I’m a former eBay power seller , sold on eBay for 3 years and I’ve now seen the dark side of eBay. eBay has been known to be one of the most dominant shopping / auction sites on the Internet today.
When I first started selling on eBay, it was back in 2005, where me and my wife worked together to pack and ship out orders on a daily basis mon -fridays. We started off selling Pirated DVD’s from china, although at the time whenever knew anything about china and pirated movies or anything from china being counterfeit.
It all started nicely, as people would buy our DVD’s , and leave a positive feedback, which encouraged us to sell more. We then started to receive numerous complaints from angry buyers requesting their money back due to the DVD’s not being authentic. This eventually moved us into selling MP3 players from china, which had no brand names (generic) and thus we could not get into trouble. By Sept 2006, we were at our peak time where people were shopping for Christmas, and our sales exploded from sept – dec in 2006.
We have grossed $330,000 for the full year of 2006 according to our accountant. Profits were somewhat around 20-30% which expanded our inventory and allowed me to leave my job , which at the time was working downtown Manhattan at an office job. We hired 2 new people to help with packing, shipping and other duties, while my wife continued to work at her job, bringing in extra money.
Well, this year, 2008 , we have seen so many changes on eBay since the new CEO , John Donahue President of eBay. Fees increased, listings were less controlled by the seller, and of course, the infamous Feedback change back in June 2008.
We saw the effectiveness in the new feedback changes when our 100% powerseller account was quickly dropped to a 94% due to all of the recent neutral feedbacks buyers have left for us in the past, which was now counted towards the feedback system as a negative. Our account started to fall, as people would leave negative feedbacks, as we were selling refurbished items, and some people just weren’t happy with their purchase, not even contacting us first, but would rather jump onto the bad feedback wagon, while eBay simply encouraged buyers to be as honest as possible and pretty much beg buyers to left negative feedbacks towards the seller.
Around August 2008, we received an email from eBay informing us our account is on hold, and will not be able to sell due to buyer satisfaction policy, which of course is a new policy from eBay regarding if a seller maintains more than 5% of negative feedbacks within a 1 month period, their account will be restricted and placed on hold for review of up to 30 days. From this 30 days period we were not allowed to sell on eBay, but still had to deal with previous customer’s issues and questions until eBay would decide our fate.
This was the final straw for us as eBay was clearly degrading its sellers and quickly pushing away the higher and good sellers into other channels of selling. Luckily, we had purchased an ecommerce shopping cart a few months before the new eBay buyer satisfaction policy came into play. We had opened a new website, selling new mp3 players, cell phones, and other electronics we could obtain from reliable vendors. We just got an email, last Friday , 10/10/08 , stating that we are suspended indefinitely on eBay and would not have any chance of appealing their decision.
I have to say, I am very relieved we are no longer part of the eBay community, but rather part of our own community. We have done really well on our website, using channels like Google, yahoo , msn, pricergabber etc.. to promote our business store.
The best part about it, we run the show, not eBay, and there are no huge monthly bills or invoices that will hit us at the beginning of each month again, as eBay’s invoices were from $5k -$9k /month in fees. We were approaching titanium status right before eBay held our account because of the new policy. Nearly 1/4 of eBay’s top sellers have moved elsewhere because of the high fees, unacceptable changes, and eBay’s lack of appreciation for us sellers.
We will enjoy watching eBay go down for all of these bad choices and changes that have been made this year.
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I am selling on eBay and I am doing good, I try and get good quality products and stay away from branded items.
Hope all is going good since you left!
Oh, yes, since I left back in August, or at least was banned, it was the best thing that could ever happend to me.
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I started selling on ebay three month ago as a hobby after my dad died and soon afterwards my husband joined me . It was never our main source of income just side money and I pity those whose only income is generated from ebay,.
They have gotten so outrages that both of us have ended our relationship with ebay andPaypal who puts holds on our funds until there is a confirmed delivery or postive feedback. The only problem is the buyers never leave feedback and our funds are not released upon delivery unless we phone. We are restricted on the ammount of funds we can transfer to our bank accounts to $400.00 per month . I think they are looking for people to work for nothing! They must be in bad fiancial shape.
The feedback system is a fraud all the buyers have a score of 100 and you can no longer tell the good buyer from the bad ones. We have been forced to return money to buyers before they have returned the goods and have gotten stuck several times when there wounderful buyers or should I say scammers never returned the product.ebay treats their buyers like children and their sellers like criminals. It is hard to think that a company under this type of managment can do well,
And I dont know how any seller big or small can last under such hostile condictions.
eBay sucks and I am really sick of eBay !!!
I don’t sell on eBay anymore and let’s stop selling and buying on eBay pls people !!!
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