Not everyone who sells on ebay can accept returns, and accept piddly offers on products that they sell, With your post you are once again assuming that every seller can work or minor percentages on items and a lot of sellers can't, including me.
Not every seller seller can work on a .50 cent profit margin after ebay fees, shipping fees, paypal fees. Some people working out of their basement/garage/spare bedroom may be able to to, but sellers that have physical business locations CAN NOT. We pay commercial utility rates (electricity, phone, internet, water, sewer, etc), commercial school taxes, commercial land taxes, commercial corporate taxes if in municipality, building upkeep, building repairs, fire insurance, comp insurance, personal injury insurance, and a thousand other things. Plus another huge amount for employees.
Best offers is a joke. Put a $ 200.00 item on ebay for $ 100.00 with best offer and you will get offers as low as .50 cents. Waste of time and effort, especially if a paid employee has to run the ebay. I have ran best offer listing multiple times and not one has ever come close to a reasonable or realistic offer. Finally listed at set price with no offers and sold the items for what they were worth in monetary value, not for the equivalent of beads and trinkets.
The offers seem to be made by some 25 year old pot smoking mooch of a wanna be hippie living in their parents basement, living on their parents money sucking up their parents medical insurance as obama suggested they do.
It has been said many thousands of times on these boards by alot of people including me - if you sell stuffed wallaby's you get by the truckload from china for $ 1.00 each you can accept offers, accept foolish returns and jump through ebay's hoops backwards without consequences for a fairly long period of time. But sooner or later you are going to have to stop selling stuffed wallaby's or stop selling on ebay.
If you have stuff like antiques, collectible advertising, rare coins or paper money, true Vintage parts for cars, motorcycles, etc, and a host of other highly valuable items then YOU CAN NOT.
And it IS ebay hiding sellers listings, only making listing visible that are "promoted", or from ebay pets that they choose to give traffic to. Because sellers like me that sold $ 80K one year and then drop off a cliff at the beginning of the ebay changes know that our products or our way of doing business is not the problem. The problem is ebay and their selective exposure. because those of us that have other venues that have not slowed down but ebay has can put 2 and 2 together and get 4 all on our own.
I constantly have buyers emailing me wanting to know why they find my items on Bonanza, Etsy, Blue Jay and my company website but no longer can find a lot of them on ebay. But yet they are still listed. That says they are not visible to the buyers.
My pet peeve is other sellers coming on the boards saying that we all need to adapt to ebay and sell for less and find ways to make it work. I just went somewhere else and still sell more and pay ebay less. I sell more on other venues than I do on ebay for less fees and I have been on them for only a few months. Been on ebay for nearly 20 years. Evay is broken, not the ebay sellers.
