eBay Stores: What's Your Strategy to Cope with Fee Hike?

[Ming the Merciless]

Ebay has a history of secret fee increases, and this isn't only one.

Quibble and nitpick my previous posts all you want, but the truth is the truth.

And the truth is that a company that as a matter of course deceives and cheats its customers as a matter of policy will likely have no compunction about committing deceptions across the board. And when it comes to reporting truthfully to its stockholders, judge for yourself Meg Whitman's recent comments about sellers not being as upset now as they were in February.

Who was her audience for such an inaccurate and deceptive statement? The Street!

The Street doesn't have much of a clue what's really happening with ebay because the 99% of their perceptions come from ebay itself and not from ebay's customers.

CHANGE THE DYNAMIC! Call The Wall Street Journal and tell them the truth about Meg Whitman and Bill Cobb are REALLY doing to ebay.

The party's over, Meg.
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The best way to expose corporate slugs is to lift the rocks concealing their hiding places and expose them to the light of the media, business oversight agencies, and law enforcement.

[HollywoodCatLady]

When eBay first took over PayPal, there were no processing charges to sellers for debit card or cash payments from buyers.

Suddenly, without warning or notification, they began charging processing fees for debit card transactions.

When I upgraded my account so that I could accept credit/debit cards, I discovered that PayPal would charge processing fees for cash payments/PayPal transfers as well.

When I asked about this, I was told that I could build in to my shipping/handling charges the fees that I was being charged by eBay/PayPal - but that I could not so inform the buyer.

Do you know what their excessive fees to do my shipping/handling charges?! And now they're going to blame sellers?!

Gimme a break!

[SandysFancyPants]

Beginning to think I better say something nice about Ebay. I just received an item I bought at ebay and it came in with Overstock stickers all over it. Have they now bought them out also. They will soon own the world. Yahoo, Skype, Craigs List, PayPal.
I think Parker Bros. put out a game by that name.
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[DizziPinz]

Reading the posts have been most interesting and informative. Everyone has good points - some emotional and some very informed.

And now we learn that eBay has decided to drop the seller advertising program on top of everything else. So now I'll be paying $49.95 for a featured store and my benefits over a basic store are . . . . ????? Selling Manager Pro and Free Listing Designer? It's going to soon be "back to basics" for me!

No matter. Like so many others I will be diversifying soon. I have a website already in the works.

eBay would prefer that we don't have so many store listings . . . and return to the old "core" listings. I'll be happily obliging them. Those old "core" listings are to our advantage as we will get seen and every sale will generate new leads. But my particular type of product is one that benefits from a store presence - not an online auction - at least most of the time.

Will I be leaving eBay? Certainly not. Not going to cut my nose off to spite my face! But will I be reducing my presence on eBay? Absolutely. Significantly. Gee. What to do with all those extra fees I won't have to pay? Shopping Cart Software! Advertising! More products! And I'll even try out Google's new payment option. Heard it's supposed to be good - and cost effective.

I am also in the process of diversifying the products that I sell - growing the business, if you will. It's taken me more than a year an half to build my eBay store up to the point where I wanted it but no matter how long I've been an eBay Seller - I'm glad to know the status of things before incorporating my newest ventures.

[Ming the Merciless]

If I missed this scam along the line, I apologize for any redundancy.

If you use ebay's Second Chance offer, you were and/or are exposing your bidders to fraud. It seems that the user IDs of losing bidders -- which are supposed to be invisible to everyone but the seller -- are instead visible to many of ebay's program developers.

As a result, someone set up a website and made these user IDs available (probably for a price) so that scammers could email losing bidders and offering to sell them mechandise they of course don't have.

Who should be held accountable? How should the responsibilble parties be held accountable?

If you've been selling on ebay for several years, you may recall the secret ebay scam program that partnered with so-called 'reward' websites. Members of these 'reward' websites received points for simply joining ebay, points for bidding, and points for buying. These points were redeemable through the 'reward' websites for merchandise.

Ebay never formally acknowledged the existence of this program nor did they make restitution to the hundreds and hundreds of sellers who had to cope with an extraordinarily high percentage of returns this 'reward' program caused. I had one customer who before she bought item asked if she could return the item for a refund if she "redecided." Unaware of what was going on at that time, I said she could. When indeed she did return the item I asked her point blank if she belonged to one these "cool" new 'reward' websites because I wanted to join one. When she said yes, I told I'd "redecided" on her refund and gave her a refund in the form of a merchandise credit instead which she never used.

These are the kinds of strategies ebay routinely uses to exploit sellers.

Who should he held accountable? How should they be held accountable?
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The best way to expose corporate slugs is to lift the rocks concealing their hiding places and expose them to the light of the media, business oversight agencies, and law enforcement.