Below Standard Drop Resulted in 99% Cut in my Listing and Selling limits - Is this Normal?

[salon-1-audio]

I've been selling on ebay since 1986, with thousands of positives, currently at 100%, sales over $1M and last month my limits were 11,000 items and near $150K.  We had a guy return an empty box filled with paper so no refund.  He fought it and ebay refunded him and nicked our rating.  Then had a return go to a neighbors store, by the time we found it ebay had refunded.  Another nick.  And a couple items went out a day late (my fault).  Still no emails or unhappy customers.  We just fell under standard and ebay dropped our selling limits to 140 items and $18K!  After a number of calls to find out if this was a glitch, its apparently not.  How does cutting off 99% of a sellers ability to sell help anyone here?    Every couple hours I'm getting emails when items try to auto-relist that we're over our limit.   Its like getting kicked in the crotch and spit in the face everyday.  For years I used to have a personal ebay representative I could call and now seems like I'm just another number.  No wonder they are losing business. 

[sharingtheland]

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@tri-countypowersports wrote:

My boss started our ebay store many years ago, and I have been in charge of it for the last 10. We recently got a listing program that messed up our handling times, and we had a ton of late packages due to use being closed due to the Christmas and New Years holidays. We were out for 3 months waiting for our rating to go up. Ebay doesn't include handling times when you are on vacation mode, which is total **bleep**. We have almost 100,000 listings and we cannot manually change the times for every single item. It would take us 2 months to do that. Late shipping and returns all count as strikes toward us. Cancelled orders are another one that bit us due to the company we were using not having the correct information provided towards us. It was a huge lesson and we learned and bounced right back, but it did take some time and hurt me financially due to this being my full time job. Sales were down and so were the paychecks. There are rules on here, so just make sure to follow them correctly and you should be fine.

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Always change your handling time when your store is in vacation mode.   As someone else said, you can do a bulk edit; you do not have to revise each listing individually.

When the vacation mode ends, bulk edit the handling time again to restore the original setting(s).  

[dflkj-70]

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@salon-1-audio wrote:

Tracking uploaded on time and late shipment rate are both above standard.  Looks like the transaction defect rate is 2.83 and needs to be 2% or better.  I did learn NOT to cancel a sale a buyer backs out of by showing it out of stock.  This penalizes your account.  

Here's one I just love too.  We sell tested TV circuit boards.  We get buyers (Homeowners, not TV repair techs) using them to 'test' their broken TV.  If the boards doesn't fix it , they claim its defective and return it and buy a different board until they find a fix.  We always let them return them, but we've refunded just the item and had buyer complain, only to have ebay step in an refund the shipping too.  We can't sell without a return policy so we're paying no matter what we do.

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We used to get that with certain parts too...

The really sad part is the buyer's mindset when they're doing that.

They think they're not hurting anybody, to them it's not really stealing.

They think this big bad megacorporation that surely has trillions of dollars in their bank vaults can simply absorb these puny sub $100 losses day in and day out.

These are the same people who feel they are "undervalued" at work (read: not getting paid enough).

So here's my question:

Where did they think the money to "absorb" those losses would come from?

EVERYBODY pays for the cost of consumer theft, even the janitor.

[southern*sweet*tea]

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@rograc-37 wrote:

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@salon-1-audio wrote:

I knew why I was being punished, but why not cut my selling ability by 70% or heck even 90%, but 99%?  They've already taken away all of the discounts.  ebay is saying, "Step up your selling ratio ...and Oh, we're also going to take away 99% of your ability to actually make sales. Fortunately I only had 420 listings running and it's now cut to 140 max.  Just seems a bit excessive.  Next they'll throw in a couple negative feedback for good measure.

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This is the kind of torturous, maleficent behavior that should have eBay's CEO and his dweebs standing in front of a judge. 

No credit given for years of service. Absolutely no management with any sort of backbone. It literally makes me sick. 😖

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Actually, in the not too distant past sellers like this would have been immediately kicked off without a chance to raise themselves out of below standard.  At least now sellers do have a chance, as opposed to none at all.

[charity_scents]

So sorry this has happened to you. Hope you are still on the 3 month defect removal instead of the 12 month. 

Reading various posts is diminishing my hope in any future with ebay.  Can't imagine what the suits are thinking. 

[coolections]

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@salon-1-audio wrote:

You are correct.  It was 1996.  It was the wild west back then and nowhere near the rules they have today.  We could actually leave appropriate feedback for bad buyers.

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You are absolutely correct about that. No rules and sellers could scam buyers and give retaliatory feedback to boot. Thankfully things have changed, maybe not completely for the better, but at least no more wild west.

[grayirongolf]

If eBay would come out with their own crypto currency to use specifically on the site, it would open up a whole new world for eBay.  They could collect transaction fees & get around the consumer protection laws.  Product sold as is no refunds would actually mean something.  These consumer protection laws give buyers the power to rip you off whenever they want especially on the internet.  Give the sellers an option of only accepting the eBay coin as payment. Beats losing out on $1000’s in product & payment to a shady buyer.