Comments on: Lack of Trust key to eBay’s decline

By: banderscom

banderscom — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 09:54:48 +0000

FIRE DONAHOE!!!

Search the internet for

“Ebay Stockholders and Sellers Calling For Immediate Termination of John Donohoe CEO Petition”

By: Dave Zatz

Dave Zatz — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 14:21:12 +0000

My ebay rating maxed out at around 400 a few years ago, which probably represents only half the transactions I participated in. Due to fraud and annoying people, I gave up. Over the last year, things I’ve needed to “ebay” I’ve brought to an ebay consignment shop. They take a steep cut, but all the problems (and resolutions) are theirs to deal with. It’s worked out well. No muss, no fuss.

By: smorty71

smorty71 — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 13:19:45 +0000

I haven’t used eBay in a couple of years. Had two incidents where I sold working items to people who later tried to claim that they didn’t work. In those cases, the burden was on me to prove the items were in good shape when they shipped. Very tough to do after the fact.

In both cases, the buyers threatened to post negative feedback if I didn’t give them a refund on the items that were listed “as-is” with “no refunds.” In both cases, I took the hit on my feedback rather than cave to someone who was having buyer’s remorse.

I eventually resorted to shooting a video of the products I was selling showing them in use. Those items sold without a problem; however, I wasn’t willing to keep up that amount of work to sell things (not to mention pay all of the listing and PayPal fees).

I am exclusively Craigslist now for both buying and selling. There is a lot less of a hassle, plus you can negotiate the price. Sure, it’s harder to find those A-team Colorforms, but it’s perfect for things like furniture.

By: TechMacro :: (un)Official Daily Tech News » News » eBay Traffic in Freefall, How about User Confidence?

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 08:43:28 +0000

[...] feel uncomfortable too. Jeremy Toeman, Live Digitally, writes about his experience when he decided to post his VAIO laptop to eBay for auction and received no serious inquiries, many [...]

By: Ricky Cadden

Ricky Cadden — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 02:18:18 +0000

I had a similar experience recently when trying to sell my Nokia E90. First of all, simply listing it was a hassle, as I had put a staunch warning that I would *not* ship using Western Union or MoneyGram or similar. It seems as though Ebay’s listing checker thingy took the presence of these keywords to mean that I was trying to sell USING those tools, and warned me to remove them – only, it started with Western Union, and when I’d removed Western Union, then it informed me that MoneyGram wasn’t kosher, either.

What made that more annoying is that each error required me to correct the listing, a process involving at least one more page load, during which several checkboxes and entry points were changed.

Once done, I also got 15 questions, 14 of which turned out to be spammers. I even have 31 feedback, so I’m slightly better positioned than you. The listing cost me $3.25, which isn’t bad at all. However, the biggest problem is that I used Paypal for payment, which means that not only did I have to pay a percentage to collect my earnings, but…

They have this RIDICULOUS new ‘Buyer Protection’ system that I was NOT informed about until after the auction had ended. Basically, your money is placed on HOLD for up to 21 days. It will be released earlier however, once you either get positive feedback from the buyer, or show delivery confirmation that the package arrived. The delivery confirmation *still* holds your money hostage for another 3 days, but the positive feedback releases it within 24 hours.

By the time it was all said and done, I ended up waiting 5 extra days to get $30 less than what the auction ended at for my phone. It would have almost been cheaper for me to just pawn the thing, sadly.