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.
You can also read the AuctionBytes blog, which has a place for reader comments under every posting (http://blog.auctionbytes.com).
********
Re: "Top Seller Bargainland Leaves eBay to Launch New Auction Site"
http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y207/m12/abu0204/s03
Ina,
Great story on Paul and Bargainland!
I think it is kind of sad that they got driven from eBay. They offered a unique and valuable business to the platform.
Oh well.
Cheers,
Andrew
********
Hi Ina - as usual, I figure you are the best place to turn for help. I see ebay has decided to release my street address to strangers with their latest version of auction win notification! I am not happy about this! Since 95% of people pay with PayPal, they really don't need my address. If they want to mail payment, I request that they contact me, at which point I forward them my address. I don't need all these people to know where I live!!! too much crazy stuff out there.
Any suggestions as to how I can stop this? I thought I had a better chance of getting a straight answer from you than from anyone at ebay anytime soon FYI, below is a copy of the same auction I ran a couple of weeks ago, with THAT buyer's win notification. Any help you can give me will be much appreciated - thanks, Ina!
********
Is it not amazing that eBay's major source of revenue is not primary or even secondary in its worldview? The sellers who create the bulk of eBay's income are never even close to being paramount in its plans. This distresses me no end.
Any business that treats me as a second class citizen does get much business from me. I am slowly weaning myself away from eBay after 10 years. I don't enjoy being abused. I don't enjoy being told that I am guilty till proven innocent in any dispute with a customer.
********
Re: "Should eBay CEO Meg Whitman Step Down?"
http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2007/12/1197001412.html
Dear Ina
I read the article about Meg Whitman stepping down, which forced me to write this letter.
Like every ebay seller, we miss our old ebay. Why? Because we were able to make a profit and enjoyed our work. Last holiday season, I noticed my sales were down but I still made a little profit. This year is another story completely and it's not just me or my sales either, it's across the board.
Of course there are always a few hot items that will command decent prices but everything else is ending with either no bids or dirt cheap. Look at the listings, go to ending soonest and see all of the listings ending with NO bids at all. Sellers are desperate and all but giving away their stock, to keep from losing even more money.
Ebay can't claim they are doing well and breaking records this holiday season. If they do, it's an outright lie and someone needs to look at their books. They have never been generous with listing specials, so their decision to offer specials SCREAMS "we are hurting". Why don't they just admit it and ask sellers how they can turn things around? We know what works, how to sell, how to price but eBay has a mindset that ONLY eBay knows what's best for us. They make useless changes while ignoring the obvious and we are watching the demise of a site WE built.
Recently, I set up an account with Amazon. The first thing that happend was a call back, to confirm my phone number was valid, followed by close scrutiny to make sure I was an honest, reputable seller. WHY doesn't ebay realize, their problem is not the good sellers but the scammers? Why don't they realize they could stop much of that with "Verification" procdeures that don't stop with sign up? Honest people don't mind being scrutinized but you can be sure, the crooks wouldn't make it on Amazon.
I am not just a complainer. I have submitted this suggestion to eBay more times than I can count but it has been ignored, like all other good suggestions by sellers. They are so focused on numbers, they allow anyone to sign up for an account and begin ripping people off. When you notify ebay that someone is a crook, they send you a form email that instructs you to notify a federal agency that won't even look at a scam, below $5000. They do nothing to the sellers we report and the scams keep on keeping on. When you mention eBay now, people automatically say, " no way, there are too many crooks on that site".
I have been a power seller on ebay for 7 years, have amazing feedback and two websites.
Today, I got an email from a buyer that broke my heart. "He hoped he didn't hurt my feelings but he was concerned I was scamming him". Here is his exact quote. " I'm not accusing you of being fraudulent, but understand my concerns with this being eBay. I hope I'm not being taken to the "cleaners". No one has ever accused me of taking advantage of them and I was crushed.
Should Meg Whitman resign? NO, she should be fired. The decisions she has been responsible for, have left millions of sellers in desperate straights. The focus for ebay should be security, not just numbers of members. Instead, they are moving sellers with high shipping, lower in the searches. Big deal. Those are usually the crooks so why just move them lower in searches? Honest sellers don't rip people off with shipping. DUH.
I am sorry this is so long but My Holiday Sales are the pits and I know other sellers who are in the same position. We are hurting and eBay is doing nothing to fix the problems. I beg all sellers to bombard eBay with this issue and good suggestions. Maybe if we all join together, ONE MORE TIME, we can make them see the light.
Ann
PS:
Dear Ina
If you read my letter, you saw the quote from the customer who thought I was scamming him. After a few notes to him, he sent the apology below. It did make me feel better but such a shame he felt that way to begin with. Ebay is doing that to many people.
Thanks as always
Ann
********
Hi Ina,
Perhaps a "letter to the editor"....
We sell stamps and postal history to collectors ( www.JaySmith.com ).
Background: A few years ago we started selling on eBay. We were late coming to the party, but everything started fairly well. Selling rate was 40-50% and that which did sell usually sold for a fair bit above what we expected to get. We also got lots of new clients that continued to do business with us through other channels. However, after about 18 months, at the start of a summer, the selling rate plummeted to 15-20%. As a result, we had to stop for the summer. When we tried to restart in the fall, we could not get the selling rate above 20%. After a couple more months of paying about $1300/month to eBay in fees, we had to give it up. In that same time period, when we tried to put more items into an eBay Store, there were some serious bugs in the store system that affected our store layout.
(Basically, not matter what, you could not get past the first page of listings even though hundreds of items were listed; the eBay store system was chasing its tail. I did get a tech person at eBay to acknowledge that there was a problem, but it did not get fixed in time for us.)
We thus stopped selling on eBay a couple years ago. It had gotten to the point that it was costing more to be on eBay than the sales were generating. I was paying a full-time person a real-world, professional salary and trying to provide professional service (not something that every eBay buyer seems to appreciate). Even if we did clear out some otherwise slow-selling merchandise, it still would have been cheaper for me to put that stuff in the dumpster than to try to sell it on eBay. (There is nothing wrong with or unusual about the general range of items we offered - worse is offered on eBay every day, and it does sell. However, one can't make a business out of that because it often sells below wholesale replacement cost (and I am just as often a buyer for my other sales channels!).)
Since then, through a number of "fortunate" purchases, I have accumulated many thousand interesting items which are philatelic, but outside our core area of clients and our core competence. These are items which can't easily be priced - the perfect type of items to sell on eBay.
However, the bottom line is that, though eBay is the perfect place to offer them (the right potential buyers are often on eBay), I can't afford to sell them there, for the following reasons:
1) My staff that has the skills to do eBay work has SERIOUSLY threatened to look for different employment if I insist on going back on eBay. Their reasons include: a) The awkward timing problems (if you want to close on Sunday night, you pretty much have to post them on Sunday night, or at least be available to monitor an auto-poster). b) The learning curve for the Blackthorne replacement to the old SAP software. c) And the BIGGIE.... the frustration of dealing with eBay buyers that can't or don't read and who try to make up their own rules. (The behavior of the typical eBay is VERY different from the behavior of our typical non-eBay clients - I don't know if such people are especially attracted to eBay or if they are "normal" people that, because they are on eBay, forget to open their eyes, turn on their brains, and act responsibly.)
2) eBay's fees continue to rise while the benefits they offer to sellers continues to decline. eBay found the "pain point" in terms of fees and policies, and then took it a couple steps farther.
3) eBay's pricing/listing policies can make it uneconomical to list highly specialized items for which there might only be a couple of buyers on the planet (at an appropriate, in my opinion, price level). If one of those two or three people are not looking at eBay for a week or two, it dramatically changes the potential outcome and thus the sales and costs. A more seller-friendly relisting / pricing policy would really help.
4) At the same time as eBay's prices have been rising, so has the general cost of doing business. Anybody who believes the (U.S.) government's inflation figures is smoking the same stuff they are in Washington. (Someday somebody is going to put new batteries in the inflation calculator and discover that things are not as we have been told.) The result is that, JUST TO STAY IN PLACE, we are forced to move 20% more product than we did just two years ago. We have to do this without any extra time, staff, space, or financial resources. That means that any products that require time consuming knowledgeable describing go to the bottom of the to-do list and/or only the higher value items (say $50 and up) receive attention while MANY thousands of $5-25 items languish on the shelves. As eBay has gained in business & technological efficiency one might think that they would take steps to lower seller's costs and reduce barriers for sellers, but, unfortunately, the opposite is true. In any true collectibles business, EXPERT TIME-KNOWLEDGE is the key limitation. Expert staff is expensive, often impossible to hire in super-specialized fields where if you have the knowledge you ARE a company, and its use has to be maximized every minute of the day. Yet, certain types of items that "deserve" to be offered on eBay require describing that really does mean the use of expert time.
5) While eBay makes things harder for sellers PayPal also makes things harder. PayPal is great in concept, but poor in execution when it comes to the seller's perspective. (PayPal may be the best of a poor group of options, but just wait a couple of years until RevolutionMoney gets into high gear.) Between unjustifiably high PayPal fees and PayPal always being quick to take money from the seller when buyers turn out to be bad, it is a costly and stressful environment. Overseas buyers are quickly learning that they can claim non-receipt and get a full refund; this trend will become massive in the near future. Our NET PayPal costs run about 5%, after taking into account unjustified chargebacks and all the obnoxious bookkeeping necessary to reconcile PayPal transactions. This is about DOUBLE our cost environment for MasterCard and Visa charges.
But what other path is there? The thousands of items I have accumulated are the kind of thing that require expert descriptions and are difficult to place a fixed price upon. They are best sold in an auction environment where there are a LOT of eyeballs.
My own website (well developed with over 1500 pages and tens of thousands of products) is not the best place for it. My website does not get the eyeballs for the type of material that is causing me consternation (the material is outside our core selling area).
The Delcampe (www.delcampe.com) auction site is an excellent option in terms of fees and relisting policies, however as much as I love Delcampe, they often don't get the necessary bidder activity to actually have competition that will raise the final selling price. If offered at a low starting price (such as I might use on eBay), an item is more likely to sell at that low price on Delcampe - while on eBay there is a better chance that multiple bidders will raise the price level. And key here is the fact that the items I am concerned with are items for which it is very difficult for me to set prices.
Selling on eBay using non-staff people to do the work is not an attractive option for me. I want the visibility and brand; I especially want to capture the buyer information; and I don't want my professional reputation (on eBay or anywhere else) put at risk because a non-staff person took unacceptable shortcuts.
I have slowly been coming around to the conclusion that there is no good answer. Some days it seems like the only option is wholesaling such material to people who don't have to worry about paying salaries or counting the value of their own time.
Obviously some of these issues/problems are limitations that I place upon the environment and transactions.
However, while my situation may be unusual, I don't think that I am unique and I don't think that eBay/PayPal are very good at listening to the needs of such sellers. Frankly, with all types of sellers having a wide range of reasons for leaving eBay, I am not sure what eBay/PayPal is very good at listening to ANY type of sellers.
Speaking of PayPal alternatives, keep a close watch on:
http://www.revolutionmoney.com/about_revolution_money.aspx
http://www.revolution.com
http://www.revolution.com/revolutionis/default.asp
Founded by Steve Case (from AOL) and with a board and management team that looks like the Who's Who of the U.S. and World economy and payments systems, this outfit has the potential and massive financial backing to really take on PayPal (and eventually MasterCard, Visa, etc., if they wish to go in that direction).
Jay Smith
website: http://www.JaySmith.com
********
Hi Ina,
I am an avid follower of the news letter. Keep up the good work. Listened to the town hall meeting this week courtesy of your news letter and heard Bill Cobb talking about security and secure payments on eBay. I am currently facing a situation where a seller is trying to bully me into sending unprotected payment for an item just because I failed to notice that he did not offer pay pal as a payment option. I feel that I would never see my goods once I part with my money and that really shakes my trust in EBay as a safe environment for buyers. Can you please help me if you can and if you cant, can you possibly give a contact email to someone at eBay.com to contact.
Best regards.
Emma
