eBay

pinetreecottage · ‎02-27-2018

To my fellow collectible/vintage/pre-owned sellers, do you think with all the changes, there will still be room for us here? None of the stuff I sell fit the demographics mentioned in the announcement, and how can we be protected with a completely ludicrous return policy, or are we to assume there will be different policies for different products.

Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here. Before we can return it, it has to be sold. With just a few visits to listings, and only the occasional sale, it may all be academic.

pjcdn2005 · ‎03-11-2018

Looks like this world has lost the ability to gauge things by quick observations and instinct.

Oh I'm sure that people are still able to do that but that doesn't mean that the result they come up with is accurate. Some do have better instincts than others and base their results on facts as well as on various sources. Others make sweeping pronouncements based simply on what they've read on discussion boards. Of course the discussion boards here are largely negative because people don't come to post about their good experiences.

ricarmic · ‎03-11-2018

I think, just like what is almost always the case here, "it depends" is the answer. We sellers cover a very wide range of categories and material here and as we know things in my categories may not be the case for folks in other categories!

Here is what I can tell you from my experiences in the "stamp world".

I've been selling for a long time, nearly 20 years before there was an eBay. I've always sold on more than one online site since 1999.

Since 1999 until today, eBay has always been my strongest online source for customers and $$$ (including my own website, long ago forgotten).

I have seen some real disasters on other online sites I've used over the years.

It has gotten a lot harder to maintain sales volume everywhere, not just eBay. Pre internet it was very very expensive for me to find and keep buyers from the USA and internationally. The online sites opened up a whole new accessible marketplace for me.

Of course in the last couple decades all those new customer opportunities also became new opportunities for all the sellers in all those other countries to sell here too, so now I'm competing with sellers from all over the world, making things more difficult.

Creative dishonest buyers and sellers from around the world have done things that have caused the online sites to have to create hoards of new rules to protect themselves, buyers and sellers which makes things more complicated for everyone.

I always recall efforts to get my items noticed amongst everything else out there and that continues today, on all sites. I've always had to keep experimenting to try to find things that work, and it looks like that will be a permanent requirement because things will continue to evolve everywhere.

For sure it is a very very much more complicated and competitive world to sell online now. This is true for all the sites I sell on. For sure I find selling online now a lot more frustrating and "work" than was the case 5 or 10 years ago.

Personally these boards are a curse and a blessing, despite how long I've been around, I still regularly learn things from these boards, which is why I stay. But there is such a strong negative vibe here it is very hard not to catch that and let it taint one's perspective.

In the days when I had two jobs: here and a real job, one of the aspects of my real job was dealing with people who had problems because they didn't follow the rules. There were about 6000 people in the group, however when I constantly had to deal with the 1% problem makers, over time one begins to think of them all the same way, which of course isn't true. I think that sometimes happens here when day after day we see all the "problems" of the site.

I've really spent too much typing here already and need to get back to listing, so after the book I just wrote, the short version is that I think eBay will continue to be a viable marketplace for me and I intend to be here for some time yet........

rose-dee · ‎03-12-2018

@pinetreecottagewrote:
To my fellow collectible/vintage/pre-owned sellers, do you think with all the changes, there will still be room for us here?

My view is that it isn't so much that there won't be room, but that eBay's policies are no longer directed toward support of its "traditional" sellers. Almost every change eBay has introduced over the past year or two has been focused on homogenizing and/or automating the site to make it look more like one online retail storefront of mass-produced, brand new goods, and that trend on eBay's part is clearly continuing.

Although the UPC/catalogue issues won't affect most of us selling OOAK/collectible items, paid returns most certainly would. I'd be surprised though if they force it on us here in Canada, as it seems to me the logistics just aren't viable.

I'm essentially in a wait-and-see mode now. I've decided to continue my store subscription for another year and hope that eBay's policies don't knock me down completely. Sales over the past few months have been very poor (and oddly erratic), and costs have risen quite dramatically. There is only so far that equation can stretch at both ends before it reaches the breaking point. After more than 15 years, almost 11 of which was selling, I'm really no longer committed to staying on eBay as a seller. In any case, I'm taking a "Scarlet O'Hara" attitude -- I'll think about that tomorrow. 🙂

pinetreecottage · ‎03-12-2018

The policy makers on ebay are not following the trend, by trying to squeeze out the pre owned/vintage/collectibles etc. sellers. With more and more TV shows focusing on renovations, crafting/collecting and DIY themes, one would think, there is a huge customer base who is looking for anything, not made in some faraway corner of the world, possibly made with toxic materials in some back alley. (recent report about costume jewelry by "marketplace".

Aside, when I sell a pre owned wool blanket for $145 and shipping is $40, the fees for that one sale, is more than 100+ sales for beads and $ store and knockof stuff from China. So, the only reason for all the changes makes no business sense. Cheap junk of poor quality is available in every Walmart and discount store. Every town has at least one of these.

But, time will tell