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The Official EBay Discussion Thread


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4 hours ago, CabDriver said:

I'm not sure it applies EVERYWHERE - but everywhere I've lived, the USPS will collect parcels from you for free every day, assuming you've got the postage paid somehow (either with stamps, or by printing postage).  You just book a collection online, and the next day someone comes to collect from you!  Easy!

Wish more sellers knew about this

 

Exactly. That's how I do it.

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8 hours ago, CabDriver said:

I'm not sure it applies EVERYWHERE - but everywhere I've lived, the USPS will collect parcels from you for free every day, assuming you've got the postage paid somehow (either with stamps, or by printing postage).  You just book a collection online, and the next day someone comes to collect from you!  Easy!

Wish more sellers knew about this

 

Yes I can schedule a pickup and before I leave at 6am Monday morning I place my packages on my open porch in full view from the street and unprotected from the morning thunderstorms we have here almost daily .  Then sometime around 2 or 3pm the postal carrier will pick them up , if they're still there .  It would be nice but not everyone can take advantage of this service .

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2 hours ago, TooOld said:

Yes I can schedule a pickup and before I leave at 6am Monday morning I place my packages on my open porch in full view from the street and unprotected from the morning thunderstorms we have here almost daily .  Then sometime around 2 or 3pm the postal carrier will pick them up , if they're still there .  It would be nice but not everyone can take advantage of this service .

I get it Bob - doesn’t work for every situation.  👍🏻

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  • 5 weeks later...

Gotta love people who don't know what they are selling. I am looking at this kit for parts since there is no body shown (despite them listing that it looks complete), I explained this and made an offer for $20. Got countered twice for $35 and then $30, with them saying that "it needs to be painted" the first time. I just declined their second counter since I don't need it that badly.

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9 hours ago, Jordan White said:

Gotta love people who don't know what they are selling. I am looking at this kit for parts since there is no body shown (despite them listing that it looks complete), I explained this and made an offer for $20. Got countered twice for $35 and then $30, with them saying that "it needs to be painted" the first time. I just declined their second counter since I don't need it that badly.

I have asked if a kit is complete and several times they tell me they are no model expert. That tells me all I need to know. I move on because I don’t need a headache..

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4 hours ago, slusher said:

I have asked if a kit is complete and several times they tell me they are no model expert. That tells me all I need to know. I move on because I don’t need a headache..

I'm just glad that there were pictures of the contents, rather than just having box pics and finding out upon opening it that the body is missing.

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I got lured into selling on eBay late August with their 250 free listings a month. I manage to list slightly less than 200 for August, did the full 250 in September and so far 100 for October. 

Before anyone here gets giddy, I’m selling items from my stamp collection. Mostly small town post marks.  I’ve got a success rating of slightly less than 30%. 

I’ve learned to hate their listing process, it assumes everyone is an idiot. I despise the button that pops up during every listing “ask an expert seller for help”.  

And they are so unknowledgeable, many of the fields don’t apply.  And their software will auto fill them with nonsense. For instance my eBay user name has “turtle” in it so it was filling in the subject field with turtle.  I didn’t even notice it was doing this until someone messaged me asking what the item had to do with turtles. Then I had to go edit it out of a lot of listings I already had completed.  And a lot more nonsense like that. And a lot of these attributes are on a three tiered fold down you wouldn’t even know was there.

A few more.. I listed a 1908 registered mail signature card from Buffalo NY to Switzerland. Their software filled in Subject as “animal” and Country of Origin as Switzerland. And decided my item was blue and filled in color field as blue.  Nobody would ever search in postal history category by color.  And of course I had to edit all this out of a slew of auctions since eBay then set them as defaults! I did figure out how to circumvent it all by filling in every useless field with a period. And then never starting a new auction from scratch.

I believe someone here asked why there was a “Make offer” on their listings… because eBay hid that option on a fold down menu you’d never access!  Even then if you price something at a start price of more than 99 cents it puts it in. You have to go in and delete it!  And if you pull the auction back up to edit some text.. it will add the make offer in again!

I learned that one by accident. I listed a set of old Coke advertising postcards for $5.99 plus $1 postage. I no sooner listed it and I get a message I have an offer! I had no idea I was open to offers at that point!  It was a jerk offering a dollar with free shipping. Basically with eBay charging 45 cents for the transaction and 58 cents postage I’d be paying 3 cents to send it to him! Um no! I eventually got my asking price.

Frickin day in the park!

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

EBay has recently totally revamped their listing categories, and search terms.  It is seriously broken.  Here is what one of a members of a model train board wrote abotu the "new eBay" (from the N scale model trains perspective, but not only):

The good, the bad, the ugly: a comprehensive analysis of eBay's N Scale category changes.

Of the hundreds of watches that I have created over the span of many years, only those that were directly related to the former N Scale category have been impacted by eBay's October 12th site changes.

My heavily filtered main N Scale category search is now toast.

Item searches that were filtered to only show N Scale products are now showing listings in all scales.

Excluded sellers and selling locations can still be filtered.

You can no longer filter out unwanted brands or keywords.

You can no longer make the seller ids, feedback, or listing dates visible in the search page results.

You can no longer save searches.

As searches can no longer be saved, new listings related to your saved searches will no longer appear on your personalized eBay home page saved searches feed.

You can longer select how many items are seen on each page of results.

Your page results no longer indicate which items are promoted listings, which with eBay's newly launched PPC (i.e., Pay Per Click) advertising model means sellers are going to be paying for numerous buyer clicks on listings that do not end up in a sale.

Bluntly put, while eBay's minimalist approach might be advantageous for smartphone users, the new categorizations and changes in search filtering were likely made to improve site profitability from a rapidly diminishing group of sellers.

After more than two decades on eBay, I ended my sales on the site earlier this year because of the increased costs and risks that came along with the venue's managed payments mandate.

In addition, along with huge increases in seller pricing and shipping costs, a rapidly diminishing selection of products and US based sellers has made eBay a last stop destination for the majority of my purchases.

 

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Pete, I hear you on the cruddy eBay changes! I surfed eBay a lot on my phone.....one of the categories I had listed that they totally messed up was "Vintage Model Kits". I noticed a HUGE change after I got the last update from them (a few days ago) that nowhere near the number of listings were showing up like before.

It was not unusual to have at least several hundred listings pop up within a few hours. It's now down to a couple dozen which I know is not how it was previously.

I'm at the point where I'll only look for something on an "as needed/wanted" basis and not keep fooling with their screwed up system. 🤯

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It is broke...they've been doing their level best to break it over the last fifteen years or so.  Every time they try to "fix" it, the remedy always seems to involve taking it further away from its origins, and alienating the very people who helped them build it in the first place.

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Totally screwed!

Im hearing the same in my other hobbies.. multiple categories people depend on smashed.  And we’re all getting emails with new mandatory fields in “item specifics” that must be updated that make no sense at all.  For instance in my selling category of stamps/ historic covers (used mail of historic significance), I’ve been ordered to add an attribute of “Color”.. um, envelopes are generally white and nobody would ever search this category by color!  So do I update 400 listings or bow out?

And the thing that absolutely makes no sense is that eBay will auto fill these fields without telling you!  For instance I listed an item with a Blue River, Kentucky postmark. EBay decided the color was “blue” and then copied it onto my next 20 listed before I noticed.  
 

My user name has “turtle” in it… so they started filling in the theme field with turtle.  Then I had people asking me what my item had to do with turtles.

Their work is being done by people who no doubt have no experience in the hobbies, nor have ever sold anything. And I’m believing it’s by off shore people who don’t even speak English!
 

 

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7 minutes ago, Tom Geiger said:

And I’m believing it’s by off shore people who don’t even speak English!

I was stuck on the phone with a Microsoft customer service rep named "Mary Murphy". Yeah. Right. I asked "Mary" if she liked corned beef and cabbage. CLICK!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

m

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Well this explains a lot for me. Like many of you I have specific saved searches for certain model kits and some other oddball items. I get emails for all of these searches every morning.  For the last few days I have been getting emails with no name, I.E. Aurora, but way, way more listings.  Something for trucks I think. I will now just delete that search as it does nothing for me. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

eBay doesn't want you doing searches, they want you to look at everything they are dumping into the category, like all the military kits I'm seeing in the automotive section.

They seem to be modeling themselves on supermarkets, where the main effort is directed at keeping you in the store longer (thinking, the longer you are in there, the more you will see, and the more you will spend on impulse purchases).

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I've turned off most of my saved searches. Either I'd never get any, which is odd, or I'd get things with no relevance to what I am looking for. I have a way to search for what I want. I don't need their listings.

Just my opinion, it seems eBay is now rife with sellers who go to estate/garage/ yard sales and buy stuff cheap thinking they can make a killing on it cause they've heard (insert your purchase of choice here) are worth a ton of money.

I do like to find the ones who don't know their item is worth a lot more than they are asking. I jump on those.

So many listing with virtually no description, just what is auto filled from the title, and "see pics as they are a part of the description". And many of those only have one or two (usually poor) pics.

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Today I was on eBay looking for a large lot of my favorite postal items to sort through for my own collection and sell the rest.

So I went to my usual category and put “lot” as the search term..   I came across a clueless seller who was listing single items.. his auction titles were “Lot #1” and so on.. he listed over 100 items like that!  

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2 hours ago, DPNM said:

Just my opinion, it seems eBay is now rife with sellers who go to estate/garage/ yard sales and buy stuff cheap thinking they can make a killing on it cause they've heard (insert your purchase of choice here) are worth a ton of money.

As I see it, eBay is rife with buy-it-now items with many, many professional sellers selling cheap stuff. Basically a clone of amazon.  It has not been a "large flea market" for a very long time.

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