What are the worst parts of ebay?

What do you guys think?

Will

Edited October 26, 200817 yr by hls30.com

1) Sellers from Buffalo NY who say they won't ship to Canada!

2) The Paypal system that resolves a dispute in your favor and get you NONE of your money back after getting screwed by a seller.

3) The 'new' ebay motors display and search format.

Im sure I'll think of other stuff...

The one that burns my butt the worst about Paypal is I still have open issues from four years ago-like I am going to let Paypal off the hook for refunds due to non delivery they told me they could give me!

Will

I don't know where to start. I started using eBay way back in 2000. I hate having to deal with it now, especially to sell. But for uncommon items, if you don't live in a large metro area, there aren't many other options.

...as a sidenote. I work in Toronto, and you used to be able to go into a 'pawnshop' and get some great deals. Now, they are all but extinct and theres no more great deals to be had because now everyone has the means to sell to a global market.

Yeah. When was the last time you saw anything special at a swap meet? In the old days, when your project was finished, you sold the left-overs at club swap meets. These days the good stuff never makes it to the local meets, it goes to eBay instead.

I have two items in question at this time. I am completely in limbo with them - Ebay seems to do very little to deal with trouble sellers. My cases are very simple - I won auctions and paid completely (inc. shipping) within a couple of hours of auction endings and the seller didn't ship and won't answer my emails. One item is from August.

I will be adding to the bad ebayer list soon.

Those darn fees are ridulous!

A $250 auction item sold is reasonable like around $6 bucks in

fees with bold option.

But try and sell the $250 item at a buy it now price and they all of a

sudden they want $24 in final value fees or something like 12% !

And if you notice the first 3 pics used to be free, now it's donw just one pic.

And all of their little extra options have gone way up in price now they

wonder howcome their profit margins are dropping.

I mean come one, ain't like they gotta stock this stuff, they're just a

website that host the sell.

If they lower the pirces they'd sell more in lower price options but a

very good friend og mine, who just past away, was explaining to me the

rule of 33.

I thought that makes since only if you're actually selling something physically in

stock and not just a online service, good greif, lower the prices.

And further more whats with it the completed listings box keep disapearing!

~Z~

I agree with Arne and Zak, you used to be able to find deals at pawnshops, flea markets, garage sales, etc., but not any longer, all you find now is crap.

On another note, it has also driven up the price of cars and parts at a much faster rate than they would have before ebay. Some may say this is good, because the value of our cars has risen, but for people on limited budgets trying to find cool parts, its not a good thing.

Ebay has also given rise to people who have bought out entire inventories of parts from Nissan dealerships and are now selling these "NLA" parts for tremendous profits online.

Edited October 27, 200817 yr by Twentysixouncer
proofreading

Interesting twist - perhaps unrelated, but half hour after I posted my frustration in this thread about the undelivered goods - I got a refund on that very item from Paypal . Made my day. Might be the right time to complain about the lottery.

All of the above, and then some.

As for fees: you pay a fee when you list, you pay a fee when it sells, they you pay another fee when they pay with paypal (an ebay owned company). Thats 3 fees to sell one item. If its a foreign currency transaction the exchange rates are always skewed in the favour of paypal, and when you want to transfer the money from paypal to your bank account, some transfers are hit with a fee also.

Ebay tried to make it so that the only payment method in Australia was paypal and other methods of payment (eg direct bank transfer) were not allowed. They sent out a message informing their customers that this would happen, then had to retract the statement and not proceed, since doing so was a violation of Australian law. So now they force us to offer paypal as a payment method, but we are still allowed to accept payment methods that don't have any fees involved.

I've been using a local alternative when I need to, called www.oztion.com.au because its free to list, and you only pay a fee when it sells. (there's a 1 cent relisting fee, but you can avoid that if you really want to by creating a new listing for the item, instead of clicking the relist button). You aren't forced to accept paypal as a payment method.

Everything about eBay ticks me off! I've got a set of guidlines I follow on eBay for the rare times I'll use it. I never bid on anything from a seller with 0 feedback. I never bid on anything from a seller with a less that 99.5% feedback profile. I never bid on 'private' auctions. I never bid on items where the shipping cost is not stated. I never bid on anything from sellers that sell items you can get elsewhere for less. I don't bid on items with vague descriptions. I'm kind of skeptical of locations like 'Racerville' (sorry Wng!) or 'Nismo Heights' (sorry Blax240!) unless I have had experience with the seller. So as you can see, based on all of that, that I don't bid on eBay items much anymore. It's a hotbed for scammers and really one of the last places I think of when looking for something be it car related or otherwise. There's just nothing in this world that I would have to have so badly that I would take that kind of risk.