Ah, good old eBay...
Long time top-rated seller, but I walked away some years ago when eBay switched to the "managed payment" model because I knew that put the advantage squarely in the fraudulent buyer's corner. However, a warehouse full of goods and extra time on my hands, I decided to come back.
LOL!
Good old eBay. I've been back two weeks, and have already been scammed TWICE (by the same buyer) and got negative feedback on my first sale because (among other asinine things) a 100% LEATHER jacket "makes a sound" like plastic.
It's a WILSON'S LEATHER jacket, cut from a thick piece of leather (and NOTED IN THE LISTING!)...but she thinks it was "treated with something" that makes it plastic...or something.
She noted that the jacket is black, but that the pictures didn't properly show that. I guess the ENTIRE PARAGRAPH I included in the description, that said EXACTLY THIS, wasn't good enough. She said there's a "hump" in the back when she puts it on, but that I didn't list this as a "defect". (It's not a "defect", lady -- the jacket doesn't fit you). But me not disclosing the "sound" and the "hump" is me failing to list all the defects.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
And the scam? It's a good one. Buyer purchased my item, which I'd recently LOWERED the price for, but ADDED calculated shipping (originally I'd had it listed with free shipping). Cancelled the order immediately, due to "buying it by mistake", waited for the automatic re-list, and bought it RIGHT BACK again, but this time at the new lower price and with FREE SHIPPING (somehow).
Nah. Not doing it. I cancelled the sale (because the buyer requested cancellation, remember?) and blocked him.
Blocked the nimrod with the leather jacket, too. I'm sure I'll take a hit; she'll whine to eBay that my book-length description wasn't enough (or was somehow "deceptive") and demand a return, and of COURSE they'll grant it (they always take buyers' word over sellers). But I'm not willingly participating in a buyer's delusions and poor choices. I sell GREAT products, describe them thoroughly, and take plenty of pictures. I'm not giving in to someone who buys a thick leather jacket and expects it to fit, feel, and SOUND (???) like silk.
BUT since it's my first feedback on this new, years-after-TRS account -- I'm now in the negative.
Good old eBay.
kibble-net
·10 months agoSometimes your first roll at the table is gonna be snake eyes. Statistically, it's all downhill from here.
There's an old expression about starting the day by eating a frog, and then the worst is out of the way.... it sounds like you've eaten two already - here's hoping things improve!
You can't change the fact that there are crazy buyers, just remember it is a numbers game.
candd205
·10 months agoIf I were you, I would finish dealing with the problem sales you have, then abandon this account. Start a new account with 0 feedback instead of a -1
dogtags_biker_bazaar_and_thrift_shop
OP10 months agoI'm going to look into rolling this into my old account. If I can't do that, I'll wait to see if eBay corrects this (unlikely, but I spoke with a customer service rep about it because suddenly, with the negative feedback, I can only offer auction listings -- he pushed the case to the folks who "fix" this, agreeing with me that this was pretty egregious and needed to be changed. We'll see). If they don't, I'll buy a few things and get buyer feedback, and see if that pushes me upward, at least until some of the other stuff I've sold gets positive feedback. I still want to believe that the good people outnumber the bad. Sooner or later the good feedback will, too.
rsoxnation2004
·10 months agoSelling clothes can be trying. But the good sellers and buyers far outnumber the bad ones. My advice is to stick with it. eBay, with all its trials and tribulations, is still among the best places to buy and sell.
dogtags_biker_bazaar_and_thrift_shop
OP10 months agoI'm not going anywhere. As a comment noted above, I'm a glutton for punishment! 🙂
fern*wood
·10 months agoWelcome back! It's a shame your comeback tour started out like this. I agree about using your old ID if possible. You can even change your ebay name if the old one doesn't work for you now.
I rather liked your description, but as others have said many won't read that much and then your Q&As were on top of that. I'd condense it down & add a couple measurements since vintage clothing is usually not the same sizing as modern. I bet that coat just didn't fit.
Good luck, I hope you can reboot.
dogtags_biker_bazaar_and_thrift_shop
OP10 months agoI honestly believe it was a fitment issue also. I have so few non-motorcycle pieces of clothing that I just thought I'd get them online quickly, especially since they're all good quality, good condition pieces of mostly leather; I didn't really figure I'd need to mess with the measurements thing. Lesson learned.
Thanks for the welcome!
soh.maryl
·10 months agoYou lost me at "I didn't really figure I'd need to mess with the measurements thing".
meme6253
·10 months agoI guess you're a glutton for punishment!, Welcome Back!
dogtags_biker_bazaar_and_thrift_shop
OP10 months agoI am indeed.
Momma didn't raise a fool; she raised a masochist!
Thanks!
an-57470
·10 months ago@dogtags_biker_bazaar_and_thrift_shop
Sorry this happened to you.
Some good advice posted to you already re: return policies.
Take some time and fully read the eBay 30-day Money Back Guarantee (MBG) for buyers; it will prepare you for myriad issues one can face as a seller.
At the risk of drawing your ire, you cannot really complain about the “low price†you got for the jacket since YOU accepted the lower offer.
Wishing you better luck with future transactions.
dogtags_biker_bazaar_and_thrift_shop
OP10 months agoNot complaining, per se. Just disgusted that even with a discounted price, this person still felt entitled to make claims against me...especially claims that were patently untrue and actually disputed by the very listing itself. I offer virtually everything I sell with a "make offer" possibility. I'm not averse to giving someone a discount, if they ask for one. But JEEZ...getting a top-hide Wilson's Leather jacket in phenomenal condition for the cost of the average cotton hoodie -- and then leaving feedback like this? I'm not complaining about the price; I'm b*tching about the lack of grace and reason.
chapeau-noir
·10 months agoTry a 30-day buyer pays returns on your items.
dogtags_biker_bazaar_and_thrift_shop
OP10 months agoI didn't know that was an option (I never accepted returns, except on special occasions), but I definitely will. I think most buyers are going to be fair, and fine; it's the scammers (of which there are far too many) and the "entitled" (which is what I think this particular buyer represents) or lazy (which may also describe this particular buyer) who cause problems, and who ruin the experience for smallish sellers just trying to put a little extra in our pockets.
Thanks for the suggestion.
bonanza125
·10 months agoEbay expects you to run operations as a business. Some customers are hard to please. This buyer should have just returned the jacket and you issue them a refund so that way you can sell the jacket to someone else who would appreciate it and be happy with the purchase they made. Clearly this buyer decided to take the route of a negative feedback which having a strong return policy of 30 days w/seller pays for shipping would have helped isn't of having no returns. Yes I understand you want no returns but they can return it anyway if the buyer choose to do so. As far as that second buyer I would have blocked that buyer immediately after the cancellation so they wouldn't have had a chance to buy the item back again at a lower cost. They were playing the price game. I get those types a lot where they have a price point and want things as low as possible which includes wasting time.
dogtags_biker_bazaar_and_thrift_shop
OP10 months agoYeah, it took me by surprise how quickly they moved. I hadn't realized that the automatic relist could present problems (the setting my shipping back to "free" totally took my by surprise) and the buyer snatched it back up before I even realized it had been relisted yet.
Lesson learned. I'm gonna have to be quicker on the block button than I even am on social media!
rugerskick
·10 months agoDo you have any experience(s) on other platforms? Might they be a more hospitable place to do a restart?
dogtags_biker_bazaar_and_thrift_shop
OP10 months agoI don't. I really almost accidentally fell back into this. My hobby led me to find a lot of bargains when looking in the right "spaces", and I realized there are opportunities to turn those into profit. Pairing this with a huge storage shed filled to the rafters with exceptional goods (the stuff I had accumulated for selling during my first -- which was actually my second -- go-round on eBay), I figured it was probably time to start selling again.
I'm likely to look at some of the other platforms, though, now that there are some that are actually competitive with the Bay. Outside of Amazon, nothing was remotely competitive when I was last selling.
mamacassidy
·10 months agoOne thing that has changed since you walked away some years ago is the amount of people who actually read the description.
I read through your description and you very accurately described it. However, there are a lot of words there (you described it as book-length). There are way more words there than I believe the average buyer is going to actually read through. Attention spans have gotten very short.
You might consider highlighting any flaws in the photos and then keep the description short and to the point: "Jacket is BLACK, even though it looks faded in the photos. The jacket has a stain on the sleeve as shown in photos."
On a side note, I highly recommend you switch to "accept returns, buyer pays". Yes, returns are annoying, but they can save you from INAD claims and might have saved you from this negative feedback if she thought she could return it.
I'm sorry you are having to deal with this.
dogtags_biker_bazaar_and_thrift_shop
OP10 months agoI appreciate the advice. I'm almost certainly going to have to look at the returns situation. I'd hoped that with nearly a decade of additional eCommerce experience, customers had gotten better.
They haven't.
And brevity has always been a problem for me. I'm a writer by craft (or was, in another life), so banging out a thousand words is literally a two minute operation for me. I often forget that a thousand words is usually about nine hundred more than the average person is going to bother reading.
Thanks for the reply.
relicpeddler
·10 months agoAfter selling for years don't you still have access to your old eBay account? Why the new account?
dogtags_biker_bazaar_and_thrift_shop
OP10 months agoI probably could have tried to revive my old account, though it's been at least pre-Covid. Also, I established an entirely different business as the "base" for this (mis)adventure, so I just decided to start from scratch and create a new "brand" to go with it.
Obviously that decision may come back to haunt me, at least in the early going, since I had 10k feedback and a 98+ rating on the old account. Now, with negative feedback right out of the gate, I may be months just trying to sell enough to build any kind of useful reputation.
relicpeddler
·10 months agoI would go out of my way to reopen the older account. A veteran established older account with good feedback will make for better sales for sure. Even if the account had some negative feedback that would have fallen off by now. I would get on the phone with eBay and figure it out.
dogtags_biker_bazaar_and_thrift_shop
OP10 months agoThat's a good idea. I may be able to roll this "brand identity" into that old account, if I can still find it after all of these years. I had almost zero negative feedback on there. I'm already so far behind the eight ball (with ONE FEEDBACK left) on this account that I may be months just trying to get un-buried already.
Thanks for the input.
tobaccocardyahoo
·10 months agoIMO Using PayPal for payments was no less to the buyer's advantage than using Ebay Managed Payments.
Credit card chargeback disputes were always the way for a buyer to get their money back when a serious disagreement between buyer and seller had occurred.
dogtags_biker_bazaar_and_thrift_shop
OP10 months agoThe real problem I had with managed payments (at the time) was that I was managing my own payments just fine, but eBay changed the model without any option to keep doing what I was doing. And in the end, the two issues I had were firstly, this one -- that buyers would get whatever they wanted, and eBay would see to it, and we have absolutely no recourse. And the second is that eBay is making a fat profit already, but now they also get to collect interest on our money while they "hold" it until they feel like paying it out. That just rubbed me the wrong way. And I'd done ten thousand transactions by that time; I guess I was just tired of being treated like the bad guy when it was clearly the buyers who were being disingenuous. I chucked it because I was sick of it.
Didn't learn my lesson, obviously! LOL.
tobaccocardyahoo
·10 months agoThere is no change in whether the buyers will get what they want, they always have but it may have required a credit card dispute. Merchants rarely win a "quality of merchandise" chargeback, for example.
As for the holds, that is a trust and safety issue and many new trust and safety measures including holds exist on internet marketplaces. Even PayPal puts holds on disbursements to new account holders.
Your problem, like many online sellers' problem is a resistance to change because change never seems to benefit us.
Other than Ebay International Shipping, there has been nothing new on Ebay which has appeared to help sellers. At best, it is a wash, like Ebay Payments vs PayPal. An I prefer Ebay Payments, just as I preferred Billpoint before Ebay bought PayPal.
dogtags_biker_bazaar_and_thrift_shop
OP10 months agoI have found the eBay payment model reasonable, now (as you noted) that virtually everyone is placing holds. And you're right -- at the time, I just didn't like the sound of it, and didn't appreciate that someone else was going to be managing my money. I had a system that was working for me, and didn't need eBay to come along and wreck it. But it was other things besides just the managed payments. I'd had a growing resentment toward different things within the eBay bubble; managed payments just was the camel-back-breaking straw.
chapeau-noir
·10 months agoVintage can be a quagmire - I've sold it for years and still have some left. Fortunately, the vast majority of transactions go off without a hitch. But the feedback hit - ugh, I'm sorry for that.
dogtags_biker_bazaar_and_thrift_shop
OP10 months agoThe only good thing with having a bad taste in my mouth from previous experience is that I was kind of expecting something like this to happen eventually, so I'm not surprised. I still try not to be so cynical that I believe everyone is bad, but I'm too much of a pragmatist to not realize that the bad ones find places like this and ply their "badness". It's only a matter of time until it finds me.
Would have been nice if it had waited until I had a few positive feedback first, though! LOL.
inhawaii
·10 months agoI fail to see where this was a "scam" vs. just an unhappy customer.
dogtags_biker_bazaar_and_thrift_shop
OP10 months agoI wasn't saying this one was a scam, per se, though it certainly could wind up being so. I don't allow returns (for this very reason!), so she COULD have left the terrible feedback trying to get a partial refund, a full return, or just the leverage to complain to eBay and get her money back. In that regard, it COULD be a scam. But mostly, in this case, I think it's just a customer who bought a used product online, either failing to read the description in full or just not giving a crap, and then deciding that I'm at fault when she doesn't like what she bought.
My listing was very detailed, the pictures were perfectly clear, and I sent her a top-quality heavy (heavy!) leather jacket, for the price of a cheap Chinese windbreaker. And the icing on the cake? She didn't even pay my asking price; she made a low offer, which I nevertheless accepted WITHOUT EVEN COUNTER-OFFERING.
But this is eBay. It's only a matter of time now until she files for a refund, which I will be asked to approve (not like asking me has any effect; they'll approve it anyway, no matter what I say or how right/wrong it is). I'll lose the entire payment, and the jacket; or I'll get the jacket back (with luck) but lose the payment plus return shipping despite that I specifically don't offer returns; or I'll lose the payment plus shipping, and get a jacket that has been destroyed back. Yeah, that's happened to me, too.
Good old eBay.
soh.maryl
·10 months agoYou do know that, if the buyer does not return the jacket (when you send the prepaid return label), you won't be required to refund, right?
And that "no returns" doesn't mean "no refunds"?
richard1rst
·10 months agoAND if he doesn't send it back then you are not charged for the label.
dogtags_biker_bazaar_and_thrift_shop
OP10 months agoWhen I was selling before, I also didn't offer returns. That's mostly because I was a full-time "road" seller, so trying to coordinate getting things back was almost impossible. I'd ship something from Charlotte, and be in Providence when someone decided they wanted to ship it back. It was a pain. So a lot of the "return" stuff is still a learning experience for me. Sadly, yes, I do realize that eBay can (and does, regularly) force refunds. I lost every single time something would come up in that way, which fortunately wasn't a lot but when it was, it was frustrating and fueled my disgust with the site.
One dispute I had was with an absolute scammer, who claimed that the sewing machine he bought from me was broken and unusable. I had shipped a virtually brand new machine, packaged to withstand a direct nuclear strike. He just got it and thought he could open a case and I'd give him some of his money back. When I refused to play ball with his scam -- and that's what it was, complete with email exchanges making it clear -- he took the case to eBay. EVEN WITH ALL OF THE EVIDENCE, including dozens of pictures I took during the packing process, eBay gave him a full refund, though he had to ship the product back. I got back a machine that looked like it had been removed from the package and run over with a tank. LITERALLY, this guy busted this thing into pieces. Of course I told eBay, and of course it meant NOTHING. The one truth I know (or at least did, unless it's somehow changed) is that a buyer could murder a bus load of eBay employees, and they'd still refund. This particular go-round is actually my THIRD on eBay; the first was as a small but "successful" seller as well, and the second was fully Top Rated Seller (they hadn't had that program the first time around) -- and in both previous experiences, eBay would ALWAYS side with the buyers...seller be damned.
The worst mistake eBay ever made was taking away the ability of sellers to leave negative feedback for buyers. I was there for that one, too, and pitched a fit about it then. But again, eBay does what eBay wants, sellers be damned.
Good old eBay.
soh.maryl
·10 months agoI'm with you on this one. Buyer just plain doesn't like it. Most scammers scam to gain something, usually money. What does that buyer gain with this scenario? You get the jacket back to sell again, hopefully to a buyer who reads and understands the description.
chapeau-noir
·10 months agoThis is a bummer - it's a vintage leather jacket with a blouson styling so of COURSE it puffs out - it's supposed to. You were very clear about how much work it needs, and I wonder if they even comprehended that. She should have just asked to return it.
dogtags_biker_bazaar_and_thrift_shop
OP10 months agoI don't offer returns, but oddly enough if she'd approached it properly I would have accommodated. I don't want people keeping something they're not happy with, especially when I know I can sell it without issue to someone else. I'd rather take the small shipping hit than the big hit I'm gonna take when she escalates this.
But she didn't even message me. And then within her feedback she offered the most asinine explanation(s) for the "problems". Just rubbed me the wrong way right out of the gate. There's a certain "entitlement" mentality that attaches here, that I can't quite put my finger on but definitely gets my hackles up. To look at the care I take in my listings, the price I charged for a jacket of that quality, etc., and not even attempt to find a reasonable resolution before going straight to calling my listing trash and acting like I've somehow scammed her -- I just don't feel like accommodating her AT ALL now.
soh.maryl
·10 months agoI hesitate to ask this of an experienced seller, but you do know that "No Returns" doesn't mean "No Refunds", right?
If a buyer opens an item not as described case, your "No Returns" stance goes out the window per the MBG.
dogtags_biker_bazaar_and_thrift_shop
OP10 months agoYeah. As I mentioned in a reply above, I've been bitten by this policy a few times. I guess I just still expect better of people, and I'm a stubborn old coot who, if I'm gonna take a hit, I'm gonna take it while I'm fighting back in whatever little way I can! LOL
At least "no returns" feels like I'm fighting, I guess. Kinda like my lengthy descriptions.
soh.maryl
·10 months agoSorry -- don't understand why you'd be fighting back at a well-publicized rule like the Money Back Guarantee for buyers. And why would you continue using a venue that you've found to be so disagreeable?
hartungcards
·10 months agoI think willingly participating in a buyer's delusions and poor choices is one of the things we all implicitly agree to in the User Agreement.
dogtags_biker_bazaar_and_thrift_shop
OP10 months agoI'm sure if it's not in there yet, it will be soon enough.
Seems participating in delusions is a requirement for functioning in life these days. MY delusion is thinking that somehow the world will wake up from all of that!