Like a lot of you, I've been troubled and stressed by the diminished traffic and increasing fees on Ebay. Despite its quirky shortcomings, though, I like the personal contact Ebay affords over other platforms, and one of my selling accounts in particular has many endearing buyers whom I've worked with for years.
To do my part to try to get Ebay healthy again, I have been TRYING to check here before buying almost anything lately, and I've been trying to make my purchase here if all things are equal. I've even been checking for dry grocery goods and/or looking for good deals on gas cards so that an Ebay seller can get some of the "business" associated with my everyday expenditures. Rather than worrying that I'm lining the pockets of top Ebay brass, I frame it to myself as trying to give another downtrodden seller a little boost in the form of traffic, a sale, a little REVENUE.
BUT--the issue I keep running in to (that makes me abandon shopping carts right and left)--is the crazy per-item shipping that many, many sellers have on their small, multiple-quantities-available items. For instance, today I needed a bunch of cabinet knobs for a project. I selected a style to put in my cart at least three times. Each time I would check the price of the same knob at Lowe's, make sure the Ebay option was competitive, load 12 of them in my cart, only to be faced with a $50 shipping charge. In each case, the shipping on the first knob was something like $6, which was fine, but then $4 or so was added for each subsequent knob, even though all 12 of them would easily fit in a small flat rate box or 15 oz 1st Class bubble mailer. And these were not priced-below-retail knobs--each one ended up being a good $4 over what I would pay at Lowe's, HD, Ace or whatever.
How about you all? What gets in the way of YOU patronizing other Ebay sellers when you go to buy your staples or run-of-the-mill items? Are you just exasperated enough with Ebay corporate that you don't bother, or do you have the same pangs that I do and find yourself wanting to (try to) bolster Ebay by shopping here yourself?
