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For me my preference for ebay is also practical. For a Finn, it's the only game in town. Craigslist sellers usually refuse to send international, and our local auction site was essentially ruined by a company drowning out everyone else with 1500 listings of NIB items sold above retail. None of them sell, but the site has free listings so they're just endlessly relisted.

At least the Brits and other Euros on ebay still send to my corner of the world. Rather reasonably sometimes, too.

ne thing that annoys me is when there is like 6 days left it has 'Bids:7' pushing the price up from a 99p starting to like £10 without it being anywhere near the end!, or when pictures say its sprue of bits, or some troops and it doesnt even make an attempt to say what they are, the seller just says 'see pictures'. Yes, the unbelievably terrible pictures where you are trying to work out whether the thing pictured is a goat or a space marine

I fell for one from The Troll Trader of all people. Blurred photo's but a well respected company so I though waht the hell and bought them.

Ten days later, after paying for first class they arrived! Not one single Space Marine was complete. Not one! All of them had bits missing and those who were at the back of the blurry photo had heads missing.

Bastards!

I complained, they ignored me, I sent them back, didn;t get a refund for about 3 weeks, then they banned me from bidding on any of their stuff. Ignorant, rip off tossers.

breathe, must remember to breathe.

Agamemnon2 wrote:
At least the Brits and other Euros on ebay still send to my corner of the world. Rather reasonably sometimes, too.

Actually international buyers are my biggest business. I charge a starting fee of $5.00 and then $0.50 per auction after that. If you buy so many we are starting to cut off money as some people would end up paying $17-$20 on shipping and that wasn't right. Like I have said to people in the past the only real way to make a solid penny on ebay is to sell in massive bulk. My bits store has been in increasing at a rate of $2-$3k a month, and though I hate that everyone has to dip into my koolaid I still walk out well on top. As per the shipping the costs lie in matterials and time really. Though I hate hand writting 20-30 customs forms a night the money makes it worth while.

In the end ebay is a business too, and you don't get as successfull as them without pissing a few people off. Most of the ebay store owners I know love it as it has opened new markets for us. Heck today I shipped to France, Italy, Spain, and Australia (the last two being major customers of mine!!). Normally with all I have spent on advertising I haven't gotten anywhere near the numbers I do on ebay through my webstore. I understand a lot of your compalints but I personally say that ebay rocks!!

As per the shipping the costs lie in matterials and time really. Though I hate hand writting 20-30 customs forms a night the money makes it worth while.

I hate writing them too! That's why I was so happy to find out I could just hit a little button and let ebay fill them all out for me, and hit the 'print' button.

Go to 'my ebay', pull down to 'Summary', find 'preferences', and set up shipping by USPS through ebay. You print your lables while on the Ebay side of things, without going over to paypal. I hadn't shipped overseas for a bit, and was delighted to find out that they'd set it up so that ebay propagated all the info over to the customs forms you needed, and they printed along with your prepaid shipping lable.

I always ship through ebay actually, just all of my overseas is first class generally, and they don't have that up yet :(.

That makes sense. I'm not doing bitz, and my work schedule is so hectic, I hate running in to the PO for customs forms, so the only things i ship overseas are larger/more expensive items.

Aye... 400+ auctions ended today all are shipped via first class.

I'm an eBay power seller 1000+ 100% 10 years too.

I still do eBay because I am good at it and old junk becomes money.

But it is not what it used to be. Sellers take all the risks, pay all the fees, and get almost no protection. Here's some insider insights:

EBAY FEEDBACK IS COMPLETELY BROKEN
The Feedback system is completely broken, buyers can NEVER get negatives. I EARNED MY 1K, under different rules than those. They need to separate meaningless positive feed back as a buyer and count it distinctly from hard earned seller positives, its completely misleading to stack them all together.

FORCED PAYPAL EXTORTION
They have limited payment methods sellers can accept, you can't even put the words 'checks and cash' in an auction anymore. I use to take cash, checks and money orders, it was riskier and slower but it worked fine, sometimes even in person for free shipping on local exchanges, they said it was to 'make the community safer', but it was really to get more paypal margins on all transactions.

SHIPPING MARGIN TACTICS
Its been a seller trick for years to get around the eBay % based fees by building some costs into the shipping fee, a penny item and 15$ shipping, they corrected it, now they have limited what a seller can charge for shipping in several categories like movies and Games. What happens when you are shipping an estate sized collection? The system will only let you post the maximum they say a single item will cost to post. Furthermore eBay is constantly advising sellers to offer free shipping (effectively building your shipping into the starting price), they say its to 'increase buyer interest', but the reality is then they get to take margin on it.

FOREIGN REFUND EXTORTION
Through the paypal buyer protection program ANY foreign (non US here) buyer can keep anything they want that wasn't shipped as registered mail international by simply claiming they never got it. Now that they cant even get a negative feedback as a buyer they can do it over and over and over! Unless a seller can provide a delivery confirmation number verifiable online from USPS or Royal Post paypal will automatically reverse the transaction at a buyers no delivery request. They even IGNORE customs records as proof of mailing for shipping confirmations. US->European Fraud is rampant.

KEEP NEW SELLERS OUT
Unless you are at least a bronze tier power seller your auctions are not prioritized in search results, meaning others (power sellers) with like items will always show up before you. This makes it hard for new people and low volume members to even compete with similar items, even at lower price points.

There's a lot more, do some research and check the eBay forums for the endemic seller problems they have been ignoring, and in some cases agravating for years! Good luck out there, BEWARE.

Augustus wrote:

EBAY FEEDBACK IS COMPLETELY BROKEN

The previous feedback method was broken too. Sellers would routinely hold back feedback, give bad feedback in retribution etc. It was much worse for buyers under the old system. I can see why they changed it.

So you're on the buyer side.

Ok, how about this: negatives drop off seller accounts after a year.

Why? To sweep away the mistakes and let sellers look better than they really are.

It's a completely gamed system.