eBay

themightyquinnbrassandwinds · ‎06-28-2019

I have been on eBay since 1997. That's right, 22 years. It was AuctionWeb when I joined.

I have gross yearly sales on eBay approaching $4 million.

I paid eBay over a quarter of a million dollars in 2018, which, by the way, was substantially more than I took home.

I have watched over the years as my FV fees have climbed from an average of about 3% to 7.15% for my category, and that is just because I have an anchor store. I've watched as the cap on items went from $100 to $250. I watched you reduce the Top Seller discount from 20% to 10%- a move which it took $40k a year out of my pocket. And all through it I have tried to hang on and grow my business.

The final straw came this week when I was informed I have 'Very High' rates of returns due to item not as described.

We all know this new and completely arbitrary standard is just a bullying tactic to get people to offer free returns. Well, I sell musical instruments, and I am absolutely not in the business of providing free rentals for a money and paying the shipping both ways. Even so, there is an awful lot of abuse, and people will list an instrument as defective if they don't like the way it plays, just to get a free return.

Over 3 months I had a total of 28 returns due to 'item not as described'. 18 of them were abusive. And these are not appealable.

But those 28 returns are enough to get me an additional 5% final value fees with no cap. This stands to literally add $20,000 PER MONTH to my eBay bill. Because of a few people who abused returns.

This is ridiculous, and it is also an existential threat to my business.

So I did what anyone n my position would do. I called my Personal Account Manager. He's on vacation without any information for who is covering for him. I called another contact who passed my request for a call to the person covering my account manager. She's 'really busy' and will call me next week.

She's too busy to call a $250k customer who is facing a threat to his business.

Ever since I got a Personal Account Manager (for the second time) 3 years ago, I have been telling eBay what I need them to do to expand my business. eBay has ignored me. eBay is no longer interested in creating partnerships with business and growing online sales-they have instead resorted to the tactic of increasing revenue by increasing fees.

I am leaving eBay after 22 years.

moxiedrinker · ‎06-30-2019

My Wife and I do not have "Smart Phones" we are looked upon like we are crazy. I don't need to be that connected. Nor does my Wife. The use of cell phones has gone way overboard.

ifyouloveit · ‎06-30-2019

I hear you @moxiedrinker. My phone is a 2011 iphone4 and I cannot believe how many people make fun of me.

It works fine, it takes the photos for my stores, why spend more money, to be cool?

I am cool, ha ha, so are you 🙂

moxiedrinker · ‎06-30-2019

Gee Whiz! Thank you so much for saying I am cool!

moxiedrinker · ‎06-30-2019

@ifyouloveit I hate to confess this ,but we have flip phones . We can call the Enterprise!

lovefindingtreasures2 · ‎06-30-2019

HA HA HA HA !!!!! Can you beam us all up, I'm about done here 🙂

I loved my old flip phone! I think I still have it too, go communicator phone!

lovefindingtreasures2 · ‎06-30-2019

You're as cool as a cucumber moxiedrinker, beam us all up! Maybe they will buy our stuff on another planet or ship, what do you think? 🙂

pcobra93 · ‎06-30-2019

Ebay is in Mexifornia....why would anyone be surprised about them having ignorant policies.....

lasantino · ‎06-30-2019

@amp_global thanks so much for the detailed explanation.. and i'm thrilled to see that you haven't had to deal with fraudulent returns... I am increasingly getting scared to sell high value items because of the stories i read on the boards..

question,,

did you receive a message from ebay that you have

"high returns" or "very high returns"..... i hope you made the same mistake i did.. I got the email too, and i assumed it said very high,, but upon calling customer service,, they pointed out that i was only "high returns" and so no extra 5% fee.. crossing my fingers this might be the case with you too,, i see you said in the response to me that the message said high returns.. so for sure go check

masam1108 · ‎06-30-2019

@pcobra93 wrote:
Ebay is in Mexifornia....why would anyone be surprised about them having ignorant policies.....

Wow. Racist, fascist and just plain rude.

moxiedrinker · ‎07-01-2019

Heck, That what I use ! My Wife and I can keep in touch .That's if I remember to turn it on.

moxiedrinker · ‎07-01-2019

I think you found me out! Oops!

trukur_0 · ‎07-01-2019

@fashunu4eeuh wrote:
Very sorry to hear you are leaving, even tho i'm sure it was a sound business decision to do so.

It shouldn’t be this way, but having a No Return policy is practically the kiss of death on eBay. It is too risky. To adapt, and survive, one must either alter what they sell, or institute a buyer-friendly return policy. All in order to avoid fraudulent Not As Described cases. Such cases can drastically effect one’s standing on eBay, as you boldly illustrated.

You are a high volume, high dollar seller. As such, chances are significant that you will see your share of unavoidable buyer problems. That said, and with respect for your longevity and success on eBay over 22 years, i must admit that 28 cases in just 3 months time seems a lot. And 52 Feedback revisions also. It suggests there could be some other issues with your account not related to buyer fraud. Or were all the cases baseless and fraudulent?

"...We all know this new and completely arbitrary standard is just a bullying tactic to get people to offer free returns..."

There has to be some kind of standard, some kind of oversight, to weed out the poor performers.

I know what you are saying, but I also believe service metrics are these hoops we are forced to jump through and are ineffective at curbing bad behaviors. We jump in ways unnatural in order to comply but not because we were going to misbehave to begin with, and those who misbehave can do so easily and still manage to comply.

Meanwhile buyers are left wondering why we behave in such stilted manner, yes believe it or not buyers can sense and sometimes outright see that we are jumping through hoops, I have even been asked on occasion why I would behave in such a manner... You see, it doesn't make sense even from a buyer's standpoint.

Back to the thread I will say this...

The new service metrics as relate to the 5% increase in fees came along at the same time a whole new "shipping" page was rolled out, at least for me it did. This new shipping page did help ease the process of shipping however it also involved a bit of a learning curve, lets just say things were a little too easy for a bit until I realized I could not entirely rely on ebay without doing my own double and even triple checking everything before it leaves the door... And for that reason I had more than a few returns, and I can blame it on the new shipping page although I've pretty much accepted the fault lies on my end, it makes no difference, I had a larger than usual amount of returns.

In the end I've gone back to the old method of double and triple checking everything, it is slower and tedious in ways but it's the only way I keep my returns down to an absolute minimum, and unfortunately even here I do agree with you and ebay both that returns do not a "good" buying experience make.

Especially not when items get mixed up and buyer A gets item B and buyer B gets item A and so on...

Lets just leave it at that...

However, the crux of the matter, the point of this conversation is that the new shipping page AND the new service metrics got rolled out at the same time and it did come to my attention that if I got tripped up by the little trip wires then it's quite possible someone else did, too?

This thread proves my question was correct.

And here's the thing...

Was the simultaneous release of the new shipping page AND the new service metrics intentional?

Probably not, but it sure seems that way when you get tripped up by it and it ends up costing you more in ways of fees that they end up collecting, hard to believe that was not entirely coincidental when the beneficiary is also the instigator...

However it probably wasn't intentional, it probably was merely the usual byproduct of a company that has gotten way too big for its britches, another way to say it is this is what happens when the right hand no longer knows what the left hand is doing.

Anyhow, /rambling on...

trukur_0 · ‎07-01-2019

@themightyquinnbrassandwinds wrote:
You are the third or fourth person to mention starting up my own website. Do you people really think a website is a magical thing that buyers will automatically find? I have had my own website for several years and it gets nowhere near the traffic eBay does. That's why I pay eBay fees in the first place.

I wanted to add I have built my own website, there is a lot to it...

I would be willing to wager, the half of these folks who suggest a website don't have one, have never built one, or pay someone else to manage theirs and it's neither truly their own nor is the money they pay coming out of their pocket.

The tune always changes drastically when the dog in the fight is your own and truly your own, when it is you who suffers directly when that dog loses, then all of a sudden reactions to situations change dramatically.

To really get good at building a web site and driving traffic to it, I built my own as a hobby, I spent a lot of time on that... A good several hours every day on my spare time, for a time frame approaching something like 7 years...

We're talking about learning how to code, then learning how to optimize the code, then coming to the realization that code comes in standards and so a webmaster might benefit by coding the website in an optimized standard language (such as XHTML 1.0 transitional, just as an example)... That language, by the way... Yes, XHTML 1.0 transitional is a language, it adheres to coding standards that should be followed meticulously, that language today is almost deprecated and obsolete, but around 20 years ago when I got into this it was state of the art beta stage, they weren't even sure if that language would stick if you get my drift but I 'adopted' it as my own so I could build my web site because I knew then if it stuck I would be set for a long time to come...

I was right, but technologies change and like I said today that language is almost obsolete.

We're talking back in the days when Windows XP was the latest and greatest thing and smartphones were of yet unheard of, so standards have changed from desktop based browsers to handheld devices for one thing...

That's just the coding aspect, there's image optimization and layout and again this is all just the nuts and bolts part. Then there's DNS and registration and SEO and email and hosting (virtual vs dedicated) and each of these aforementioned things is as long an educational path as the coding was and I still haven't covered maybe half of it, mostly because it's been so long and I stopped keeping up with it around 10 years ago...

How do I say it, I've spent as little as 50 cents a month all the way to $100 a month for hosting my website. It's pretty wild west out there, I'm sure this hasn't changed much.

Let me put it another way, I've had a website indexed in the Yahoo directory back when that existed, I built one of my first websites on Geocities for those of you who know and understand what that means...

Now I will conclude because I could go on for ages...

But what I am saying, what I wanted to say is building and then maintaining a web site is no easy task.

It's not a joke, I used to compare it to building a ship, old style, with sails, from scratch, with lumber and rope and nails and tack and paint and things, by yourself.

So if you have built your own and you don't have the traffic, believe me I am not faulting you and if you paid someone else I can't really see how that would've worked out any better either so I get "we do the best we can."

Sorry to see you go, personally speaking the only way I can see for you in terms of staying would be to undergo a complete revision from top to bottom, personally supervised... I'm talking getting your hands dirty and not letting go from the supervisory aspect, every single listing, all your settings, everything ebay you would have to take down, inspect piece by piece and refurbish in a manner that matches the "new way" and accomplishes what they expect of us today.

Things have changed, what used to work 5-10 years ago doesn't quite fit the model anymore.

I'm sorry it just doesn't, as has been said ebay doesn't care about all that either.

Abd you may be too tired of doing that, I'm sure you've done that before, I know I have.

If so, best of luck to you.

moxiedrinker · ‎07-01-2019

I don't know if this helps at all. But in my experience ,I try to treat possible buyers or bidders as I would like to be treated my self. When there is a problem I take care of it. Good luck!