@marnotom! wrote:
The issue I don't understand is why a buyer would continue to beat her head against a brick wall and try to deal with GSP sellers who--in her words--are often like a 12-year old.
As I've said before, the GSP doesn't transform poor sellers into brilliant ones. Sellers using the GSP inappropriately haven't done their homework and may not be even aware that they're in the program. They may think that they're still offering shipping to the United States only.
My experience in dealing with "Ships to: United States" sellers has largely been more hassle than it's worth and so I don't try dealing with them anymore. To me, many GSP sellers are just "Ships to: United States" sellers in disguise and, thus, not worth my time.
If your experience is different, more power to you, but you seem to alternately post that the GSP somehow makes things "difficult", the sellers are happy to ship directly to Canada, and that the sellers are frustrating to deal with. If you don't understand my confusion arising from these mixed messages, so be it.
The GSP is a symptom, not the sole problem, the GSP is in fact a gross overcomplication that makes for increased confusion, etc. One should not have to quit their job to spend enough time to understand how eBay works. Thing is with how eBay is constantly "improving" it's practically a full time job in itself to keep up with eBay.
This is what I keep saying, eBay's employees are full time, they're constantly submerged (and getting paid for it) into eBay culture and so forth — and is likely why they see nothing wrong with the current approaches. HOWEVER, most people (both buyers and sellers) do in fact have lives outside of eBay and simply want to use a simple, economical means to sell their stuff with the minimal hassle, they should not have to spend the equivelent of a full time job reading FAQs, forums and whatnot. If eBay was doing their job, they'd provide a bare bones mechanism for handling the transaction between buyer and seller under the seller's terms (with basic mediation if the buyer didn't get an item and/or in the expected condition) and that's it. There would be no GSP.
I don't want to spend hours upon hours trying to weed through GSP entries, they're becoming just as annoying as those foreign listings where you have 1 out of every 4-5 entries the same thing as a page ago from the same sellers. Notice here how these two items compound each other and makes things even more complicated. There is no way to tell eBay's website software to exclude these entries, causing complications.
Again, eBay should be a basic platform between buyers and sellers with basic mediation in the event of an incident. It should not be a shipping company, it should not be a customs power of attorney, it should not be a package processor it should not be anything of that sort. Regardless if it's a contractor or not doing these activities, eBay themselves are facilitating it.
There's an old saying: Do one thing and do it well. — eBay has failed to do that, instead it wants to branch out and get tendrills deep into every aspect of the purchase. I wonder how long until eBay begins operating their own product warehouses to compete with Amazon and makes it harder for sellers to compete because eBay will get to use their own GSP mechanisms for a reduced rate that no seller could.
Again. Do one thing and do it well.
c!~~_7.JPG "kalvin@ebay.com"){kind=avatar}
