
while the part ?is in the mail?. I hate it when the seller withholds
feedback until he gets a positive from the buyer.
- Also,
the sellers and buyers feedback scores should also show their feedback as a
?buyer? and as a ?seller? separately.
- Sellers
should be able to restrict buyers with a ?buyer feedback? score below a
certain percentage from bidding, say 98%.
Dave
Homstad
56
Dodge D500
-----Original
Message-----
From: Forward
Look Mopar Discussion List [mailto:L-FORWARDLOOK@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Bill K.
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2008 1:03
AM
To:
L-FORWARDLOOK@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [FWDLK] Those of you who sell on
eBay
May be
interested to know eBay's planning major changes besides the fee increase that
starts on the 20th. (yes it's an increase, the fee they charge when your
item sells was raised as much as 60% of what it was before, while the fee to
list it drops very little).
The
subject of eBay is a huge can of worms in itself, but I did want to pass on
that a lot of people are boycotting this week 2/18-2/25 mostly because they
plan sometime in May to remove the ability to leave negative or neutral
feedback for buyers. It seems that they've deemed "retaliatory" negative
feedback by sellers a problem - even though if anything it's more a problem
from bidders, particularly those who choose not to pay for the items they
win.
They
will also change how things show up in searches - everything will go to what
they call "best match" and be sorted by who has the best DSR rating - those
stars that you see now on the feedback page. Except that when you
click on them as a buyer, it comes up where 3 = acceptable, 4 = excellent, and
5 = beyond excellent - those aren't the exact terms, but they all work out in
that manner, so as to lead the bidder to mark someone with 3's or 4's on a
perfect transaction. But the standards they hold the seller to
don't match the ratings scale - if your average rating as a seller is
less than 4.5 in any category, you're considered bad and will drop to the
bottom of searches. Which can only take one ticked off bidder mad
because he got a speeding ticket this afternoon or whatever else, if you don't
sell enough things over a 30 day period.
And,
they already have a deal going where if your feedback stats are less than 90%
positive over 30 days they can restrict your ability to sell things.
Neutrals count against that percentage also - only on eBay is neutral the
same as negative. But the stated goal of John Donahoe, the new CEO, is
to eliminate the flea market nature of eBay - they seem to want to turn it
into another Amazon.com, only a half-assed version, rather than remaining an
entity with virtually no competiton. If I owned any stock in eBay, I'd
dump it now, the way this is going in 12 months it will be more valuable as
toilet paper.
Since a
lot of us on this list use eBay, I just wanted to share in case their
announcement email never made it to you, into a spam filter or just never
turned up. There's lots of places on and off eBay you can check out to
find out more about it. So far about 98% of the people who've become
aware of it are pretty upset by it all. When you get into the
details of it, it's mystifying to try to understand why they would do
this. It would sort of be like if in the early 80s Chrysler had started
building mid-60s Imperials, New Yorkers, Furys and Monacos again instead of
the K-car and minivan.
If
anyone needs to know more, drop me a note off list and I can send you some
links to visit to check it out, along with some alternatives to
try listing things with -
Bill
K.
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