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I have sold on eBay for quite some time now, but have been pushed closer and closer to abandoning it altogether over this last year.

The increasing fee hikes have so far been my primary reason, but until these last few months, they have been worth tolerating because I made more sales there.

I guess if I had a huge inventory of products and could afford to pay the monthly store fees, the listing fees, the selling fees, and the extra paypal fees, I wouldn’t do much more than complain about it. However, I have traditionally sold sporadically and my best month there to date has been about $800…of which eBay took around $200 between their fees and the PayPal fees.

All things considered it was still worth it, though I think they have been skirting the edge of my limits for a while.

Tonight however is the last straw. I logged into my account to see this:

Lowered Search Standings

The first thing that crosses my mind is the fact that this morning I had a “raised” search standing…so how in the nine hells could I possibly have a lowered search standing with only one new feedback?

Clicking the big glaring red bar, I see this:

I was still scratching my head for a minute until I realized that in the last 30 days, I have only had about 3 feedbacks, partially because I have not been selling a ton of items there due to working on other projects. Still, I get dinged because the post office and packaging providers are raising prices due to gas? Thats a bit stupid in my book.

Perhaps there is more to it, so I check the requirements for raised, just in case:

Uh oh, it looks like one of my customers was at least slightly dis-satisfied with my shipping time. I get that every little bit, especially since people tend to buy on thursdays and fridays…resulting in my not sending things out until the following monday ( our podunk post office isn’t open on saturdays ).

Now, I could see average search standings, but with my average ratings in all areas being between 4 and 5 on a 5 point scale, having my search standings set to lowered is pretty damn insulting.

I guess eBay simply is not for us small time sellers anymore. Imagine if I took a month vacation and had no sellers…my ratings would all be at 0 and I would probably get a nastygram. Somehow I am thinking that eBay has forgotten who is the customer here. While it is true that they provide a service, those of us who sell there are the ones who pay them…so why they are treating sellers more and more as if we are their employees is quite beyond me.

All I can say at this point is I am going to be more than happy to move the last of what I have there over to eCrater and close my eBay store tomorrow.
I guess what irks me the most is the fact that whoever is running the place must be asleep at the wheel. Personally, I don’t like leaving money on the table as it really isn’t the best of business practices.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 16th, 2008 at 6:54 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.