So due to travel coming up later in February, I scheduled a time away to start on February 12 (still gives me a few days to pursue payments and close out unpaid items, and a little time for items to arrive to deal with any fall out, should anything go wrong with a sale).
On the first 5 days of my vacation I'll have wifi, so dealing with problems will be simple enough, then it will be very intermittent to deal with an internet connection (and plus I don't want to pay to use my phone abroad if I can avoid it... my carrier wants $17 a day to access data services while abroad).
In January I had a massive amount of requests to make up special packages containing a significant number of low value items (to the point the customers did not want to pay postage one each item, or haggle for the price on several individual items).
My latest custom request is to combine a few items to ship to the United Kingdom (for which eBay was charging my customer $16 times three and not letting him request an invoice). I sent him the link of the item and he claims the link is putting him back to the main eBay page. My only thoughts are maybe because he's in the UK and your phone defaults you to the site you are to be using for your country (at least they always direct me to the Canada eBay site on my phone), he's having issues accessing the item.
I followed up on this by telling him what the title was, it's the only thing that will come up in search if you put in all words, so it's easy enough to find. His last message at 9am eastern time was "don't forget about the time zone difference". Well fair enough if we're exchanging messages in the evening, but this was 7 hours ago for which it was daytime in the UK most of this time, and I reply within 2 minutes when I'm working online, so I don't see what the time difference has to do with it when I'm replying within a couple of minutes of each message... he's the one that's taking 12 hours to get back to me on each message... which I find particularly annoying, because if you want to buy something and you're having issues, and the seller is very quick to respond, take the time to sort these issues out (that is if you actually want to invest the time to get your item).
Most of my custom listing buyers will have a few message banter with me as we are often both online at the same time, so that sorts things out easily. (Even the custom listing buyers that I have from the UK are pretty quick to get back to me). So to have to wait a day to respond to a message that results in no progress is particularly irritating. The last time I had someone take a day between each reply, after I week I cancelled their custom listing and ignored all their messages. Sales are good, but I don't need the aggravation of dealing with someone who's difficult from the start.
Because I'm planning time away and trying to "wrap stuff up this week" before I close my store, I have little to no patience for anyone who's a little bit difficult. Generally I just reply to messages and forget about it because I have lots going on. But this past week I've been a bit impatient to resolve issues.
Anyway looking forward to my store being closed... I have big plans to get my auctions ready for when I come back (and have uninterrupted time on my computer each night next week to do this). I have offline software, so I can create the listings and launch them when I come home. I kinda of like the idea of a "break" from eBay.
C.
