eBay

raphael@ebay.com · ‎06-12-2013

I would like to hear about your insights on what it's like being a Canadian eBay seller. Please post your thoughts here, what works, what doesn't, ideas for improvements to the site or for new features, etc. Please keep the topic on selling.

Note: This is not a thread like our weekly Board Hour. I'll try to stay active on here as much as possible but please keep any questions or site issues (including any comments on what is not working with GSP! ;-)) for our weekly discussions. What I'm hoping to do here is get a sense of your business insights and perhaps even find an idea or two we can look into implementing.

Looking forward to read you!

expressit1 · ‎01-17-2014

I left 1 year ago, I stopped selling mainly because of the ever increasing Canada Post rates.

I sold one item to some obscure country and pay pals grabbing of the funds despite the constant communication.

The Buyer was refunded, and when the honest buyer re paid, after finally receiving the package I was not able to leave any positive feed back on the buyer.

He was a Honest Angel and I wanted to tell the world.

I then realized what just happened. If Paypal refunded the $$ and a scammer actually got the package. I was totally SOL

The time limit to leave feed back is bogus, the small packet delivery time before claim automatically closes and money is refunded is also bogus.

I can understand when there is no communication on the item but when there is an honest attempt to resolve.

Turned me away from selling on E bay .

I listed my 1 st item in a year today.

I saw this thread and thought I made the right decision, but we'll see in 6 days 🙂

comicgeek74 · ‎01-19-2014

Yeah, exactly why I decided to stop selling with eBay for few reasons.

1) Canadian postage rates got higher.

2) When a buyer opens a dispute - PayPal's "power grab" of seller's funds no matter whatever reason (well, eBay DID own paypal)

3)DSR settings - sellers have no say when buyers decide to give lousy stars even when sellers did great job in packaging or shipping. Even with tracking numbers or proof!

All that reasons above was enough to turn me off from selling. I had got lucky dodging 2 "bullets" in the last 2 months - had 2 cases come up against me already. Before that, I did well for 14 years until these two cases popped quickly? That got me thinking "Well, guess the signs are there telling me something". So I leave from there.

Most big-time business sellers can afford the time to keep on selling here. But not for small-time HOME sellers (like me) - it has got to the point where I can't afford the risk now.

Not worth all the hassle as far I'm concerned. With so little seller protection - not good enough.

I can continue as a buyer BECAUSE eBay do offer good protection for buyers only!

viridel75 · ‎07-10-2014

It is a living, breathing HELL. I sell small parts, $3-5 usually, with most of my sales to the US. I take a scan of every posted envelope that goes out the door, yet because they aren't TRACKED, I have absolutely zero recourse when it comes to the Buyer Abuse Program. Let me ask my buyers if they want to pay an extra $20 for Tracking on their $3 items - oh, wait, I wouldn't have any buyers!

So now I have to jack my shipping rates up to finance the fraud and/or postal theft or incompetence that eBay actually ENCOURAGES by their policies. Oh, and it's impossible to become a Top-Rated Seller without using Tracking on 90%+ of your sales. I used to be a TRS, until policy changes just made me stop caring about customers - it's just not worth it!

And just today, in rebuilding my listings for better efficiency, I made the "mistake" of doing it on .ca (you know, where I actually LIVE) - just to find out.... Wait for it, this is golden...

AUTOMATED SHIPPING DISCOUNTS ONLY EXIST FOR USPS!!!

So on EVERY multi-item sale, I either have to send a corrected invoice, then hope I get paid (in a timely manner, or at all) - or the buyer has to pay the full amount, then hope I refund them the difference! Customer Service at its finest!!! I know eBay has only been around 10 years, and they are busy and all... But holy %#$&, is this an example of complete and total incompetence...

And don't get me started on the Global Shipping Scam... Absolutely terrible. I actively avoid sellers that have been tricked into signing up for that.

But I know - it's my fault I'm not American. Sorry about that.

treasure.hunter.d · ‎07-13-2014

I like selling on Ebay however there are issues that need to be addressed otherwise I'm sure a lot of sellers will be looking elsewhere to sell.

1. As the market and economy changes and margins shrink Ebay raises their fees. This cannot continue otherwise sellers will keep seeing diminishing returns on investment and shrinking realms of what can be sold. Why bother selling a $25 item that you had to pay $5-$10 for when the amount of work required in finding it, listing it, shipping etc is all for a pittance of a return once fees are taken out.

2.Canada Post is almost single handedly destroying the ability to sell to the US as every year they raise their shipping rates, What I could ship for $11.50 last year costs me over $17.00 this year.

3.Ebay is slaughtering small sellers in search results now and catering to the large Chinese $1 and free shipping scabs. That can't continue as again it will kill small sellers ability to sell.

4.We need access to support in either the US or Canada. I'm sick to death of dealing with the useless support in the Philippines. They are poorly trained, rude in many cases and don't speak our language well enough for me to not end up almost every call frustrated and with a pounding headache from that alone.

5.Ebay Canada needs to get up to speed with all of the same listing features as US. Why on earth should we have to pay for something on.ca that is free on .com.

Just some thoughts anyway.

Cheers,

thd

pjcdn2005 · ‎07-13-2014

Why on earth should we have to pay for something on.ca that is free on .com.

I'm curious what you are referring to?

estreetplazacanada · ‎07-15-2014

There are many apps available to the .com sellers that are non existent to us in Canada, tens of apps like listing, marketing accounting and so on.

It is a nightmare every time I have to report sales tax, I manually have to extract the numbers from each and every transaction. I cannot understand how a corporation as big as eBay cannot provide a simple total on our reports. We are obligated to collect sales tax and at the same time we are being punished for doing the right thing.

Another thing that is hurting Canadian sellers: 2 years ago, the eBay big deal program was only open to Canadian sellers and we did very well, I used to sell 400-800 in one week from one item, now anyone from any country can participate. In the last few months I've been running over 9 deals at a time and I'm lucky to get a total of 10 sales during that week.

I have reported my concerns to customer service many times before and they told me that they would escalate my concerns for review.

pierrelebel · ‎07-15-2014

"I manually have to extract the numbers from each and every transaction"

???

Since you are GST/HST registered, don't you send invoices to your buyers with every transaction?

Don't your invoices have that information?

What software do you use to send and record invoices?

There should be an easy way to simply add the information for bookkeeping and tax reporting purposes.

Why do it manually?

michaelbb2 · ‎07-15-2014

"It is a nightmare every time I have to report sales tax, I manually have to extract the numbers from each and every transaction"

Just do it now instead of at tax time. I don't use any invoicing software, just a good ole excel spreadsheet.....for each transaction I record the value and the tax on the spreadsheet as I am preparing it for shipping......it only takes a few seconds now and it saves you hours/days at tax time. At tax time I just look at the bottom of the tax column and voila.....total tax collected! Just remember to save your new entries frequently and back up your file!!!!

faircrochet · ‎07-21-2014

I don't know if my suggestions have anything to do with being a Canaidan seller specifically, but here are my suggestions.

- refund the appropriate part of my FVF on shipping when I make a partial refund to a customer, just like paypal does. I accept that ebay can't calculate shipping correctly for every circumstance, but it is wrong that I have to pay for final value fees on refunded shipping because of it. If every buyer would wait for an invoice with the correct shipping on it there would be no problem, but that doesn't happen. And perhaps shouldn't happen - I don't want to do anything that would discourage a buyer from payng quickly.

- remove DSRs for shipping. Because I've been a buyer I understand that when you see the DSR for shipping question you automatically think "wow, it took a long time to arrive, I'm going to give them a bad mark". The seller could live next to a post office and post the package 5 minutes after the sale came through, but if the post office takes too long to deliver the seller will still get a bad DSR. There is no way for a buyer to accurately gauge how long a buyer took to get the parcel to the shipping company, so they shouldn't be asked (or allowed) to provide a rating for it. If ebay wants the buyer to rate the transit time for shipping, something out of the seller's control, the rating shouldn't count against the seller.

- have customer service reps who are trained on ebay.CA rules. I haven't had to contact customer service for much, but when I do it is always a challenge to get someone who understands the differences between .COM and .CA. In fact, they often don't seem to realize that there ARE differences, let alone what the differences are.

Thanks!

gaudium2 · ‎10-24-2014

Being a Canadian Seller now for many years. In the last three years I have noticed that The exact same USA Items sell higher then Canadian items, even though shipping is pretty close to the same? I have listed my items available to USA , Is this a patriotic move by US citizens just to buy off their fellow Americans or is Ebay messing with the search engine?

gaudium2 · ‎10-24-2014

Being a Canadian Seller now for many years. In the last three years I have noticed that The exact same USA Items sell higher then Canadian items, even though shipping is pretty close to the same? I have listed my items available to USA , Is this a patriotic move by US citizens just to buy off their fellow Americans or is Ebay messing with the search engine?

@stouffvillejen wrote:
I don't know if my suggestions have anything to do with being a Canaidan seller specifically, but here are my suggestions.

- refund the appropriate part of my FVF on shipping when I make a partial refund to a customer, just like paypal does. I accept that ebay can't calculate shipping correctly for every circumstance, but it is wrong that I have to pay for final value fees on refunded shipping because of it. If every buyer would wait for an invoice with the correct shipping on it there would be no problem, but that doesn't happen. And perhaps shouldn't happen - I don't want to do anything that would discourage a buyer from payng quickly.

- remove DSRs for shipping. Because I've been a buyer I understand that when you see the DSR for shipping question you automatically think "wow, it took a long time to arrive, I'm going to give them a bad mark". The seller could live next to a post office and post the package 5 minutes after the sale came through, but if the post office takes too long to deliver the seller will still get a bad DSR. There is no way for a buyer to accurately gauge how long a buyer took to get the parcel to the shipping company, so they shouldn't be asked (or allowed) to provide a rating for it. If ebay wants the buyer to rate the transit time for shipping, something out of the seller's control, the rating shouldn't count against the seller.

- have customer service reps who are trained on ebay.CA rules. I haven't had to contact customer service for much, but when I do it is always a challenge to get someone who understands the differences between .COM and .CA. In fact, they often don't seem to realize that there ARE differences, let alone what the differences are.

Thanks!

Being a Canadian Seller now for many years. In the last three years I have noticed that The exact same USA Items sell higher then Canadian items, even though shipping is pretty close to the same? I have listed my items available to USA , Is this a patriotic move by US citizens just to buy off their fellow Americans or is Ebay messing with the search engine?

Anonymous · ‎10-24-2014

I felt that eBay shouldn't be "above the law" about Returns.

Many stores don't give refunds for opened DVDs, music, underwear, earrings, and other things, so why the heck should we be forced by eBay to give refunds on those items.

eBay needs to develop a policy with a list of items that the buyers cannot return for refunds. I felt it is fair and right.