I've been pwned

Meadows

Just goes to show you need to shop around and not buy into the eBay 'offers'!

RFW

We've been selling a fair bit more on Amazon lately and our Amazon prices fluctuate massively compared to Ebay, especially in more competitive markets.

the_lunatic_is_in_my_head

TKPeters wrote: »

It could also be that the seller uses Fulfilment by Amazon, where their stock is held in a Amazon warehouse & Amazon post it out on their behalf

This is expensive for items not sold via Amazon's site and also the paperwork should include the company's logo rather than Amazon's.

A lot of these sellers lie in their listings and say they use fulfilment but drop-shipping from a different retailer isn't fulfilment (which is when a company processes your stock for you).

martindow

I wonder how much of a risk it is to the seller. Most people are going to compare the Amazon and Paypal prices and a proportion are likely to show their annoyance with the feedback and stars they leave.

RHemmings

martindow wrote: »

I wonder how much of a risk it is to the seller. Most people are going to compare the Amazon and Paypal prices and a proportion are likely to show their annoyance with the feedback and stars they leave.

The seller I bought from has a very high percentage of positive feedback, 99.9% Stars are all displaying as five stars. They're selling over 4000 items a month. Every item of theirs that I checked was cheaper on Amazon. It looks to me that they could be making a decent income out of this and their account should be safe, I'd guess.

As a computer programmer, I wonder if this sort of business couldn't be automated. Write code to scrape Amazon for potential purchases, and compare Amazon prices to past sales on ebay. When plausibly profitable items are found, it would pop up a screen allowing the user to create an ebay sales page that doesn't infringe Amazon's copyright. The listing would then be posted to ebay automatically, and on it goes. If it was possible to automatically redirect the purchases to Amazon, that would then help even more.

the_lunatic_is_in_my_head

RHemmings wrote: »

They're selling over 4000 items a month.

Did you see a VAT number in the business seller info? A lot of these sellers aren't paying their taxes and might be in for a shock one day.

RHemmings

the_lunatic_is_in_my_head wrote: »

Did you see a VAT number in the business seller info? A lot of these sellers aren't paying their taxes and might be in for a shock one day.

Where would the VAT number typically be found? I can't see one, but am not sure that I'm looking in the right place.

alphabet_soup

Is it at the bottom of each listing, in a box I think - just under where the business address is?

RHemmings

alphabet_soup wrote: »

Is it at the bottom of each listing, in a box I think - just under where the business address is?

Yes, there's a VAT number.

Must be a pain reclaiming the VAT from each Amazon purchase and paying higher VAT on the ebay purchase. But it's clearly a large scale business that they're running.

soolin

the_lunatic_is_in_my_head wrote: »

Did you see a VAT number in the business seller info? A lot of these sellers aren't paying their taxes and might be in for a shock one day.

I don't have a VAT number but I do pay tax