Here's what eBay Academy Will Not Tell You

[fbusoni]

Just saw a post by @valueaddedresource about the discontinuation from the German eBay site of the eBay Academy.

What do other sellers think about a "mega thread" that enumerates, in succinct form, the lessons that we all have learned over many years that eBay (for obvious reasons) will not teach new sellers?

I'll start with a couple of my personal favorites.

1.  Read the eBay user agreement carefully.  Pay particular attention to Article 4, which gives eBay extremely wide latitude to render judgements about you and your account and to which you have effectively no recourse, and Article 15, according to which you agree to not hold eBay responsible for anything that goes wrong on this platform, including "glitches," delays, disruptions, bugs, errors or inaccuracies of any kind.

2.  Assume (because the capability exists) that eBay has an "unofficial" file on every seller (and buyer) on this platform.  Other than maintaining good metrics, sellers (apropos of Article 4 above) should comport themselves appropriately at all times.  Artificial intelligence now has the capability to scan and render judgments about everything a seller writes on this platform.  Specifically, sellers need to be extremely careful about (a) their written exchanges with buyers, and (b) the manner in which they respond to negative feedback.  Search these forums for more information.

[hartungcards]

3.  Any anomalies you may experience on the site are due to an annual increase in system activity experienced during this period, which cause processing delays.

[chevymontecarlo88]

4. Read and understand the eBay MBG (Money Back Guarantee) before selling/buying. Being familiar with the reasons why buyers can return items and what financial responsibilities may fall on the sellers. When listing items of value, understand the risk and possible loss.

[bashort]

5. There is no such thing as a no returns policy.

[gurlcat]

I don't know what eBay Academy even is, in fact I don't think I've heard of it before.  I've also never read the user agreement, and if I'm honest, it always strikes me as flippant and condescending whenever that is the suggestion given to someone who posts a question here.  The eBay user agreement would take hours to read (at a spoken pace) and most of it is the kind of 'legalese' writing that invariably leads to numb-reading after a while, where the effort it takes to make sense of the words gets too tiresome and so it turns into skimming. 

I won't ask for a show of hands of who all has read .... meaningfully read .... the entire user agreement, because I don't want to call anyone a liar to their face.  And even if you did read the whole thing, did you memorize everything it said?  Come on.  Furthermore, the user agreement doesn't even cover everything a seller (or buyer) needs to know, and for those questions there are the Help pages, which serve as sort of accompanying literature. 

If eBay ran something like this: You must read all of the UA and Help information and pass a 100 question test including hypothetical scenarios and how to handle them .... before you could sell on eBay, this place would be a ghost town.  And maybe some would like it better that way but I sure wouldn't.  Like I've told many people who asked me about selling here: There are few things simpler than listing and selling an item on eBay (and to me that is what makes it great) ... but there are few things harder than mastering how to avoid every possible thing that can go wrong, including failing to sell.  But to me, that doesn't detract from it being great; that's just a learning curve, and reading a bazillion pages of text before even trying is not going to stick; you have to make mistakes and learn from them. 

For me, discovering this Community was a thousand times more useful than reading the UA ever could have been. 

[fbusoni]

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@gurlcat wrote:

For me, discovering this Community was a thousand times more useful than reading the UA ever could have been. 

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@gurlcat 

I have not read every single word of the UA, but after reading thousands of posts here complaining about all the various injustices and whimsical edicts perpetrated against sellers by eBay, I decided to familiarize myself with its operative sections -- which I allude to above.

Because the two sections (4 and 15) effectively say that sellers have no particular rights on eBay and that eBay can more or less render judgments about sellers as though sellers were mere objects -- and that there is no recourse for sellers in almost all cases -- they are really the only two parts of the UA that one need know about. 

Now, I will be the first to admit that my suggestion (read articles 4 and 15) will likely be ignored, because most sellers do not want to be told in stark language that they are mere tools to be used as eBay sees fit, and that they can be terminated at any time, for any apparent reason. 

But I do find that referring sellers, who complain about the unfairness of life here on eBay, to the two UA sections above saves a lot of time.

Meantime, please share your own pearls of wisdom about selling on eBay.  I know that you have some unique insights.  😊

[gurlcat]

Well as I talked about in that other thread, there ARE ways for sellers to avoid losing their money to scammers even when eBay lets the scammer "win".  That is, eBay will give the seller a courtesy refund.  And I guess the reason it's called a "courtesy" as opposed to g.d. common sense is because of the stated rights-waiving policies you're pointing out. 

I get the impulse to point those out to a furious rage-poster about how eBay screwed them, because I do feel it's kind of abusive or at least disrespectful to come here and dump that sh on us after it's too late for us to help in any way.  And in the worst examples of this, sometimes the unhinged nature of the person is so apparent I'd probably rather they not stay on eBay anyway, so then I don't mind when someone "risks" making them even angrier by telling them they have no rights according to the UA.

What bothers me is seeing someone give that smackdown to someone is only baffled about what happened to them, or at worst really upset, but not bitterly, grotesquely so.  In those cases the UA reference just comes off as cruel to me, and I lose respect for the people who do that. 

Incidentally, I don't even consider "lawsuit talk" inherently bitter or grotesque.  America is an extremely litigious place and so if you look at it from the point of view of someone who's heard of people getting awarded big money for trivial slights, it's not hard to understand why they think they'd have a slam dunk case when they were blatantly scammed, and they have proof, and eBay let it happen anyway.  I guess then it makes sense to inform them of the UA language, but GENTLY, like with sympathy.  I think what so many members here fail to get is this: we have seen a bazillion of these outcries, but each person making them doesn't know that, so they don't deserve the brunt callousness of collective irritation.  Does that make sense?  Not sure if I'm wording it clearly. 

And by the way, despite what the UA says, I have seen posts here where sellers actually filed small claims suits and showed the filing paperwork to eBay ..... and it resulted in them getting their courtesy refund, in exchange for signed affidavits that the sellers would drop the suits, LOL.  Now is that because eBay actually feared the suits?  No I don't think so, in fact the UA probably protects them wholesale just like it purports to.  But I'm guessing that the individual employees (or their supervisors) reviewing such cases decide to issue the refunds purely because the sellers' willingness to go to such effort ... within the legal arena .... is kind of proof that they definitely weren't the scammers in their seller/buyer "disagreements."  This appears especially true when the sellers also filed fraud claims with the USPS -who would do that if they themselves had committed the felony crime?  So such a refund is still a "courtesy", as it's saying basically, "This refund does appear to be the right thing to do, even though it's not your right to demand that we do it." 

[simply-the-best-for-you]

1.  Don't sell anything you can't afford to lose.  

2.  Things change.  You must change with them. 

[tobaccocardyahoo]

If you sell on Ebay, it helps to understand that you are a business and have to behave as a prudent business behaves. Whether Ebay tells you what that is or not. Ignorance is no excuse and even if it was, there are no exceptions made for any apparent poor business practices.

If you are caught, you are punished.

[simply-the-best-for-you]

And to add to what @tobaccocardyahoo  mentioned.  Just pay your **bleep** taxes!  

ETA:  Oh gosh, I didn't realize that very mild word would be bleeped.  Sorry.