After more than 20 years selling on eBay for both myself and at work I can say bottom feeders are not new but what is new is the follow up nasty messages after you refuse an offer.
Lately though even the bottom feeders are absent here, with 6 accounts and over 6,500 items listed at work we haven't had so much as a single view in over a month, all on items that were selling regularly until about March or so. It turned off like a switch.
I started browsing and listing on FB Marketplace about a year after it started, about 6 or 7 years ago, from the beginning it was pretty much as wasted effort. I gave up there over a year ago after not having sold a single thing the whole time. I listed cars, trucks, bikes, motors, appliances, or anything too big to ship. I got a few dozen offers at best and most were $20 offers on $500 items and such.
As a buyer there its no better, I've come to believe that most list there for sport and the items don't really exist. After all these years I've only had one person reply and actually sell something.
What I get lately is people that expect you to bring the item to meet them somewhere, even if that item is a farm tractor, or truck engine. I just had someone who wanted me to meet me at some police station so they could 'take a look at' the 6ft long chest freezer I had listed.
CL used to be the better platform but lately there's no buyers there either.
I listed and sold a lawn mower for $50 about 8 years ago. The buyer responds to an ad for another one I had listed, then shows up with the last one he bought that looked like it was left out in traffic for week, wanting to trade it in even up. He told me it quit running after only 7 years and he feels I should replace it. He was dead serious. It rates right up there with people who want to return items the next day after a yard sale because they changed their mind. I never knew that had become a thing but we gave up on yard sales here because of it. What's worse is that they try to return things you didn't even sell.
At work we've had buyers do the same thing, more than a few times we had buyers return items they bought from somewhere else. Items we don't even deal with. I had a someone who bought a vintage bicycle part return a 55lb box of new cookware complaining that it wasn't 'non stick'. The package showed up without warning, then they automatically refunded them $22 that they paid for the bicycle part. Then they started the string of nasty emails because they spent $180 for the cookware they returned.
I offered to ship her back the cookware if they'd pay the shipping up front but they refused saying I stole their stuff. They shipped it to the wrong seller for a return, not me, then filed for a refund on an item they kept but it was our fault somehow. It also wasn't a buyer with low feedback they had close to a thousand feed backs, all as a buyer, so they weren't new to buying. Looking back at that transaction several years later I see that buyer is no longer a registered user.
We broke up the set of cookware and sold it in pieces which took over a year to get rid of. None of it had ever been used. All high end stainless steel pots and pans.
While selling that stuff, the number of psycho messages and low ball offers were insane. We listed them for 1/2 of what they sold for on that companies website, and got offers of $10-$12 on items that retailed for $150+. It reinforced the reasoning why we don't generally deal with those items.
I cringe anytime we do have to list housewares and we do not sell anything wearable.
After having half a truck load of 'universal fit' baseball caps that we sold for $10 each plus shipping about 12 years ago and having almost every fifth one get returned because it didn't fit for some reason we just threw the rest in the shredder. None of us could figure out how a one size fits all hat could not fit so many people and they were name brand inventory from a major retailer that had gone bankrupt, so they weren't cheap hats and had retailed for $22 each at that store. We also had name brand sneakers, nearly all were very small or very large sizes, we had several buyers return sneakers saying they were the wrong size, they bought a size 14 but they wear a size 8. yet they got a refund. I had a guy return an 8x11" single page tri-folded sales brochure for a 1950's tackle manufacturer because there were folds in the paper. It sold for $4 with free shipping. We had sold over 40 others and they shown folded and in the original envelope in the ad.
From my experience, its the lower priced items that create the most problems, as well as the biggest discount items. If your selling a $300 item for $50 as clearance its almost a guarantee someone will return one for some senseless reason.
It forces my work to put a strict policy of no returns, no refunds. The last straw was someone who returned a used item after nearly two months saying they it wasn't what she expected. It was a new old stock steering wheel for a 40 year old tractor that we sold as being either new with shelf wear or possibly used. It was black, they're all black. In her complaint she said she ordered a red one. Her messages from the start made no sense, she was talking as if it were a piece of clothing not a steering wheel for a tractor. But she returned a steering wheel and got a forced refund.
The blocked list got a little longer. She had won it on an auction, it sold cheaper than any others had out of about a dozen or so of them, and she outbid 9 others for it.
These sort of issues didn't become a thing until smart phones became the norm. I think looking at a 3x5 picture of something or scrolling through lists of ads that way has a lot to do with it.
The buyer side of me never uses my phone for eBay, its just to small of a view, and my phone is huge. I need to see it on a full screen and read the ad and description, something many ads no longer have. In recent years, a good many of the issues we had at work were with buyers who did not have eBay accounts, they found the listing through a google search, got directed to ebay and just hit BIN never looking over the ad or knowing if its new or used. Those sorts of purchases have been problematic and quite a few seem to turn into returns filed for at the 29 day mark.
Best offer items that sold for lower offers also tend to be problematic so they have now been mostly eliminated on all items we sell at work.
We got either no replies to best offers that were accepted, or items got returned for no reason or simply buyer remorse.
evry1nositswindy • seller since 2013
