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I've only had four bad trades, one as buyer and three as seller. That's out of about 500+ trades. Two of them were avoidable just by not letting buyers not pay for registered post. It's funny, but however many items "go missing" in the post, it's only ever the ones without proof of delivery.

Of course charging registered post starts to make your postage fees look rather expensive for overseas buyers.

To be honest, that was four bad deals out of about 500 in my total eBay career so it was running at the 1% level JohnHwangDD was talking about.

It wasn't the bad deals that put me off eBay. It was the way everything started to change, for the worse, and the changes kept coming every few months.

1. Allowing buyers to rate sellers on postage, promptness, etc, separately.
2. Removing seller feedback on buyers.
3. USE PAYPAL. YOU MUST USE PAYPAL.
4. Look up any item in the universe and get a list of 700 Hong Kong based sellers offering it for £1.99 and £50 postage.
5. Nearly zero protection for sellers when buyers scam, and not much more protection for buyers when sellers scam.
6. Hassles with PayPal and them using PayPal as a front to get out of their responsibilities when everyone knows they own both companies.

Etc. etc.

Behind it all, the same old scams and new ones were going on, and eBay never bothered trying to stop them or even to prevent the things like excessive postage that were against their own basic rules.

So I quit. And you know what? eBay went bankrupt within a month.

Kilkrazy wrote:It's funny, but however many items "go missing" in the post, it's only ever the ones without proof of delivery.

Exactly so.

This particularly happens in antiques and such. I refuse to ship anything without delivery confirmation, and I always charge for it.

Kilkrazy wrote:
So I quit. And you know what? eBay went bankrupt within a month.

Huh? Ebay went bankrupt?

I just had a bad ebay experience myself... I wanted to order the Angel complete series DVDs for my girlfriend for her bday.. found a guy selling it for $65 so I ordered it.. after I won he got his payment and 2 weeks later I was still empty handed.. I emailed the guy 2 or 3 times and never got a response. I filed a claim with paypal and they weren't able to get ahold of the guy either, so I got my money back. The guy originally had 100% positive feedback then right before the claim it was down to like 40% and all his recent orders either were way wrong or never shipped.

it ended up taking another 2 weeks for me to finally get my money back from the claim. A buddy of mine was saying the guy prolly had his account hacked and stolen...

BigToof wrote:

Kilkrazy wrote:
So I quit. And you know what? eBay went bankrupt within a month.

Huh? Ebay went bankrupt?

Get jokes much?

Necros wrote: A buddy of mine was saying the guy prolly had his account hacked and stolen...

If some people were still receiving orders (as seems to be the case if he was receiving feedback regarding orders being wrong) it's more likely that he
1: had his previous 100% feedback all from buying, and was just a terribly disorganised seller
2: had previously been an ok seller, and got lazy, or
3: handed the account over to someone else (which is against the rules, but some people still do it) and the person who took it over succumbed to either 1 or 2...

If it had been a hacked account, nobody would have been receiving anything.

insaniak wrote:

Necros wrote: A buddy of mine was saying the guy prolly had his account hacked and stolen...

If some people were still receiving orders (as seems to be the case if he was receiving feedback regarding orders being wrong) it's more likely that he
1: had his previous 100% feedback all from buying, and was just a terribly disorganised seller
2: had previously been an ok seller, and got lazy, or
3: handed the account over to someone else (which is against the rules, but some people still do it) and the person who took it over succumbed to either 1 or 2...

If it had been a hacked account, nobody would have been receiving anything.

4: He died

mattyboy22 wrote:

insaniak wrote:

Necros wrote: A buddy of mine was saying the guy prolly had his account hacked and stolen...

If some people were still receiving orders (as seems to be the case if he was receiving feedback regarding orders being wrong) it's more likely that he
1: had his previous 100% feedback all from buying, and was just a terribly disorganised seller
2: had previously been an ok seller, and got lazy, or
3: handed the account over to someone else (which is against the rules, but some people still do it) and the person who took it over succumbed to either 1 or 2...

If it had been a hacked account, nobody would have been receiving anything.

4: He died

I've had that happen twice now..

I used eBay a bunch in the past. Used to a lot of CCG buying and selling there, since you can stick them in a letter and get it anywhere worldwide in a day or two.

Also New Zealand post guarantees small parcels worldwide without charging the earth. Which means when the odd bad apple tries to claim their models don't turn up, they strangely change their tune when someone official gets involved.

Paypal is just awful for account resolution issues. Keep as little money in there as possible, as even the slightest whiff of an issue and you end up with frozen funds.

These days I only use trademe, which is NZ based. And cheap.

I found that about one in thirty transactions has some time consuming issues involved. Usually it's just someone being out of contact or unusually busy, or a screw up by the shipping company. Other times you get grey areas, like the guy who had his models nicked out of his postbox. If they hadn't left the wrapping there wouldn't be a way to tell if I'd just not sent it. We ended up meeting, and he was prepared to pay (again) for the models, I refused since I believed him (although I wasn't sure until I actually saw him, evil cynic that I am). Plus I felt kinda sorry for him, since the reason he'd been away for a week and missed picking the parcel up was that he'd been away for his mum's funeral.

The not as description stuff would make me very nervous about selling anything second hand on ebay. I don't think there's ever been second hand minis I've been 100% happy with lol...