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Ebay just killed themselves

Yeah that thing is a real annoyance, it destroys the URL too. You can't click back to get it again. As bad as eBay is, it is still prefereable to the 'request-a-quote' used hardware sites. Tried these recently, "request-a-quote" means "we-dont-have-it" At least with ebay you get a price. But still I agree with all the criticisms.

@GiGaBiTe Does AI traffic differ from standard web crawlers significantly? Don't think AI bothers with my site. I just want to say how much I love love love AI, not because its great, because in 5 years it will be our overlord, read this and spare me.
 
They dont tell you the fees. Its all cryptic. And it fluctuates. There is no ryhme reason or firm documentation explaining precisely what the feesnare. And they engineered it thst way unpurpose.

They are behaving EXACTLY like a company I worked for that stopped giving pay breakdowns. Then turns out was misclassifying their employees as contractors while Keeping our tax payouts.

But 20 years ago we started a class action lawsuit.. today everyone is just a bunch of pansies and just leta companiea do what they want.

Sorry if you were a regular seller youd know all this. Is incredibly shady with no figures anywhere easy to find.
 
mR_Slug said:
Does AI traffic differ from standard web crawlers significantly? Don't think AI bothers with my site. I just want to say how much I love love love AI, not because its great, because in 5 years it will be our overlord, read this and spare me.
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Yeah, it differs significantly.

Normal web crawlers will systemically read the whole website by following links and delving into the website like a tree. They also generally don't read the same resource more than once, unless it is a necessary link to read other unread content. They also generally follow robots.txt and won't go places you tell them not to. They read this file first, before trying to crawl your website. You can expect these crawlers to regularly crawl your site, but they won't keep downloading resources that they determine hasn't changed since the last crawl. Alexa, Google bot and Internet Archive Bot, generally behave themselves.

AI crawlers on the other hand are all over the place. They will read random files and often get stuck on a single resource and start reading it over and over again. Sometimes hundreds or thousands of times over hours or days and won't stop until blocked. Different AI bots get stuck on different files, never looked into why. It can be a random binary file, or it can be a cascaded style sheet or a text file. AI bots generally come from datacenters like AWS or Azure Cloud, where you can rent enormous pipes for cheap and keep changing the address to prevent them from easily being blocked.

SEO crawlers behave similar to AI bots, but they tend to get stuck less often on random files. But they generally do not honor robots.txt (if they even read it at all) and will just keep reading as much of your site over and over again. These historically were easier to block, because they came from the same location every time.

Before Cloudflare, I'd semi-regularly have a SEO crawler try and crawl my websites. Some time later, I'd get an email sent to one of my catch-all email addresses for those websites with some Indian SEO scam company telling me that I'm not search engine optimized. They'd tell me that if I give them some comically large amount of money, they can fix my website for me and get me "top rated".
 
@GiGaBiTe thanks for that link.

Yeah ebay stands in between of what they could maximally charge, and what they must earn to enable the facilities they must. Their buyer protection is good, when seller fked me up I never had to go through anything, just click "the item didn't show up" and that's it.

Their guitar/basses fee is low because they want to attract customers, they're not ranking high in that area. I am a musician, and I almost never check ebay stuff. I would be very hesitant to buy a guitar over ebay.
 
VERAULT said:
They dont tell you the fees. Its all cryptic. And it fluctuates. There is no ryhme reason or firm documentation explaining precisely what the feesnare. And they engineered it thst way unpurpose.
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While their fee structure is complex and a headache, they tell you exactly what fees you're being charged for. When I was selling regularly, I knew exactly which fees I was being charged for. The few times I helped other people sell on ebay since then, nothing has changed in how they structure their fees, and there weren't any surprises if the item sold.

VERAULT said:
Sorry if you were a regular seller youd know all this. Is incredibly shady with no figures anywhere easy to find.
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I *was* a regular seller, and I *do* know all of this. I sold regularly on ebay for years. All I can tell you is to read the seller help page and read all of the fine print when you're listing an item, and you won't get any "surprises". Ebay also shows you the fees you're being charged in the seller hub in payments. Even when making a listing, it will tell you what will cost extra if you want more than just a standard listing.

seaken said:
What does everyone think about local apps on your phone for selling? Like Offerup or Letgo?

Seaken
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Never heard of either of them. From a brief look, it seems like Offerup wants to be an "ebay lite" and charge a fee for non-local sales. Both Offerup and Letgo seem to be free for local sales. They have about as much risk as meeting someone on CL or FB marketplace.
 
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Last year I sold a Ryzen 9 7950X on eBay and they charged me 15%. And that's when I quit.
 
When selling anything on ebay, best charge 30-35% more than your going rate if you actually want your going rate. Or save the receipts and write it off as a loss on your taxes. Amazon is more in the range of 45-50%.

Also, don't forget your payment processor, they charge fees too. Paypal was historically 10%, but it looks like it may have gone down in recent years, since they now have to compete with venmo, Apple Pay, Zelle, etc.

Something else for Ebay sales, combine the shipping cost in the price, rather than list shipping separately. There are lots of idiots on ebay that don't look at the shipping cost when looking at the item and will kick up a big stink about it and try and get you to lower the price. I'd also recommend only selling within your country, because international shipping is a huge headache, even with the GSP. You can set excluded countries in your seller profile, and it will automatically block those countries in your listings. You still need to watch out for P.O. Box scams, escrow and freight forwarders and "I got a buddy in country" scams. Don't give them the time of day, because Ebay won't help you if you lose your item to a scam like those.

I used to get them pretty regularly when I shipped video cards. Lots of scammers back then in South American countries and Puerto Rico. They'd send me silly messages about my items being too expensive and demand the price be lowered and shipped to them.
 
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Haven't had much time to actually mess with eBeh latley. But now I am seeing a pattern that if I review more than a few dozen bookmarked items, it will insist on "verifying" my browser, which of course does not work right.
 
Just wanted to share my experience because I’m really frustrated with a restriction eBay put on my account.
All the “Item Not Received” (INR) cases I had (they were 5) were resolved - either refunded or replaced. A few of them were simply parcels held at US customs because of the recent law changes there. I refunded the buyers straight away, but eBay still counts those cases against me. In one case I even have clear proof of delivery, yet it’s still showing as INR.
When I look at my Seller Standards, I’m Above Standard globally and even Top Rated in the US. No late shipments, no unresolved cases, buyers are happy. On paper everything looks great.
Yet somehow I’m hit with a global selling restriction that just doesn’t reflect my actual performance. I’ve sent in all the screenshots, tracking proof, and appealed, but so far it feels like nobody is actually reviewing the details.
Has anyone else been in this situation where customs delays or resolved INR cases still damage your metrics? How did you manage to get eBay to look at it properly?
 
Zare said:
@GiGaBiTe thanks for that link.

Yeah ebay stands in between of what they could maximally charge, and what they must earn to enable the facilities they must. Their buyer protection is good, when seller fked me up I never had to go through anything, just click "the item didn't show up" and that's it.

Their guitar/basses fee is low because they want to attract customers, they're not ranking high in that area. I am a musician, and I almost never check ebay stuff. I would be very hesitant to buy a guitar over ebay.
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eBay has had a hard time trying to decide if they want to be The World's Garage Sale (used items, individual small-volume sellers) or Worse Aliexpress (500,000 listings of the same widget from commercial vendors varying by +/- 3 cents per unit).

In particular, they poisoned their Garage Sale well when they started being super-aggressive for "sponsored listings". If I want a new Anker 3-metre USB cable, they're all identical enough that it's in their interest to only show me the sellers who give them a big kickback.

But if you land on a page with, say, one 1828 half dollar, or a vintage hand-drill, they aren't 100% interchangeable and someone might want something marginally different. You win by showing the customer every possible option because that maximizes the chance of winning the sale.

I also suspect they missed their moment when every third strip mall had a "we'll sell your rubbish on eBay for you" shop. If they had turned that into a owned franchise option, they could have cemented themselves as the hassle free "Grandpa's dead, let's just dump their entire estate online and be done with." Back in the early 2010s I did webdev for a small local auction house and asked myself "why would anyone try to sell something of any possible value here; you're not Sotheby's or Stacks-Bowers who can create an event around a high-value auction, and you don't have the entire world browsing and possibly noticing that the old tinplate train or rifle is desirable.
 
So, I ordered a CRT screen, the seller did not protect the package well, and the top plastic on the enclosure broke off. It's not a small crack, but significant.

1756892157920.jpeg1756892179669.jpeg

I cut the tape on the top of cardboard box package and I immediately saw damage and took the photo and contacted the seller, closed the box. So it is still packaged as shipped.

So what are my options here, is this refundable?
 
VERAULT said:
Just thought I would share something. The last computer I sold on ebay, they took $404.71 in fees. What on earth makes them think they can take that much of the sale for doing nothing other than hosting the listing? Thats a HUGE percentage.
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Unfortunately, the fact you used them, and someone paid, and you agreed to the fees makes them think this.

The future of sales are AI based agents accessing a common pool of information to find what you want, and negotiate a reasonable price... Everything from leaving permanent bids "open" to any seller to ranking AI agents based on how often they fail to negotiate the sale to finalization.

But until we get there, Ebay is still the biggest problem and government regulation will keep them in power.
 
Zare said:
So, I ordered a CRT screen, the seller did not protect the package well, and the top plastic on the enclosure broke off. It's not a small crack, but significant.

View attachment 1307324View attachment 1307325

I cut the tape on the top of cardboard box package and I immediately saw damage and took the photo and contacted the seller, closed the box. So it is still packaged as shipped.

So what are my options here, is this refundable?
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Yes, if damaged in shipping, you can get a refund. Even if the damage is slight.
 
I presume it is 'return to seller' option? Package has ebay shipping protection btw.
 
Message the seller first. Then they might be more willing to give you a refund, because if you immediately go for the return option, eBay counts that against them as a "defect".
 
I've been a long-time eBay buyer only. Thought about selling a few items, but read many stories of sellers being ripped off or scammed with no recourse. Are there any seller protections on eBay? Is it safe to sell valuable (higher-dollar) items on eBay?
 
It's safe to buy high dollar items on ebay. Ebay transfers the risks to the seller.

Is it safe? Sure, but only within the risk framework Ebay provide, and most sellers feel that this framework isn't ideal. This is why most sellers go to extreme lengths and carefully package the items, and sometimes ask the buyers to waive any risks outside of using Ebay shipping services. The closer you get to Ebay and their ripoff services, the safer you are.

Mostly, you just put "Local Pickup Only" and make shipping the buyers problem. This is safest because you can document the entire process - when they came, refuse to hand over until they present the barcode for scanning etc.

I have bought from someone like they - they refused to ship because they said it would get smashed in the mail, old plastic etc.. I agreed to take on the risk of shipping. Shipping price was good and they sent it, and it all got smashed in the mail as expected, but the outer case survived and the internal components survived - just the internal structure including the monitor support was all plastic and disintergrated. How the monitor survived being smashed around is a miracle, but it's repairable and I took that risk on, so the seller had it all documented. I could have still made life difficult for them, but any transaction with another person can go pear shaped.

Talking to your customer and explaining things bluntly helps a lot. "I can only wrap this in bubble wrap. There is no insurance. If a courier takes it, it will arrive with damage, which could range from minor cracks and repairable items, to completely smashed to bits. I won't guarantee it's safe arrival unless you agree to full insurance costs" type communications work well.

There's still some residual risk, but overall stuff still gets sold, so in the long run, you will get some losses, but should overall still get value from it.

None of this excuses Ebay for ripping people off and gouging though, which they do.
 
ftcnet said:
I've been a long-time eBay buyer only. Thought about selling a few items, but read many stories of sellers being ripped off or scammed with no recourse. Are there any seller protections on eBay? Is it safe to sell valuable (higher-dollar) items on eBay?
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No, there are no seller protections on Ebay, which is one of the reasons I stopped selling there. The last sale I did on the platform, the buyer was an idiot and didn't understand how to use the item and forced a fraudulent return because of buyer's remorse. Cost me a bunch of money in return shipping and fees.

In the mid to late 2000s, they started removing options for sellers to leave neutral or negative feedback on buyers, then they started removing fraud protection and protection from stupid buyers.

If you have high-dollar items, I would DEFINITELY recommend you NOT sell on Ebay. There has been an explosive growth of fraud in retail channels over the last 5 years or so, and the trend only seems to be getting worse.
 
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