Ebay & Auctions Board: Useful Links, Info & FAQs

mrchris

i bought a extractor fan from delightful-uk on ebay months ago and it has been a pain for months always acting up eventually i contacted the seller who told me to post it back and they would replace it, but i also had to enclose £3.50 for them to post the replacment back, i contacted ebay as i thought this unjust they state that as it is longer than 45 days i am not protected by ebay to put in a complaint. obvioulsly in theory a seller after 45 days can tell you to a running jump as you can do nothing about it.
i have used ebay for years and really never thought about it like this before any electrical products from now on will be bought from local suppliers only.
For the cost i not bothered about taking it further i just wanted to warn other people

virgil_tracy

I've got a load of old Punch magazines , they won't fetch much and they're heavy , how do I list them as "pick-up only "

surfsister

Hiya I just need a bit of help regarding ebay fees. I keep looking under fees nn ebay but it doesn't tell; me the percentage charged or the initial fees either. I want to sell a box set of cds. Any idea how much it is likely to cost me please?

Obviously_the_best

surfsister wrote: »

Hiya I just need a bit of help regarding ebay fees. I keep looking under fees nn ebay but it doesn't tell; me the percentage charged or the initial fees either. I want to sell a box set of cds. Any idea how much it is likely to cost me please?

Depends very much on starting price and how much you get for them

surfsister

thanks found the right page now for this!

virgil_tracy

hi

is there a way I can block someone from buying from me ?

RiaMac_2

Apologies if this has been posted to the wrong board

I am trying to sell my very first item on Ebay and want to show more than one photo without having to pay the fee for extra pictures. I read that you can save your pictures on photobucket then put them in your listing somehow but I have no idea how to do this

Can some very helpful person point me in the right direction please (and keep the language simple as I am useless at this sort of thing) :beer:

Crowqueen

POSTED TO THIS THREAD AT SOOLIN'S REQUEST.

Sellers have many more responsibilities and much more control over their sales than buyers do over their purchases.

Say you didn't receive an item and seller says "tough, I can prove I sent it, go away". You open a dispute and they fight you all the way. You eventually get the money back. Then you leave feedback honestly saying why you didn't have a good experience with this seller.

Seller then negs you back.

Is that fair?

Say the item arrives unwashed, smelly and in poor condition when it looked better on the listing. The seller refuses to allow you to return it. You file a dispute and you get your money back. You leave a neg.

Seller leaves one back.

Is that fair?

Very little after the buyer pays is their responsibility. This is the case not only on eBay but on most commercial sites. The only reason why eBay had negative feedback for buyers was that they thought they could have a "community" - when commercial transactions are governed by a lot of rules which safeguard the consumer and put a lot of responsibilities on the shoulders of the seller, who, after all, has all the benefit of a healthy business and a job, or at least cash-in-hand to spend as they want. The buyer is paying out for an item or a service, and that's where the "community" aspect ends - with that money comes the decidedly un-level playing field between buyer and seller. eBay is not Facebook with money - most if not all buyers are there to buy items, not participate in some game where they pay people but that person can then chew them out for having the temerity to have a problem with the transaction.

So allowing sellers to retaliate was preventing buyers from leaving honest feedback and driving them away from eBay.

There are options to deal with non-payers which mitigate the damage they can do - then you can set preferences to prevent people with strikes bidding on or buying your items. That takes care of virtually the only problem that buyers are responsible for. You don't completely avoid non-payers - there's always the first or second time - but with 2 strikes they are banned from many listings as a result of the tools eBay give sellers, so their incidence should be drastically reduced.

Yes, there are problem buyers and scammers, but there are issues in any line of business with theft or damage; hopefully the reward is worth the risk and if it isn't then you should indeed stay away. For most of the last nine years though, for me, the reward is definitely worth the risk.

Another facet of the issue is that buyer feedback is not something you ever see until the person clicks on your listing, so you can't really be pre-emptively warned about any buyer. As buyers, we have to be informed when we make purchases to avoid sellers who are obviously deliberately ripping their buyers off or failing to live up to the standards eBay (and other sites like Amazon and Play) set for their buyers. That's why negatives for buyers really weren't effective at preventing people from buying.

Plus there were some new EU consumer regulations coming into effect in 2008 which prohibited aggressive behaviour towards customers and the timing of the global change strongly hinted that eBay considered sellers being able to leave negs for buyers fell foul of these laws. Trust me, I was against it when it first came in, but when I had a problem with a seller later on the same year I understood why the system shouldn't in all honesty allow a seller who hadn't sent my item, hadn't communicated with me before I opened a dispute/claim and only got in touch when I left him a negative feedback should be allowed to neg me in return.

It's the buyers' money. Therefore they have considerably more rights to decent treatment than sellers do.

ajwolf

I hope I'm posting this in the right place.

Forgive me if I'm being really stupid but I need something cleared up. I've been familiar with ebay for years but only recently started selling on it and only the odd thing on a free listing weekend.

Why do ebay invoice you monthly for your fees? Aren't your fees taken from the money paid by the buyer to you so you never actually receive that money in the first place?
For example I recently sold something for £16 and charged £2.99 for postage therefore the buyer paid a total of £18.99. Like I said I only listed on free listing weekend so no insertion fees, just final value fees. I received a payment of £18.14 for this item and I assumed the 85p I didn't receive was what ebay had taken as their fee. However my invoice says I will billed £1.60 as my final value fee. Therefore a total of £2.45 taken from the sale.

What I want to know is:
What was the 85p taken off for if it wasn't an Ebay fee?
Why don't Ebay just take the money off your payment from the buyer? (As someone who doesn't use paypal often it would be easier than having to make sure I have enough money in my paypal account)

Thanks in advance

soolin

ajwolf wrote: »

I hope I'm posting this in the right place.

Forgive me if I'm being really stupid but I need something cleared up. I've been familiar with ebay for years but only recently started selling on it and only the odd thing on a free listing weekend.

Why do ebay invoice you monthly for your fees? Aren't your fees taken from the money paid by the buyer to you so you never actually receive that money in the first place?
For example I recently sold something for £16 and charged £2.99 for postage therefore the buyer paid a total of £18.99. Like I said I only listed on free listing weekend so no insertion fees, just final value fees. I received a payment of £18.14 for this item and I assumed the 85p I didn't receive was what ebay had taken as their fee. However my invoice says I will billed £1.60 as my final value fee. Therefore a total of £2.45 taken from the sale.

What I want to know is:
What was the 85p taken off for if it wasn't an Ebay fee?
Why don't Ebay just take the money off your payment from the buyer? (As someone who doesn't use paypal often it would be easier than having to make sure I have enough money in my paypal account)

Thanks in advance

The fee you have already paid was for the paypal element, they charge seperately to ebay and give you the net amount.

It is easier for most people to do a monthly bill for fees as that way all the debits and credits can be sorted out. There are ways of getting a credit back, selling on a relist for instance so paying fees as you go probably wouldn't work at all.

The fees on the £16 item will be in the region of £1.60 and that is on top of the 85p you paid to paypal, so your invoice is correct.