A Small Rant About Demanding Ebay Buyers...

And lest anyone think I'm just taking the seller side of any issue, roughly 40% of my 6500+ feedback on ebay are as a buyer. Over the years I've been through the wringer on both sides of the table, so to speak.

Compared to "the good old days", over the years ebay has increasingly promoted a culture of "buyers can do no wrong", where there are no bad buyers, only bad sellers. From removal of neutral and negative feedback for buyers (which allows scammers to run roughshod and extort sellers) to communicating on any given issue one set of information to sellers but imparting different information to buyers, thus creating an expectations gap.

We're going to encourage (on the road to "insist upon") free shipping because, well, buyers expect that!

We're going to slowly but surely phase out anything but same-day handling time for all orders because every casual/part time seller is perfectly capably of offering the same service as Amazon Prime and we DESPERATELY want to be Amazon!

We're going to up the return window from 45 days to 180 days for pretty much any reason including buyer's remorse, just pick a different reason in the dropdown list and voila! The seller has to eat all costs associated on a return.

Oh, and to rub salt in the wound, if a buyer returns an item, the seller's fees are not automatically refunded (unless you opt into ebay's automated free returns for any reason scheme, which like the Global Shipping Program, is a recipe for disaster), but rather the buyer is asked if they agree to not complete the transaction. All a peeved buyer has to do is say "no" and BLAMMO! No final value fee refund, even though the merchandise was returned.

There are more, but enough.

The point is that ebay has created an entitlement culture that sadly mirrors what we see in many areas of society today, where everything the buyer wants, the buyer gets, and it endlessly ratchets up buyers' expectations. Everything is free, and nothing is out of bounds.

What prompted this post is some experiences in the last 2 weeks. I was able to buy some very nice world currency (banknotes) here locally, including some very high grade material from the 1940s-1970s that is actually somewhat scarce. I've been listing them and it's been a feeding frenzy. Stuff selling within hours of my posting even though I'm pricing the material VERY aggressively, in many cases above full catalog value. Multiple offers coming in simultaneously for items.

It's a great thing, don't get me wrong, but I'm amazed at how many buyers there are out there that get outright ANGRY if you decline their offer or won't negotiate down to the price THEY want.

Newsflash: If it's a fixed price and/or Best Offer listing, the SELLER gets to decide what it ultimately sells for, not the buyer. Auctions are a different animal (which is why I don't use the auction format); there the buyers determine the final price.

If a seller won't accept your 20 cents on the dollar offer, that's their right. You as a buyer don't have the right to purchase at any price you want.

It doesn't work that way.

Sigh. Humans. They're a pain.

/rant

Dan - out of curiosity, if it is a feeding frenzy and you are getting multiple offers, why aren't you selling by auction rather than BIN? Aren't you worried you are leaving money on the table?

It's a feeding frenzy in certain areas (country, era, etc.) not across the board. Admittedly, I've been out of currency collecting long enough that I don't have confidence in my ability to predict current areas of demand.

By using fixed price rather than auction I am giving up "moon money" for the sake of minimizing downside risk.

If I leave money on the table, but am still making money overall, I'm fine with that. I don't need to squeeze every penny out of every item. I just need to guard against losing my butt.

Good question though. Different methods and risk tolerances for different folks...

"Don't like ebay? Don't go there"

https://goscf.com/t/56826&SearchTerms=Dreck

Sigh. Are you being deliberately contrarian? I'm not talking about ebay itself, just one particular aspect of it.

I don't take offers on my items for that reason. (Some users will still extend offers via messaging, and they can be dealt with when they occur).

I typically run items at auction first, with a start price set so that I limit downside risk. Sometimes when I have a lot in an item it will go up as buy it now at the price I want, but that's the exception.

I guess I've sold enough through Best Offer over the years (especially handy if you're uncertain as to the market value of an item) that as a general rule I think it's worth the hassle. Your mileage may vary.

I've mentioned this before, but it's also a way to vet potential buyers. Before you accept, counter, or decline, you can take a look at their seller feedback, or more importantly the feedback and comments they have left for others. It can sometimes give you a heads-up as to potential problems if you accept the offer. If it's a buyer that leaves a lot of negative or neutral feedback, that's a warning that they may be a particularly demanding or unreasonable buyer.

@revenuecollector. Just curious as to how often you have to deal with those buyer who throw a fit when you won't sell at THEIR price? If they tried the same in a retail store they would be asked to leave and if request refused the cops could be called.

revenuecollector - I've been ranting about ebay for years but what can you do. I used to about the paypal charges on a minor sale - which are ridiculous, then I went through the roof when they started taking their piece off shipping charges, and yes the "customer is never wrong thing" is truly annoying ....... but for me it hit the fan the day I lost a dispute with a buyer and ebay-paypal took a refund from my MC account because I did not have sufficient funds at paypal. I consider that theft. Regardless of all this - I'm still a seller and an occasional buyer - but it is a toxic environment we work with.

As a general rule, not very often. I think the material I listed brought out a lot of people who really want it, but (pure guesswork here) I think that the most pushback is from people who recognize the scarcity but simply can't afford it at current market rates, so they're frustrated. A couple of the notes I've listed have no other currently or previous (within the history that ebay retains) examples.

Frustration if I am pricing something far above market rates without specific redeeming qualities is understandable. But for example, if I'm not willing to come down to 25 cents on the dollar to meet a certain customer's desired price, but then sell the same item at 75 cents or 100 cents on the dollar, how can anyone claim I'm being unreasonable or overpricing? It's what the market will bear.

Also, there's what I call the Craigslist Crowd. No matter what you price something at, regardless of how cheap, they will always want it at 25-50% of your asking price. You could post a set of Zeps for $250 and they would try to get it for $150... or get you to take payments... or trade you a stolen iPad for it. But I digress.

The more fresh or unusual the offering, the more these folks come out of the woodwork. Luckily, it also draws out the people willing to spend.

You have to take the bad with the good.

See I don't think PayPal's charges are unreasonable... as a general rule.

I don't like that they keep the base 30 cents on refunds. Also, I find their currency conversion rates to be incredibly slanted in their favor, well below XE or bank currency rates.

But overall, PayPal's fees are a part of doing business; you're paying for the convenience. It beats paying for a traditional merchant card account and the monthly minimums/flat rates, especially if your sales are sporadic or cyclical.

What gets annoying is when a buyer buys a cheap stamp and pays... then buys another one and pays... and another and pays... and then wants combined shipping after the fact. They don't realize that for every extra payment they make, that's 30 extra cents PayPal is getting that otherwise I would, so thus reduces the amount I can combine shipping.

But that's a problem with the buyer... or more accurately ebay, since they make no effort to educate buyers about this. It's not PayPal's fault.

As a general rule, once you factor in the cost of shipping materials (I use cardboard mailers to protect stamps, print everything on labels, etc.) and the fact that both PayPal and ebay take their cut on shipping, I ususally am losing money on shiping. But that's part of the deal. I price my goods accordingly to compensate.




Back when ebay implemented this I was a bit miffed, but in retrospect ebay HAD to do that. There were sellers (especially a lot of Asian sellers) listing things for $1 + $99 shipping to get around ebay fees.





I've never experienced a PayPal clawback firsthand. I've had my account go into the negative when a dispute has been filed and the funds put on hold, but that only meant that the next time I mad a PayPal payment of any kind I had to pay the underage in addition. They've never pulled anything from a credit card or bacnk account.

Then again, any time this has happened, which has only been a handful of times in 19 years, I've alweays tried to resolve the negative balance within 24-48 hours, so perhaps I never allowed it to get to the stage where PayPal felt the need to "go get the money".

A dealer at a local stamp show who also sells on ebay recently told me that she had a PayPal chargeback from a Chinese buyer four months after purchase. The buyer claimed it was an unauthorized payment. The dealer had no recourse and even Ship Insure didn't cover it as it was past so many days.

As for buyers who pay for one thing at a time - that's why I have in every item description that the buyer needs to wait or request an invoice when buying multiple items. Most buyers are pretty good about that and repeat buyers already know I combine items for shipping, but there's always one or two buyers per auction who just can't wait for an invoice. I actually had one buyer pay for 20 items separately. A newbie.

Sigh. Humans. They're a pain.

That about says it all. I worked in the service industry for almost 40 years and the stories I could tell - - - . I am convinced that there also are people out there who create an incident out of boredom or some other reason I really don't care to know.

What upsets me is that I sell on ebay best offer and the person will send his offer usually a low one then I counter and then he sends another and we agree. But some send a low first offer and then I counter and then they offer even lower than their first bid! How absurd. And then they tell me they really want this item. I just don't respond anymore to that crappy etiquette.

Amazon also charges fees for shipping when I send items out from my warehouse and I'm sure it's because in the past sellers charged $2 for an item and $50 for shipping. On ebay, I remember that this was not a characteristic limited to only Asian sellers. Many sellers employing these tactics were from Europe as well as the US and Canada. It would not be too difficult of a problem to solve on either platform, but neither company is motivated as commissions on things like postage is a money-making machine.

When buyers become incredulous about OBOs, I simply delete the message and move on. What they do and how they behave is on them; how I react is on me. I know they are being cheesy so I just ignore them and their messages. If it gets bad enough (rarely), I do block them from buying or bidding as there is nothing to lose on my end when blocking a buyer who doesn't buy.

I do really hate that even though my ebay lots clearly state that buyers pay for return shipping, ebay forces me to pay it anyway regardless of the reason for the return. Why have optional shipping and return policies in writing if ebay will do as they please anyway?

I sell a lot on ebay - don't get me started.