Ebay - more restraining!

[Filterlab]

I don't know about anybody else, but I've found ebay to be getting very difficult indeed lately. For example, I decided to sell a PS3 game (Assassin's Creed) the other day, and now they have banned everyone without a PayPal account from selling video games.

I've never had a PayPal account on the principal of the exorbitant fees and I've no intention to start now, so does this mean that eventually ebay will only deal with PayPal and nothing else? Absurd, especially now as membership numbers are falling because they're rubbing so many folks up the wrong way.

In answer to this I activated an Amazon seller account - took five minutes to set up, no PayPal or any other 'third party' accounting system (filling ebay's coffers), no fuss, no hassle and listings take two minutes to do.

You get all the normal Amazon coverage and google searches on Amazon and the fees are very small (and fully stated BEFORE listing), add the fact that the money is dropped straight into one's bank account and there's no time limit on the listing and it all adds up to a really good way to sell.

[greenhomeelectronics]

It's even worse than that, they have just announced a hike in fees - they reckon it's a reduction but if you work the numbers it's actually an increase in most cases.
But far - far worse than that, from May no sellers will be allowed to leave a neutral or negative for buyers. The feedback for buyers remains unchanged. This has to be the daftest change ebay have ever brought in, how the hell can you now warn anybody about dodgy buyers? We still list a bit on there, mainly to pull people to our own site, we do not intend to list anything beyond May as I consider the risk to be unnacceptable. How any management team can misunderstand their own product as well as ebay do is quite beyond me.

[Filterlab]

It's even worse than that, they have just announced a hike in fees - they reckon it's a reduction but if you work the numbers it's actually an increase in most cases.
But far - far worse than that, from May no sellers will be allowed to leave a neutral or negative for buyers. The feedback for buyers remains unchanged. This has to be the daftest change ebay have ever brought in, how the hell can you now warn anybody about dodgy buyers? We still list a bit on there, mainly to pull people to our own site, we do not intend to list anything beyond May as I consider the risk to be unnacceptable. How any management team can misunderstand their own product as well as ebay do is quite beyond me.

They've successfully managed to go from being the world's number one household auction site into the oddest collection of absurd rules ever collected on one website. They are too self assured due to their size and believe that they're untouchable, they also live in the land of 'our business will never fail because we trade on our history'. Mmmm, dangerous territory and people are now starting to get fed up with their 'dictatory' way of operating. I'll say this:

Barings
Marconi
Mitsubishi
White Star Line
Northern Rock
Cellnet

The next one to go will be Microsoft whom make so many errors and charge so much it's almost criminal. Surely they will now be worried that Apple are doubling sales each year as more and more folk move over to their machines and ditch unreliable MS based PCs. And of course MS are not helped by their recent products; the Xbox360 (which cost MS one quarter's global profit to correct the problems encountered in one year of sales), the iPod rival 'Zune' (yes, I've never seen one either) and let's not forget Vista - the only operating system to have received 70,000 bug reports in its first week of US public usage - a product so bad that most users have given up and reverted to their previous OS.

I think eBay are a lot closer to the end than they think, and this latest ramp up of stupidity is another nail in their costly coffin.

Sell on Amazon, far better!

[greenhomeelectronics]

Damn good points there filterlab old chap!! I saw Vista at my Brother in Law's, it looked impressive but needs a super computer to run on and does not seem to offer that much above and beyond what XP can do. I have heard that it spends most of it's time looking for illegal code and the such like, I don't know how true that is though.

Any serious ebay seller should be thinking seriously of their own site, it takes time to get up and running and to get noticed but I think there will be a massive increase in people getting their own sites in the coming months.
What we really need is a competitor that comes in with a fee structure a bit like ebay's but much reduced. Tazbar and ebid both look like they should get traction but probably never will as sellers are not guided in to offering potential bargains to buyers. Stuff that gets started at 99p on auction on ebay is being offered on Tazbar for 14.99 buy it now so people have a look then go straight back to ebay. We tried Tazbar for a while, we had one sale and the guy never paid Have not tried Amazon as their take is far too big.

[sastusbulbas]

Ebay are theifs, they allow and assist con men and criminals in the theft of money, and they accept the payments from these criminals for their use of paypal and accounts. They also vigorously deffend these criminals and employ muppets with no interest in anything to do with ebay to relate with genuine customers.

Example.

I bought a load of discs of a seller, two collections.

He agreed via ebay messaging about payment and combined postage, and that the first initial lot would be well packed and sent together.
I made payment via paypal for one lot of discs, I got positive feedback for a couple of them, and two weeks later I recieved a couple of them wrapped in bin bags.

So much for paying for 1st class delivery and having it combined.

A week later I had still not recieved the other discs, he said they had been sent, then I recieved a couple more a few days later, then he started asking me for more money, even though I had not recieved all the discs I paid for.

To cut a long story short, I did not get all my discs, he stole money from me which ebay did not repay me back. And he left me negative feedback even though there was clear history the negative feedback was for an item I paid via paypal for.

Even though their was evidence within ebay messaging, where he stated he still had my discs, and that he wanted more money, and that I had paypal evidence of him recieving money for an item he left me negative for not paying for which he did not send me. Ebay still allowed him to steal muy money, they took their cut, and did nothing about my 100% ebay record being ruined by a criminal.

Ebay, they are thiefs and criminals, and as long as they get something from the thief they will defend them.