eBay tampering with mu listings

[patricia92243]

eBay keeps showing their ignorance of business by tampering with my listings. I buy products at wholesale, 50% of retail. I list retail prices as my BIN. eBay forces me to  give a 30% discount off BIN as my opening price. I am forced to compete with Chinese sellers who can buy from the factories where everything is made, avoiding the exporter's, importers, and wholeseller's markups. Their government allows free shipment to the USA and the USPS gives free delivery. I am forced to pay postage and, due to the minority of buyers who will claim non-delivery and the USPS policy of not investigating claims of hon-delivery of non-insured packages, I am forced to ship via Priority Mail ($7.40 flat rate). Add to this the 11% FFV and the opening bid is barely break even. eBay keeps changing my listings to "Best Offer," with accepting bids below wholesale. IDIOTS! STOP IT. I have to search through over 100 listings to find the ones tampered with. I work. I don't have time to fool with this.

[dhbookds]

You are not "forced" to do anything, particularly you are not forced to try to sell here, if you can't make a profit.  If the auction with bin doesn't work for you, set the price at a price which will......and forget the bin........or use fixed price. 

[caldreamer]

Never heard EBAY forcing Sellers to change their pricing or shipping method.   If you are having problem with EBAY adding "best offer" to your items you can easily check for "best offer" by going to Seller Hub, Listings, Active (go to ITEM TITLE and click down arrow  and select "BEST OFFER").   This will immediately show if any of your listings have "best offer" turned on.

[itsjustasprain]

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@patricia92243 wrote:

eBay keeps showing their ignorance of business by tampering with my listings. I buy products at wholesale, 50% of retail. I list retail prices as my BIN. eBay forces me to  give a 30% discount off BIN as my opening price.

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You seem to be coming at that backwards. If you are doing an auction listing and want to add a BIN price as well - the BIN must be at least 30% above the opening price - thats all. It sounds like you just want to do a Fixed price listing at your choice of price so why not do that instead and forget the auction format?

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@patricia92243 wrote:

I am forced to pay postage and, due to the minority of buyers who will claim non-delivery and the USPS policy of not investigating claims of hon-delivery of non-insured packages, I am forced to ship via Priority Mail ($7.40 flat rate).

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You get Delivery Confirmation on 1st Class Packages too. That is your defense against an Item Not Received claim. Priority Mail includes either $50 or $100 of insurance but if you are shipping a package less than a pound in weight then Flat rate packaging might not be needed.

[klhmdg]

There is no "force" on any of this.

Stop doing Auctions and list as BIN with the price you want.

Everything you says is "forced" in your post is all in your control.

[pjcdn2005]

Oops… misunderstood the original post so deleted my reply

[inceptions]

If you are going to run auctions, your starting bid must be at least 30% less than the Buy It Now price.

You don't have to run auctions. Why not just list as BIN? You also don't have to accept offers. You can remove Best Offer by using the Advanced/Business listing form (option at top right of the form).

[m60driver]

I daresay the issue is not with Ebay here.  And nobody is forcing you to do anything here.  By the way, I was in the cutlery business for decades and only the least expensive knives can get you a 50% or more gross profit margin (GPM).  In general, you will a need far higher GPM to sell on Ebay unless you have very high volume.   Although I did notice that you have some knives that hopefully you are buying at well below 50% your opening bid price.  Perhaps you need to attend a few trade shows and find a new wholesaler.

Ironically, when I had my brick and mortar store cutlery was the first category that I lost to online sales back nearly 10 years ago.