I am a 20+ year life-time ebay account holder with excellent feedback history. I have purchased cars, major high-end appliances, collector items, electronics, commodities and hundreds of other items on eBay. Overwhelming majority of which were good smooth transactions and only a very few problematic ones. I had to learn to really read and absorb listings in a literal way as it was our only communication between seller and buyer. I also had to learn to be responsible, tolerant, and focused upon my performance as a buyer to encourage good transaction result from the seller. eBay is a platform of contract offer/solicitation whether it be in an auction, BIN and/or special terms. I will confess now that I am a retired small manufacturing business owner (brick and mortar type) . I have held many positions from estimator, spec writer, engineer, purchasing agent, salesperson, owner/employer and contract manager. Now my problem: As an eBay buyer, I’m noticing more BIN sellers are including free shipping which I consider a good sales tool. Convenient quick economical shipping services are an important element to my purchase choice. I also consider my shopping time to make that choice as valuable. My concern is this: there seems to be a lot more sellers who list free shipping and they offer this free shipping as the more attractive quick shipper Priority Mail - which works great for smaller items that can be flat rate. However the actually ship some slightly larger items via a much cheaper (and time consuming) UPS Ground method claiming sold items cannot be fit into a flat rate USPS PMail box. Most of us buyers know that most any item could still be shipped PMail, it just wouldn’t be flat rate and probably fairly expensive. I recently had a TRS seller ask for a change after my purchase of a light bulky hand tool that was listed as free 3 day PMail shipping. I had no objection to changing from USPS to UPS (per seller’s request for the large box reason as stated above) but I still wanted the 3 clay shipping I paid for. This all happened within a couple hours after my purchase and our communications were polite and respectful up until I communicated that I still wanted the 3 day shipping no matter whomever he chose to ship. (Seller proceeded to cancel my order with Twitterish vulgar, profane name-calling language saying I was hard to deal with and has had enough of me. I’m not a milk-toast but I was really blind-sided by his offensive nature - by someone I’m buying something from. I really think he thought I was being unreasonable by my expectation that it would be 3 day shipping classification) Back to the problem at hand: Seemed to me seller was searching for an excuse to cancel because this switch-shipping thing wasn’t working out for him and it would end up either costing him more $$ for shipping if the listing was honored or for neg feedback if not. I thought that was an odd response so I revisited his listing days later (listing said he had more than 10 available) and there was the Free 3 day PMail shipping again for the listing at the same price as I had paid. Even though I was told PMail was a problem that the seller can’t fix. I Only thing I can do is leave accurate feed back which would not be positive. Being a power-seller and TRS no neg feedback could be left for 7 days. This leads me to believe this switch-shipping thing has become a grift of sorts and predatory on the buyer(s) who would just like to buy per the listing terms without having to waste time enforcing it. The 7 day wait only protects the seller knowing most of us spoiled Americans will forget about it. EBay likes to promote itself as a small business advocate, but it is still very bad business to protect sellers who want to be business people but take no responsibility to actually learn good business ethics and skills. Or is eBay merely a place to rent a stall? It’s really destroying what is left of the eBay integrity. EBay needs to earn their commissions by being the owner, mentor, regulator, advocate and enforcers of their whole small business support platform (if that’s what they claim to be). Can’t act like a free-form garage sale and expect to be called a legitimate business. They are different things. Anyway, how is this switch-shipping thing being addressed and corrected? ...and I say feedback is only good or bad if you can give it voluntarily, when it’s relevant, and without solicitation for it or protection from it.
... View more
