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December 2005
Posts: 109
Location: Alabama | It seems like there should be some way to denote buyers who never pay for auctions.
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/business/2008/02/06/janis.uk.ebay.... |
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December 2001
Posts: 10583
Location: NJ | I cannot see this lasting long.
I have so many e bay idiot buyers it is not funny |
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Joined:
March 2006
Posts: 482
Location: enid, ok | I'm with you guys. I don't see this as a viable option for long. Unless they throw in free airfare and a nice Louisville Slugger for every buyer that deserves it. Nah, hell they'd go broke in no time. |
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Joined:
January 2006
Posts: 5881
Location: Colorado Rocky Mountains | This is interesting. I have only bought things on eBay and have never sold a thing. I wonder if my 100% positive rating with 187 qualified transactions, albeit all purchases, will be stripped from my profile? Won't sellers be concerned about the legitimacy and history of their prospective buyers? As a legitimate buyer, I might be equally concerned that there will no longer be any institutional incentive to keep sellers without scruples from using shell buyers to run up the cost of items. |
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Joined:
November 2002
Posts: 1300
Location: Madison, Wisconsin | I have to agree with the story. I purchased a road case and it was suposed to ship in a week. It took almost a month to get it and when I left neg feedback, they slammed me. I ended up having to pull the feedback and they were suposed to rebate me $25. Never got the money after repedted requests but at that point, I had no recourse. (Don't buy from Island Cases) |
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Joined:
March 2006
Posts: 186
Location: The State of Hockey | As a seller and a buyer I think this is a lousy idea. This throws the sale way off balance for the buyers, and there are many unscrupulous buyers out there |
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Joined:
December 2004
Posts: 65
Location: Phoenix | I'm all for it. I bought an item a year ago, paid immediately with Paypal, waited a month and never got it. Sent emails, no response. Went through Ebay email, no response. Filed dispute, weeks later FINALLY got the item.
So I left negative feedback on the seller. Guess what? The jerk left negative FB on ME the buyer!!! And despite what Square Trade claims, there's no way to have retaliatory negative feedback eliminated. |
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Joined:
March 2002
Posts: 14842
Location: NJ | eBay?
(click.) |
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Joined:
January 2002
Posts: 14127
Location: 6 String Ranch | Ebay can be good Cliff, just like there are times when Nora Jones is OK, and Barry Manthat'slow, and yawnie.
I've got a lot of stuff from ebay. Just got to be careful, that's all. |
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Joined:
February 2005
Posts: 11840
Location: closely held secret | My wife and I have an ebay business, so I keep up on this stuff. I have very mixed feelings about it.
If you read through all the details:
" * Buyers will only be able to receive positive Feedback.
* Positive repeat customer Feedback will count (up to 1 Feedback from the same buyer per week.)
* Feedback more than 12-months old won't count towards your Feedback percentage.
* When a buyer doesn't respond to the Unpaid Item (UPI) process the negative or neutral Feedback they have left for that transaction will be removed.
* When a member is suspended, all their negative and neutral Feedback will be removed.
* Buyers must wait 3 days before leaving negative or neutral Feedback for sellers with an established track record, to encourage communication.
* All Feedback must be left within 60 days (compared to 90 days today) of listing end to encourage timely Feedback and discourage abuse.
* Buyers will be held more accountable when sellers report an unpaid item or commit other policy violations."
The only part of this I'm really not happy with is not having any method of warning other sellers about buyers who don't understand how damaging negs are to sellers, and hand them out for no intelligent reason.
It does seem weighted toward the buyer, but look at other businesses - do restaurants or music stores get to publicly complain about their customers? Nope. If the customer violates a rule or policy then some sort of action (legal) can be taken, but the business must depend on their quality of service to be reflected in their customers response. Do businesses get customers who are absolute jerks and would complain no matter how good the service was? Sure, all the time.
I'm more concerned about the other changes ebay slipped in, like the 'safe payments':
"To help ensure more buyers are protected, in some cases we'll require sellers to offer either PayPal or a merchant credit card to customers. PayPal buyer protection covers most qualified transactions up to $2000.00 USD.
Sellers will only be required to provide this safe payment option to customers in certain situations:
* For listings in riskier categories, like computers and cell phones
* If the seller has 5% or more dissatisfied customers
* If the seller has less than 100 Feedback
In a small number of cases (fewer than 5% of all payments on eBay), PayPal will hold payment funds until either the buyer has left positive Feedback or 21 days have passed without a claim."
If they start tweaking the requirements up PP could be sitting on a lot of seller's money, making interest while we wait to be paid.
...or the fee changes. Dropping the listing fees a few pennies while raising the FVF by >3.5% on auctions and >3% on store sales, and calling it 'a reduction in fees' is pretty close to fraud, IMO. Whether or not you actually save anything depends entirely on your percentage of unsold listings. In other words, it won't cost you as much to NOT sell something, but it WILL cost you more if you sell it.
They're also going to start basing visibility and FVF discounts on DSR's (Detailed Seller Rating, which is optional for the buyer). We'll have to wait and see how that goes.
[/ebay_rant_end] |
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Joined:
January 2005
Posts: 161
Location: Atlanta GA | I have both bought and sold items on ebay. I have had both good and bad transactions both ways. It seems to me that the one leveragable recourse is the feedback system. Of course there are people who don't care about that. They can take your money or your item and then just create another name, buy a bunch of $.99 items for references and then scam you on the $600.00 item and disappear. But without full understanding of how ebay works, it seems the feedback system does give an incentive for basically honest people not to be tempted to do the unthinkable. (I don't know what % of people on ebay this applies to)
I will say that Ebay "has it going on", this .com is one of few that has turned into a huge global interprise. I can't believe they would remove one of the major features (at least in my mind) without careful consideration to it impact on the business. |
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Joined:
November 2003
Posts: 11039
Location: Earth·SolarSystem·LocalInterstellarCloud·Local Bub | Originally posted by Mauvais Beal:
Ebay can be good..., just like ... Barry Manthat'slow, and yawnie. Beal, that's enough bourbon. |
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Joined:
May 2003
Posts: 4389
Location: Capital District, NY, USA Minor Outlying Islands | I heard that ebay has matured as a business and they aren't getting as many new users annually as they did in the past. It looks like everyone who would use ebay, is using ebay, and they're trying to get more customers by encouraging buyers. Problem is that they've forgotten about the other side of the transaction.
Ah, I'll see how it goes. I lived without ebay once, I can probably do it again. Though it'll be a lot harder for me to get rid of stuff. |
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Joined:
January 2004
Posts: 1225
Location: Lake Hiawatha, New Jersey | Originally posted by Mauvais Beal:
Ebay can be good Cliff, just like there are times when Nora Jones is OK, and Barry Manthat'slow, and yawnie.
I've got a lot of stuff from ebay. Just got to be careful, that's all. Hey, don't say anything about Nora Jones. I had a bad case of insomnia once which her music cured instantly! |
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Joined:
January 2005
Posts: 4903
Location: Phoenix AZ | It's a business just like any other business. The owners look for ways to tweak it and improve the bottom line.
Ebays customers (source of revenue) are the SELLERS. They make nothing from buyers. So it is in ebay's best interest to do everything they can to attract more SELLERS. But sellers need buyers. It would seem antilogical that removing the feedback tool for sellers would attract more of them. BUT, I am sure they have done their homework and believe that this move will attract more buyers, and therefor more sellers to serve them, and the honestly and repulation of the sellers should improve since they have no way to retaliate against a buyer over a bad transaction. Just my 2 pesos.
Dave |
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Joined:
July 2002
Posts: 1900
| As it's been said, Ebay is pro-seller, period. It's easy for Ebay to presume all their sellers are going to be honest, so they think all us buyers are obliged to take Ebay's word for it. Nonesense. BoycottEbay.com There's an idea that might get their attention... |
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Joined:
January 2005
Posts: 161
Location: Atlanta GA | Every time some comes up with a better mouse trap, someone else comes up with a better mouse...
My openion is that they are "forcing" more transactions to be handled through Paypal. Which is costly and not without further potential issues, but a seller would be silly not to use it now on big ticket items.
BUY STOCK IN PAYPAL and never send any money or items that you can't live without. You can fully expect to lose them (seemingly now more than ever) |
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Joined:
July 2002
Posts: 1900
| It's a tough decision either way, but as a buyer I've never used paypal, just bank wires on the large puchases and money orders on the smaller ones. I've heard horror stories about paypal, but then there are those who've never had a problem. Ebay appears to presume an endless supply of buyers. |
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Joined:
December 2001
Posts: 10583
Location: NJ | pay pal
cut me a break. some guy gets around all the rules of a merchant credit card account and offeres credit card service to average people with higher fees.
e bay buys pay pal and now requires that their users use it?????? can you say monopoly?????
oh yeah I used to do 90 percent of my overseas sales via western union and UPS decides western union is prone to fraud so they tell people not to use it and you cannot mention it in your autcions without getting the auctions canned. Wow how did an over 100 year old company get from respected to merchants of fraud with pay pal being less than 10 years old on top?
boggles the mind. |
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Joined:
July 2002
Posts: 1900
| Sounds like Paypal and UPS are still on their honeymoon... Western Union has never failed me in any transaction. If Ebay requires me as a buyer to use paypal, they lost my business forever. |
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Joined:
January 2005
Posts: 161
Location: Atlanta GA | In my mind the push towards PayPal is more subtle than them just saying "you have to use PayPal". The implication is that you can send payment anyway you want, but if there a problem the response from eBay will be "You should have used PayPal.
Lets say you send a guy $500 for a guitar, he cashes the WU wire or check and doesn't send the guitar. Can you call WU and ask for the money back? In the old feedback system you had this Marshmellow Hammer you could hit the seller with and now you don't (and it went both ways). At least if you used PayPal they would refund the money and try to resolve it. In theory.
I'm not promoting PayPal, but it is a form of hedging your bet in the case something goes wrong. And eventually something will go worng on either side of the transaction, and short of the feeback system you have nothing otherwise. So in the OFC, the discussion threads will move from "Oh I hope the guitar doesn't get stuck in a cold truck in Pittsburg over the weekend" to "I just hope the seller shipped it". |
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Joined:
February 2002
Posts: 5750
Location: Scotland | "If Ebay requires me as a buyer to use paypal, they lost my business forever"
Like they'll care. There were some stock market figures in a music trade mag this month. Publicly-traded music or music-related companies with market capitalization in the billions:- 1st - Apple Computers, $168Billon, 2nd - Ebay $48Billion. The only "real" music company anywhere near was Yamaha at just under $5billion. Ebay are huge, and as a result they can do pretty much anything they like and get away with it. Ebay is like flying with any Airline, You have 2 choices, don't fly or bend over and take it. |
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Joined:
January 2006
Posts: 5881
Location: Colorado Rocky Mountains | Originally posted by Watchme22:
In the old feedback system you had this Marshmellow Hammer you could hit the seller with and now you don't ... Isn't it only buyer feedback that is being discontinued? |
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Joined:
February 2004
Posts: 2487
| I only "USE" ebay now to sell items I need to get going in a hurry. They are really creating a monster of a monopoly that you just can't ignore. Between Ebay/Paypal fees and shipping it costs around $200 to sell and send a $2000 guitar.
I don't like it but if I consigned it it would cost me twice that or more so I will still use ebay. I think they know this. Just like FUEL, they know your going to pay for it. |
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Joined:
December 2001
Posts: 10583
Location: NJ | so I don't take pay pal. I take credit cards LIKE ALL LEGITITMATE BUSINESSSES.
Give me one additional advantiage you have using pay pal that you don't have using a credit card.
you have to dispute the charge any way you look at it. And what many people don't realize is that the item HAS to be returned to the seller. Many buyer scammers out there think that they can keep the item and cancel the charge WRONG. the first question the credit card company asks is "did you return the item"
pay pal is just another way to take money. As a legitimate business who pays for merchant services, I find this disgusting. The fact that e bay requires you to take pay pal is stupid.
Some of the "old timers" who would sell in the buy and sell papers or the vintage mags would accept postal money order only. Why? they can cash it at the post office and there is no paper trail.
So you take pay pal now you have to declare income, pay state sales tax etc. Do you think e bay is going to balk at providing information to the feds or state govt on your account? hell no and how friggin convenient is it for them to be able to show how much $$ you took in along with what kind of business you have.
I hate this subject. |
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Ebay stops Seller's Feedback of Buyers
