Has Ebay lost the plot?

[Louis Balfour]

Since 2000 I have used Ebay to sell "stuff" that has become surplus in my life. I have never sold there as a business.

Over the years, it has become less friendly as a place to sell. But today, it is looking unviable.

I sold a chair a few weeks ago and the buyer didn't pay. Ebay has charged the fees and their system for cancelling the sale and recovering the fees seems not to be working. I re-sold it and have been charged fees twice.

Today, I have sold some children's shoes and Ebay says I have to post them within 2 days. But there is no payment in my account and apparently won't be for 3 days. So I am required to post the shoes, incurring postage costs, without knowing that I have the money - with Ebay as an intermediary, who it seems are becoming increasingly flaky.

I am wondering whether it has reached the time where I need to abandon the 'bay.

[Spare tyre]

Not sure

It might have changed, but you can tick the require immediate payment button in future


Gumtree for me now

[Big Rig]

Being discussed at length here, basically they're binning PayPal and using themselves as the payment merchant.

https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&...

[InitialDave]

The fees one is odd. If the buyer said "no, I don't want it", you can use the cancellation option for it being their decision, and after a few days to confirm it, Ebay will refund the fees back to your seller account. If they simply never contact you, you can raise a non paying bidder case, and if they still don't pay, again, they'll refund the fees.

As for requiring postage of items before payment, I've not had that, I had a buyer take a couple of days to pay recently, and I only got the "you've been paid, time to ship" notification afterwards.

I have found Ebay's help contact (by phone or messenger) to be pretty good for untangling stuff.

I do miss the days when you could leave negative feedback for buyers, to properly warn others what kind of chimp they may be dealing with. Now it's really only unpaid item strikes that get logged, and you can filter your acceptable buyer profile to exclude once they have two (i think? Maybe three?)

[Louis Balfour]

Yes, the fees thing is odd.

I've had an email from the buyer of the shoes, she sent me a screen shot of the Paypal payment. It's not in my account though, so maybe Paypal is the issue for that one.

[Dan_1981]

Used it for years - only as a private seller selling my old / unwanted stuff and to bu things.

Sold about ten items over the last couple of months. Everything sub £300 value. Of those ten 4 have had problems.

One was genuine and damaged in transit - parcel force are still investigating two months later.

One 'lost' in transit. Royal mail paid out instantly. Was it lost... Who knows.

Two others both of which were received 'faulty' and despite no returns being seleveted as they were not as described eBay instantly froze the funds and told me I had to accept a return. No way to argue so agreed to pay for return postage rather than offer a discount or allow the seller to keep item. In both cases neither buyers returned the item or entered into discussion and after 20 days the cases were closed and my funds released. Seemed to me that both buyers were hoping for me to offer a discount.

Maybe I've been unlucky over these last few items but have never had any issues with several hundred sales over the years.

[Scrump]

Big Rig said:

Being discussed at length here, basically they're binning PayPal and using themselves as the payment merchant.

https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&...

Let’s stick to that thread.