In every issue, readers soundoff about issues important to them. From feedback to payment services, from increased fees to posting policies, AuctionBytes Soundoff gives you a chance to air your views.
Ina Steiner,
Ebay continues to single out sellers while allowing others to break all the rules year after year. Read my reply when ebay ended 3 listings and would not tell me what I violated so I could change my listing to comply after I have sold for 4 years and while hundreds of current sellers have similar product listed today.
Jack
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Dear Ina,
I enjoy your newsletter as always! Today, your newsletter ended up in my "Junk Email" folder, which was put there by my Microsoft Outlook 2003 SP2. I of course found it, but you might want to see if this is happening to others in your list and take action to prevent it!
I always review my "junk" email folder, as it catches a lot of good stuff inadvertently.
Rich
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Hi,
I just made a comment in the final section of your interesting survey regarding methods of payment accepted by sellers. Have you ever done one exclusively for buyers so that some feedback might be given to sellers about what we prefer to use? You probably have and I have just missed it. Only a buyer, but I always read your newsletter with great interest. Thank you for it.
Julie
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Ina,
Hope you had a happy new year!
Has anyone come up with a replacement for BidPay.com? I used it exclusively for my overseas customers (about 1/3 of my business), and now there is nothing. I DO NOT use PayPal, even though Ebay is hoping that by making BidPay's life miserable...people will switch. I won't.
Any suggestions from your readers?? I need a link for an overseas International Money Order...
Thanks,
Caryl
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Hi Ina,
Just a note to let you know that eBay's email is still not working properly. I received email today for messages sent through the My Messages feature 5 days ago. Fortunately for me, I also received the messages through my Outllook email, but if I relied on eBay to get me the messages, I could have been in hot water!
Thanks!
Mike
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I use the postal forms that have two sticky labels on a sheet. Just found out yesterday that since PayPal initiated international postage printing, you can no longer turn-off the online receipt printing function printing. So, basically, everytime you print a label you are wasting the other label cause the receipt prints on the other half. Sure I can take the time to carefully peal it off and put it somewhere, but this is ridiculous. Just thought this was some interesting info. Thanks!
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Canadian postal rates also go about 5% and sometimes more, across all services Jan 16th. Shipping up to 2 kilos airmail internationally goes from 41.00$ to 43.05$
Shipping surface small packet mails under 500gr goes 5.75 to 6.65$ !!!!!!!!!
etc
Richard
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Ina,
I recently read your article on BidPay. I appreciate your mention of ProPay. I just wanted to add that ProPay also offers an email invoice feature that allows you to pay/collect quite easily for auctions. It works somewhat like PayPal. I've included a link to our tutorial that describes how it works.
Another unique feature of ProPay is that it allows you to accept credit cards both online and in person. Each ProPay Account holder actually is assigned a merchant ID as opposed to PayPal which runs all of its processing through an aggregated account. In fact, many of our users currently use ProPay for their online and "brick and mortar" transactions. You can even process cards using any touch-tone telephone. ProPay acts as a merchant account, gateway, and virtual terminal all in one without the excessive monthly fees.
I'd be happy to talk to you if you have any questions about ProPay.
Email Invoice Tutorial
http://www.propay.com/tutorial/emailinvoices.html
Sincerely,
Samuel Peery, VP, Marketing ProPay USA
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Hi,
I love getting your newsletter and truly wish you all the best. But I must object to the following headline you presented: "Amazon Decision Raises Shipping Costs for Third-Party Sellers" http://auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y06/m01/i05/s01.
I consider this headline inflamatory and innaccurate, because it implies that Amazon is somehow responsible for the raise in shipping costs. It was the USPS that raised postage fees, not Amazon. All Amazon is doing is holding the line on its fee structure.
The worst aspect of this misleading headline is that it reinforces the incorrect notion that Amazon is somehow morally responsible for bailing out third party sellers and making up for the increased postage costs. This is like suggesting that the electric company and the phone company should lower their fees to compensate for the increased cost of a postage stamp to mail in the bill payment.
Your headline fuels the scapegoating of Amazon. Amazon too is suffering because of the increase in postage costs because it also ships products via USPS. This would be an unlikely time for Amazon to alter its third party fee structure in a way that further reduces the company's income.
With all due respect: you headline is grossly misleading. In fact, it is just plain wrong and deserves a retraction.
Thanks for listening.
David
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Hi, Ina:
I wonder if you'd update your readers on a change in the unpaid item dispute that eBay has made but not notified sellers of, nor have they changed their procedures on their Help pages.
The UID process used to allow sellers to file a UID on a buyer who lived outside the countries they shipped to immediately. Seller choose "Buyer hasn't paid" when filing and then, from a drop down menu, "Buyer lives outside the country I ship to." The filing would allow a seller to close the UID immediately, get their final value fee back and either relist or make a second chance offer.
WIthin the last month, eBay removed the "Buyer lives outside the countries..." option.
I questioned Colin Rule at eBay about this. He told me:
"Essentially the reason why we got rid of this option is that we now have a buyer requirements selection that blocks bids from wrong countries. If you turn that on you'll never experience this problem again. (I bet you already know how to do that, but it's in your seller preferences.) That's why we eliminated it from the UPI process. It was only a trickle of people who self-identified their cases with that option anyway. Like in the hundreds-per-month range."
That is not exactly correct. There is a large increase we have seen on the eBay boards of buyers who register in the U.S. but their actual shipping addresses are out of the country. They can bypass the blocks by doing this. eBay is also aware of the problem, judging from a response to a question a buyer posted on one of the boards about a Canadian buyer they had this problem with:
"Hello,
Thank you for writing to us. I appreciate the opportunity to assist you with your questions. I have checked your account and your blocks are still setup. However it is possible that the bidder from Canada who placed the bid is actually registered on the US site. Before there was an eBay Canada, members from there had to register on the main US site. So, if the bidder in question had registered at that time, then our system would consider them to be registered on the US site.
Regards,
(name withheld)
eBay Customer Support"
According to Colin and to a rep. for Bill Cobb I corresponded with, what a seller now has to do when a buyer lives outside the country they ship to is first file an unwanted bidder report. Then, 7 days after the auction ends, the seller can file a UID and choose "Other" as the reason for the filing. And they can close the UID out 8 days later.
There is also an issue with eBay's thinking that a seller can block buyers from countries they don't wish to ship to. Sellers in most cases need to block an entire continent if they don't wish to ship to, say, Italy or Nigeria. There are only a few countries listed that can be bloicked - Canada, Mexico, the U.K., Germany, Australia and Japan. If you don't want to ship to any other countries, the only option is to block the entire continent they are from, which many sellers won't do.
eBay did not think this change out enough before making it. And to make matters worse, they changed the procedure but did not change the written procedures in their help pages. When sellers use the dispute forms, it still tells them they can file immediately when a buyer lives outside the area they ship to.
I'd appreciate it if you could publicize this change so sellers know about it. And sellers should also contact eBay and tell them that if they want to limit us from filing, they need to add to the countries listed that we can block buyers from.
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Ina,
I keep reading letters from ebay users who complain about the site outages, and how they couldn't bid or sell, or who didn't get their full "x" days worth of auctions they listed, and how they all wish ebay would do something about it.
However, here is where all these people are missing something. Ebay IS doing something about it. They're ignoring the problem and doing nothing about it. they don't HAVE to do anything about it. They know that they can do whatever they want and in the end, you will still continue to use them and they will continue to profit from you. After all, it's THEIR screwup, but YOU will still be required to furnish the burden of proof that they somehow owe you something for the time the site was down. Further, even if you don't use them, it's not like ebay cares about that, either. For every person who leaves, there are a dozen (or more!) other suckers more than willing to stay and be loyal to them, which is what they want. They want you to continue to use them, and they test your loyalty each day to see how many users will stay with them, despite their flaws.
This is exactly why I'm completely baffled by why ebay users get so upset/frustrated about all of ebay's numerous documented flaws (wanna count 'me up in both frequency and sheer number itself? It'll take a while!), but then continue to regularly use ebay, and remain loyal to them. You wouldn't see this in the "real" world. If your favorite store (let's say Wal-Mart, just for convenience sake) consistently was closed, had their cash registers down so you couldn't buy, had poor quality merchandise which they made no apologies for, since they bought it from a third party (the warehouse, or manufacturer), had rude and/or ignorant customer service, and then charged you a non-refundable fee just for pulling into the parking lot, regardless of whether or not the store was open or not, you would very rapidly find another place to shop at. Well, that above example is ebay. Yet, unlike the real world, in the world of ebay, you get dumped on in that exact same way, but yet the shoppers say, "Thank you, sire, may I have another?"
All of this doesn't matter to me, because I so rarely sell on auctions anyhow, preferring the greater reliability and pricing of Amazon and Half.com, so I deal with being dumped on and abiding by the "greater good of the community" (sounds very communistic to me) because once every six months or so is good enough for me.
Gregory
