eBay

prettywoman-2012 · ‎09-18-2020

Apparently, none of OURS (us - meaning, sellers on eBay). Time and time again, my listings have the handling time altered from the usual 1 day to 4 days, by invisible hands. I only discovered this when editing a listing for another reason, this morning.

Similarly, the FREE shipping issue - I discovered it was added to a listing of mine, an older listing - not on this account - without my knowledge. How did I discover it? Because that item came up for being eligible to "Send an Offer" to potential buyers who have it on their watch list. When I opened that Send an Offer window, it showed the correct BIN price + Free Shipping.

Same invisible hands at work, as I never offer FREE anything that I would then charge a buyer by artificially inflating the price to cover my shipping cost.

This is against FTC regulations, although rampant on eBay.

The regulations spell out that offering any goods or services as "FREE" which is not actually completely FREE, is a violation of the law.

It is just that the entire eBay system is built around this deceptive practice, because eBay corralled sellers into (strong-arming would be a better expression, perhaps) doing this, if the sellers want their items get preferential display of their listings in Cassini the AI search engine. However, doing so as if this would not be a great deal, or nothing to fret about, does not make this practice right.

PW👀🙄🐿

prettywoman-2012 · ‎09-24-2020

Hi vintage-car-magazines
You are asking, "Are there any instances where FREE shipping is legitimate?"

I am assuming you meant to ask, "Are there any instances where advertising an item with FREE shipping is legitimate?" That is an excellent question! If that is what you were wondering, then the answer is YES. If you pay for it out of your pocket, and the shipping was not first added to your listed item price, you can honestly call it FREE shipping. The point is, you may set your price the way you like, but calling something FREE that is not FREE would be against the law.

At southern-sweet-tea: My apologies, I did not have time to answer everyone, but like your question, too. You were speaking of business costs, and said nobody would be successful in business if they sold everything at the cost they obtained the item and did not add operational costs to it, to arrive at the retail price. I don't see any law prohibiting the adding of operational costs to the wholesale or purchase price of an item, or to the price of an item that has been in your attic for 50 years. The issue at hand is not, whether a seller can or cannot set his retail price according to business expenses. The issue is to take out (any) part of the added costs and - in order to get some benefit, such as increased quantities being sold - ADVERTISE that part of the total cost to buyers, as FREE.

With an example, say you regularly visit garage sales as a vintage seller (or: purchase items in bulk at a wholesale price). As it happens to be the case, for the sake of this example, you live on 5 acres and have 4 Norton buildings to store your items, with a rather complicated inventory system, each item individually bagged, supplied with a sticker that carries the inventory number of that item, you have a software established for registry and employ 2 people who work for you, because you are either too frail to climb ladders when you sold something, or want to add something to a shelf, or, because you enjoy the hunting / negotiating part of your business more than dealing with packaging and shipping stuff.

This means, you will have business expenses like mileage (gasoline), food, maybe hotel / motel bills, car repairs, utilities to run the Morton buildings (and your home office), pay the employees, printer cartridge, office supplies, etc. You can add some or all of these costs - broken down to per item amount - to your retail price of a widget, as long as you feel your widget will still have a competitive price. If we would strictly focus on vintage items, which often involve sort of a "treasure hunt," as in frequenting auction houses or traveling the country, then you might find something for the 12 bucks that is actually worth 120.00 (or more). There is no law that prevents you from listing it online or selling it in your brick-and-mortar store for 1,200 if you wish.

Additionally, most online marketplaces allow for the adding of a handling cost. For Mom and Pop operations, this should cover some unusual handling expenses (again, making sure your price is still competitive when compared with others selling the same or very similar item). If you, however, would pick out any one of the above added price-component and use it for false advertising - e.g., claiming that your item comes with FREE shipping and handling - that would violate the regulations.

There are other, specific provisions in the law that deal with online marketplaces that entice their sellers to make false claims towards potential buyers, but these laws are currently being revised or amended, so for right now, most sellers and the respective marketplaces they are selling on, are safe - but it is not going to last for long.

Since we are talking about recouping business operational costs, I wanted to add, charging a restocking fee also appears to be a thing of the past. I just saw an article in the Business section of a news channel yesterday that talked about Wal*Mart prohibiting the sellers on its marketplace to charge restocking fees.

The way I see it, it is best to stay away from offering FREE shipping. Many sellers on Etsy for example, are talking about how it did not make any difference in the number of their sales, when they changed their listings to FREE shipping. That is logical. When there are tens of millions of listings, even just one hundred thousand sellers offering FREE shipping with, for example, hand-made face masks means, they are competing not just with the other 250,000 sellers offering face masks with a tiny shipping cost (say, 2 bucks) - but they now are also competing with the other 99,999 face mask sellers offering their masks also with FREE shipping.

After having convinced a lot of people that offering a widget with FREE shipping is beneficial for the seller, both eBay and Etsy came out with yet another sausage to be dangled in front of its sellers' nose: paid promotions. So, many sellers jumped on that band-wagon, also, hoping that if they pay extra and above the listing costs (e.g. store fees) per listing, then their item will gain some preferential placement in search. This, too, only works for a few sellers, and for them even, only sometimes, as both of these marketplaces change their algorithms often, and they do not disclose details. At least not to MOST sellers, who are left to second-guess.

Summa summarum, offering FREE shipping is a useless tool for seller, it could even jeopardize their business license. It is also BAD for buyers, who would like to know what exactly they are paying for shipping.

My recommendation is to be upfront and disclose the shipping, either by stating a fair flat rate amount for shipping to which the buyer agrees when placing an order, OR, by offering calculated shipping, at which point the buyer can enter some basic location information and see for himself how much the USPS or Fedex etc. charges for transporting that widget from the seller to the buyer.

Have a nice day, everyone

PW‌‌

prettywoman-2012 · ‎09-24-2020

@mam98031 wrote:
@divwido wrote:
It's not just you and sadly, it's not just eBay.

I posted a similar question a couple years ago when eBay started adding Best Offer to all of our listings.

We had the same reaction. If I pay to list, then I should be the only deciding what to do. That seemed simple and basic to most people, but not Ebay.
The FTC has no jurisdiction over how any seller develops / calculates their selling price for a product. The FTC can not dictate that certain costs can be included or certain costs can not. I can put whatever I want as my price for my product.

The pros and cons of free shipping have been discussed many many times on various threads over the years. I and others always have thought that the program would be better to call it Shipping Included, but then Ebay didn't name the program or start it. So renaming it after it had been around so long being called Free Shipping could have created issues I suppose.

This really is so simple. As long as the seller or company is using the marketing tool of Free Shipping, as long as they do not have a separate fee charged that is for anything remotely close to a shipping charge of any kind, they should be fine. As have been proven time and time again if by no other means but how many sites use this type of marketing and for over about two decades.

If someone / company was going to get in trouble with the FTC over this practice, I think we would have likely seen that long before now.

This discussion is, however, NOT about how sellers can or cannot arrive at the final selling price of their items. It is about

(a) sellers taking ANY part of the listed selling price and advertising it as FREE - when it is, in fact, something the buyer already pays for (which exhausts the meaning of FALSE ADVERTISING);

and

(b) about certain marketplaces enticing (or luring) sellers into engaging in these practices by promising the sellers certain benefits. Please read my above post.

It is also interesting to note that sellers who offer their item with so-called FREE shipping are also shooting themselves in the foot for one other reason: Returns.

If the buyer returns an item for buyer's remorse reason, the seller has to only refund the purchase price, but not the shipping cost, if the seller listed the shipping separately.

However, if the seller listed the item with FREE shipping, after having upped the price to include the shipping, then the seller will have to refund the entire payment, which included FREE shipping that the seller actually had already paid for when dispatching the merchandise. In some cases, where the buyer claims INAD (item not as described) and the seller wants the item back before issuing a refund, the seller sends a return shipping label to get an item back that he or she may not even be able to sell again as NEW, because the buyer may have tried it on (we have COVID, but there have been plenty of other illnesses e.g. dermatological and other problems long before that) so now the seller is out of two times shipping cost and has to remove the store tags, wash or dry clean (sanitize) the item - and he will take a hit on the selling price, too.

PW🐛

vintage-car-magazines · ‎09-24-2020

I guess we're just going to ignore case law.

The legal counsel for eBay, Macy's, Kohl's, Walmart, JC Penney, Overstock, Wayfair, Poshmark, Rakuten, Sears, DSW, Coach, Apple, Dell, Newegg and thousands of other retailers from Amazon to Zappos must all have it wrong.

yuzuha · ‎09-24-2020

For the fun of it, I asked an actual lawyer about the FTC rule, and they said your interpretation was flat-out wrong.

The rule exists to prevent companies from doing things such as advertising an item for free and then tacking on a $15 shipping and handling charge after the fact, or offering a "buy one get one free" deal on an item that usually costs $30 and then raising the price on that item to $45.

There is no deception or price manipulation involved in free shipping. The buyer will not be charged more than the price they see on the listing-- THAT is the meaning of "free" shipping. It does not and never has meant that the buyer does not pay the cost of shipping, it simply means that they are not paying any ADDITIONAL costs for shipping, unlike a website where you purchase an item and then are charged $6.95 for shipping.

mam98031 · ‎09-24-2020

@prettywoman-2012 wrote:
@mam98031 wrote:
@divwido wrote:
It's not just you and sadly, it's not just eBay.

I posted a similar question a couple years ago when eBay started adding Best Offer to all of our listings.

We had the same reaction. If I pay to list, then I should be the only deciding what to do. That seemed simple and basic to most people, but not Ebay.
The FTC has no jurisdiction over how any seller develops / calculates their selling price for a product. The FTC can not dictate that certain costs can be included or certain costs can not. I can put whatever I want as my price for my product.

The pros and cons of free shipping have been discussed many many times on various threads over the years. I and others always have thought that the program would be better to call it Shipping Included, but then Ebay didn't name the program or start it. So renaming it after it had been around so long being called Free Shipping could have created issues I suppose.

This really is so simple. As long as the seller or company is using the marketing tool of Free Shipping, as long as they do not have a separate fee charged that is for anything remotely close to a shipping charge of any kind, they should be fine. As have been proven time and time again if by no other means but how many sites use this type of marketing and for over about two decades.

If someone / company was going to get in trouble with the FTC over this practice, I think we would have likely seen that long before now.

This discussion is, however, NOT about how sellers can or cannot arrive at the final selling price of their items. It is about

(a) sellers taking ANY part of the listed selling price and advertising it as FREE - when it is, in fact, something the buyer already pays for (which exhausts the meaning of FALSE ADVERTISING);

and

(b) about certain marketplaces enticing (or luring) sellers into engaging in these practices by promising the sellers certain benefits. Please read my above post.

It is also interesting to note that sellers who offer their item with so-called FREE shipping are also shooting themselves in the foot for one other reason: Returns.
If the buyer returns an item for buyer's remorse reason, the seller has to only refund the purchase price, but not the shipping cost, if the seller listed the shipping separately.

However, if the seller listed the item with FREE shipping, after having upped the price to include the shipping, then the seller will have to refund the entire payment, which included FREE shipping that the seller actually had already paid for when dispatching the merchandise. In some cases, where the buyer claims INAD (item not as described) and the seller wants the item back before issuing a refund, the seller sends a return shipping label to get an item back that he or she may not even be able to sell again as NEW, because the buyer may have tried it on (we have COVID, but there have been plenty of other illnesses e.g. dermatological and other problems long before that) so now the seller is out of two times shipping cost and has to remove the store tags, wash or dry clean (sanitize) the item - and he will take a hit on the selling price, too.

PW🐛

I get it. You feel passionately about this. I don't know why, but then that isn't anything I need to be concerned about. You have every right to believe whatever it is you choose to believe.

As for me, I stand by what I said.

The FTC isn't such an overburdened federal agency that it would take them all these years to crack down on this if it was / is as big of a deal as you appear to be wanting to make it. Amazon would likely be their first target especially since they have the Prime program. But yet here we all are and the feds aren't knocking on our doors. Likely not Amazon's either.

mam98031 • Volunteer Community Member • Buyer/Seller since 1999

prettywoman-2012 · ‎09-26-2020

@mam98031 wrote:
@prettywoman-2012 wrote:
@mam98031 wrote:
@divwido wrote:
It's not just you and sadly, it's not just eBay.

I posted a similar question a couple years ago when eBay started adding Best Offer to all of our listings.

We had the same reaction. If I pay to list, then I should be the only deciding what to do. That seemed simple and basic to most people, but not Ebay.
The FTC has no jurisdiction over how any seller develops / calculates their selling price for a product. The FTC can not dictate that certain costs can be included or certain costs can not. I can put whatever I want as my price for my product.

The pros and cons of free shipping have been discussed many many times on various threads over the years. I and others always have thought that the program would be better to call it Shipping Included, but then Ebay didn't name the program or start it. So renaming it after it had been around so long being called Free Shipping could have created issues I suppose.

This really is so simple. As long as the seller or company is using the marketing tool of Free Shipping, as long as they do not have a separate fee charged that is for anything remotely close to a shipping charge of any kind, they should be fine. As have been proven time and time again if by no other means but how many sites use this type of marketing and for over about two decades.

If someone / company was going to get in trouble with the FTC over this practice, I think we would have likely seen that long before now.

This discussion is, however, NOT about how sellers can or cannot arrive at the final selling price of their items. It is about

(a) sellers taking ANY part of the listed selling price and advertising it as FREE - when it is, in fact, something the buyer already pays for (which exhausts the meaning of FALSE ADVERTISING);

and

(b) about certain marketplaces enticing (or luring) sellers into engaging in these practices by promising the sellers certain benefits. Please read my above post.

It is also interesting to note that sellers who offer their item with so-called FREE shipping are also shooting themselves in the foot for one other reason: Returns.
If the buyer returns an item for buyer's remorse reason, the seller has to only refund the purchase price, but not the shipping cost, if the seller listed the shipping separately.

However, if the seller listed the item with FREE shipping, after having upped the price to include the shipping, then the seller will have to refund the entire payment, which included FREE shipping that the seller actually had already paid for when dispatching the merchandise. In some cases, where the buyer claims INAD (item not as described) and the seller wants the item back before issuing a refund, the seller sends a return shipping label to get an item back that he or she may not even be able to sell again as NEW, because the buyer may have tried it on (we have COVID, but there have been plenty of other illnesses e.g. dermatological and other problems long before that) so now the seller is out of two times shipping cost and has to remove the store tags, wash or dry clean (sanitize) the item - and he will take a hit on the selling price, too.

PW🐛
I get it. You feel passionately about this. I don't know why, but then that isn't anything I need to be concerned about. You have every right to believe whatever it is you choose to believe.

As for me, I stand by what I said.

The FTC isn't such an overburdened federal agency that it would take them all these years to crack down on this if it was / is as big of a deal as you appear to be wanting to make it. Amazon would likely be their first target especially since they have the Prime program. But yet here we all are and the feds aren't knocking on our doors. Likely not Amazon's either.

I have cited the opinion of legal experts, as well as hundreds of commenters (some of whom have legal training) on this topic being discussed on Etsy. So, the claim that this is something "I am wanting to make appear" important, just cannot be applied to my post. Those who yearn to learn more about the status quo on this problem can certainly find out more, by utilizing the internet search engines. Not sure why anyone would try to make this into a personal agenda of mine, when it is not.

As for the Feds knocking on doors, just wait and see. They may or may not be knocking on each and every small seller's door, only the doors of the entities that made this happen, and encourage it by handing out false promises to those who comply with their misguided advice to offer FREE shipping, and, at the same time, by disadvantaging hard working sellers like me, who did not jump on this band-wagon, among others, through hiding or tossing out listings to the bottom of the search results. That is double jeopardy.

The FTC and affiliated agencies have currently their hands full with top priority matters, such as the election, civil unrest, etc. But this does not mean somewhere, somebody is not working on the issues to which I brought attention.

PW🦉