over charged on ebay postage. can I please have some good advice?

ballisticbrian

I would like to know if the increase in postal prices last month has impacted the overall number of eBay listings. As a business seller, I am regularly now receiving free listing promotions which didn't used to happen for business accounts.

soolin

ballisticbrian wrote: »

I would like to know if the increase in postal prices last month has impacted the overall number of eBay listings. As a business seller, I am regularly now receiving free listing promotions which didn't used to happen for business accounts.

The categories I sell in seem as busy as ever, it just looks like even the private sellers have moved to couriers.

Also, as we have shown on this forum, the mdium businesses have moved to RM contracts in many cases, so are not paying the headline price for postage anyway.

What I do think will happen is that buyers will be more aware of postage costs and may start looking more at stamp cost for a guide and this will affect smaller sellers, both business and private who have to charge headline RM prices but also add extra on the the stamp.

Looking at an item i have listed today for instance, I am selling it at £3.20 post and packing via MyHermes or £5.40 2nd class Royal mail. There are a few mega businesses selling similar at between £2.75- £3.99 postage, there is only one do free postage. However, the private sellers tend to be dearer, many are offering only RM but charging upwards of £6-£8, one has just listed a very similar item with costs of £10 telling people this is too large for standard RM post and not to bid if they don't agree with his costs.

Now, faced will all that choice what happens if a buyer buys a few from different sellers (and this is a possibility depending on what we have in stock). Will the buyer automatically give 5* to all sellers he buys from or will he share them out depending on what he was charged, reserving 5* to those sellers charging the least.

I admit this is an odd situation in that the item cost is roughly the same from all sellers, but I cannot see those charging nearly 3 times as much as the average still getting 5*

soolin

Also we must not forget that to maintain an account that ebay consider 'good' we need to show headline starts of more than 4.6- and that means we need the majority of our buyers to automatically leave 5*. The moment we have issues with buyers dropping us a star for being uncompetitive against other sellers, we are lost.

StumpyPumpy

What amuses me about threads like this is that if the seller had filled the "envelope" with enough junk packaging to take the weight over 1kg and then slapped a £5.60 stamp on it, I bet the OP would have thought they had got a bargain and would give 5 stars for postage, despite them getting exactly the same service as the actually got.

I object to people selling small things for 99p + £10.00 p&p but I register my disapproval by not buying their product.

I charge actual postage and nothing more because I have a ready source of (free) cardboard boxes and can walk to my local Post Office - I absorb the cost of parcel tape and Paypal myself. But I can understand, particularly with low cost items, how a seller might not be able to do this so needs to ensure all their costs are met, and sometimes this means that they add a small margin of error to their post.

SP

ballisticbrian

You talk about "absorbing" costs but a business is there to make money. A lot of the disagreement over postage costs is because no-one makes clear whether they are talking about personal or business sellers.

soolin

ballisticbrian wrote: »

You talk about "absorbing" costs but a business is there to make money. A lot of the disagreement over postage costs is because no-one makes clear whether they are talking about personal or business sellers.

How does that matter? Whether we are businesses or private sellers it is till the same buyers being asked to leave stars. Are you suggesting that buyers will not leave low stars if someone shows as a private seller and charges more that other people in the same category?

Strapped

Thank the Lord I am now using PPI labels which don't have the price paid displayed. Although as someone above said, no doubt some pedantic buyer will take a guess and decide to hit me with low stars anyway! (And that guess will be wrong because PPI RM24/48 parcels are paid on average weight of a bag full of parcels).

Business sellers are being forced into offering "free" P&P soon anyway, if they want to keep their TRS status, so buyers will be paying more overall, but no doubt they will be happier if they are like the OP. And ebay will be smiling all the way to the bank.

ballisticbrian

How does that matter? Whether we are businesses or private sellers it is till the same buyers being asked to leave stars. Are you suggesting that buyers will not leave low stars if someone shows as a private seller and charges more that other people in the same category?

No, I'm not talking about stars, I'm talking about people claiming that sellers are profiteering from postage charges, as if eBay was a kind of place where you do people good turns by selling your old stuff to them at or even below cost price and whether posters on here can differentiate and understand what legitimate business costs are.

soolin

ballisticbrian wrote: »

No, I'm not talking about stars, I'm talking about people claiming that sellers are profiteering from postage charges, as if eBay was a kind of place where you do people good turns by selling your old stuff to them at or even below cost price and whether posters on here can differentiate and understand what legitimate business costs are.

If stars don't matter then sellers are free to charge what they want.

If a seller truly doesn't care about their stars , then there is no discussion to be had about what is considered 'fair' when the buyer is asked to save stars .

Personally I run my business and private sales exactly the Same and the buyers of my unwanted items sold on my private account get the same treatment as my business customers, I do not not treat them as second class buyers because they are not buying from a business.

Strapped

ballisticbrian wrote: »

No, I'm not talking about stars, I'm talking about people claiming that sellers are profiteering from postage charges, as if eBay was a kind of place where you do people good turns by selling your old stuff to them at or even below cost price and whether posters on here can differentiate and understand what legitimate business costs are.

No, I don't think people can. Printer ink, packing slips, labels for envelopes, return address labels, PPI labels, packing tape, even the ink in a biro - all these things are "free" in the eyes of many buyers. Only the envelope counts. And if you're a larger company that employs staff to pick and pack, then forget it - those costs definitely can not be included in P&P apparently.

And before Soolin pipes up, yes, as a consequence, I set my P&P prices at a level acceptable to the average ebay buyer.