Ebay, PayPal Rant
Like a large portion of the population, I’m an Ebayer. I don’t remember exactly how long ago I bought my first item on Ebay, but I know I’ve been selling there, off and on, for about 8 years now.
I use Ebay like most people use yard sales. I sometimes surf around until I find something I like and buy it. Other times I round up a bunch of stuff I have laying around and sell it. I might sell nothing for a year, only to sell 20 things in one month.
I also use PayPal. If you are going to buy on Ebay, having a PayPal account makes life so much easier. You can pay as soon as the auction closes thereby assuring the fastest possible delivery. You also have a record of your payment, and some rights of recovery, if the transaction should go bad.
If you are a seller, having PayPal makes collecting your money so much faster and easier that it is almost a necessity. There are a lot of buyers, like me, who prefer to pay with PayPal.
It’s been a while since I sold anything, so I’m not sure when Ebay, and PayPal, became so unfriendly toward the small time seller.
My wife recently decided that she wanted to start selling. I showed her how to do a simple listing using Ebay’s listing tools. I showed her how to photograph her item, upload the image, create a good description, and most importantly how to create an eye catching title.
The auction ran for the standard 7 days. About day 5 she got her first bid. About day 6 the listing suddenly disappeared!
I checked my email and discovered that Ebay had cancelled the listing because I had used the term “Like New” to describe a product that had been removed from its original packaging and set on the counter for a week before being put away to be sold. To me this constituted “Like New”, however Ebay claims this phrase is “Keyword Spamming” and rather than warn me to change the title, they canceled the listing. I can only hope they notified the bidder!
In searching the Ebay Forums I was able to determine that I was not the only person this has happened to. I also found that the rule about using “Like New” is also not documented in Ebay’s rules. For fun you might want to search Ebay and see how many items are listed as “Like New”. There were over 1200 when I did my search, so we can see that Ebay doesn’t enforce it’s rules very well, or very equitably.
I was quite upset by their action, and having seen Ebay’s fees rise year after year while their customer service has steadily declined, I decided to complain. I filled out a complain form but of course Ebay doesn’t answer their email anymore, I suspect they don’t even read it.
But live and learn! My next assignment was to set up PayPal on my wife’s Etsy account. Etsy is a new, to me, place where people can sell handmade products. When I say “people” I suspect what I am really saying is, “People who are sick and tired of Ebay’s crap!”.
To my amazement, I discovered that PayPal now only allows you 5 transactions a month! What this means is that if I want to sell 10 things on Ebay, I can’t offer PayPal as an option for fear that everyone would want to pay that way.
But don’t worry, PayPal has taken a page from Ebay and for only $30 a month I can sell as much as I want! Is this really an option for the average small time seller? I can’t afford to pay $30 a month when I might go a year without selling anything using PayPal.
Is there any place where a small time player like me can sell anymore? Is there an online payment option for someone like me?
I don’t know when the enormous greed of the average American corporation will end, no time soon I suspect. In the meantime, forget about using Ebay and PayPal unless this is your full time job. You might want to let them know how you feel about their greed by not using their services anymore.