Customers vs. Users

This is a real simple topic – I will keep this post nice and short. Everyone should be able to grasp this concept (well, evreyone who does not work for eBay that is).

When you are in business, you have customers. Customers are easy to identify – they are the ones who pay you money.

Some businesses also have users – people who use your services but don’t actually pay you money for doing so. A person who uses a web page for their news or uses a free email account on Yahoo are users.

Here we go – very simply – people who sell on eBay are CUSTOMERS – they pay eBay money for eBay’s service. People who buy on eBay are USERS – they do not pay eBay one red cent for the privilege.

There is a time-honored business axiom that says ‘the customer is always right’. EBay takes the opposite approach with their new buyer protection policy – ‘the customer (i.e. the Seller) is always WRONG.

I realize that eBay could not survive without the users – the same way that a newspaper could not survive if no one ever read it and saw all the advertisements.

However, it should be up to the seller to manage customer satisfaction – not eBay. By inserting themselves in between their customers (the Sellers) and their Users (the Buyers) they have upset the normal dynamics of the buyer-seller relationship. And they have done so without thinking things out. Now, like a car stuck in the mud, they apply more and more pressure where it is least needed, and dig themselves deeper and deeper into a hole.

Will (or can) anyone stop this insanity?

Grabbing Some Perspective

Wow, I’ve done enough griping about eBay – here’s another issue I had recently that has nothing to do with eBay…

I recently bought a new lawn tractor – there was nothing seriously wrong with my old lawn tractor, mind you – beside sit being old. I just wanted a newer model with shiny green and yellow paint and more cupholders.

So, I placed a classified ad in my local paper, the Suburban Gazette, listing my old lawnmower for sale. I didn’t need it anymore, and I had no place to keep it.. I explained that this was a 8 year old mower, and what minor issues it had (the blade needed sharpening, the hood was scratched, and the motor leaked oil and needed to be topped off after every run). I listed it for $200 – a real bargain as a new model of this machine costs over $1,500.00. Well, within a week, I had about a half dozen calls on this machine (it was a real bargain, as I said) and one fellow came by, looked it over, and purchased it on the spot.

All was well until about a month after the sale was completed. It was then that I got a phone call from the Editor of the Suburban Gazette. Apparently, the fellow who bought ny old mower decided that he wasn’t too happy with it. Seems that after using the mower twice a week for a month, he never bothered to check the oil in it and he ended up seizing the engine. The editor asked that I refund him his $200.00, even though the buyer admitted to ‘screwing up’ and that he never checked the oil level.

I told the editor that I was sorry, but the mower was sold as-is, and that too much time had gone by since he purchased the mower, Besides, the buyer admitted he screwed up and never checked the oil level.

Case closed, or so I thought. Another 2 weeks passed when the editor called me again. He said he felt sorry for the buyer, and he had the Suburban Gazette refund him the $200 directly. He then informed me that I now owed the newspaper $200, and that if I did not send over the money immediately, they would turn me over to collections. In addition, I wouldn’t be allowed to place any more ads in that papers’ classified section until I paid them the $200.00.

Can you believe this? No? Good, because the entire story is made up. A newspaper would never get involved with a private transaction like this. However, this is what eBay has started doing countless times, everyday. And eBay sellers are putting up with this behavior. For now, at least.

Ebay needs to realize what they are – an online classified section – before their customers, the eBay sellers, realize that the shouldn’t have to put up with this type of behavior from any company. As their customers, we pay these companies – from the Suburban Gazette all the way up to eBay - good money every month for their services.

Let’s not lose the proper perspective about who eBay really is…or isn’t:

They are not the Internet Police

They are not your conscience

They are not your parents

They are not a court of law

They are an online classified section.

Period.

Example 2: How to REALLY Make Money on eBay

DISCLAIMER: I am not suggesting that you do this, nor would I do this in a million years – I am just pointing out the hypocrisy of eBay and their protection programs.

Here’s another one from the eBay archives – it seems that this happens a lot!

First, set up a new eBay account. Then, using this new account, buy an expensive item on eBay. Make it worth your while, but keep the amount of the item low enough do you can’t get slammed with a Grand Theft charge. Pay for the item with PayPal, of course, using a major credit card.

When you receive the item, contact the seller and tell them that this item was Significantly Not as Described (SNAD) and that you want to return it for a full refund. Even if they agree, file a SNAD report to Ebay Buyer Protection. Heck, if you have a Credit Card Company tied to your PayPal account, contact them too. The more the merrier!

Finally, get a rock or some other junk that weighs the same as the item you purchased. Put it in the same shipping box that your item came in, and then ship that back to the seller, Be sure to get a tracking #, and contact eBay and PayPal with this information.

With any luck, you’ll get to keep the item, and you’ll get your money back, too. Heck, sometimes you’ll get your money back from both PayPal and eBay.

You can’t even get negative feedback on this transaction – it’s a victimless crime (well, actually, the seller was victimized, but they don’t count in the eBay world.

I wouldn’t do this too often with the same eBay account, but hey, you can set up as many eBay ‘buyer’ accounts as you want – you don’t even need to use your real information. You can’t lose!

Think this can’t happen? Think it doesn’t happen? Think again – it happens all the time to sellers on eBay. I cringe whenever I get a sale from someone with 0 or low feedback because this has happened to me, and PayPal and eBay refused to do anything about it.

Where is eBay’s SELLER Protection Program?

Example 1: How to REALLY Make Money on eBay

Here is a real sleazy way to make money on eBay as an unscrupulous seller. This is based upon something I read recently on an eBay message board.

DISCLAIMER: I am not suggesting that you do this, nor would I do this in a million years – I am just pointing out the hypocrisy of eBay and their protection programs.

Here it is:

Sell an item (make it pricey) and ship it yourself via the US Postal Service with delivery confirmation. (Do not create a label with PayPal).

Here’s the trick – send a rock in a box, and send it to the WRONG ADDRESS. Do not put a return address on the package.

The unlucky buyer will eventually file a non-receipt complaint to eBay or PayPal, and all you have to do is show the delivery confirmation from the Post Office. Case closed. It seems once they file an item not received complaint, they can’t file a SNAD complaint.

There are plenty of eBay horror stories like this on various message boards. There are also bad people doing bad things in eBay. Bad people come in both flavors – both buyers and sellers.

The point is, no matter what eBay or PayPal tries to do to ‘address’ these issues, these bad people will find another way to scam. All of these extra layers of bureaucracy do is make it more difficult for the honest people to do business there. Everyday, honest sellers are unfairly snafued by eBay business practices.

Enay and PayPal’s security measures remind me of the toddler on the beach holding a handful of wet sand, trying to keep the water from running out. The tighter that they squeeze, the faster the water disappears until it’s all gone.

Relax your grip, eBay. You’re just making things worse – not better. If you don’t, your going to let your customers (your sellers, the ones that actually pay you money) slip through your fingers like the water in the sand.

Danger, Will Robinson!

I recently had a case opened against me by a buyer using the new “eBay Buyer Protection”. I felt the buyer was wrong (I’ll go into details at a later date as things are still up in the air and very interesting!) so I emailed them back. I got a very nice email back from someone in their Customer Service Department explaining the new Buyer Protection Process. Wanting to be certain that they were aware of all the facts, I sent them a second email. I received an email back, reiterating what they said in the first email. A few days later I emailed them a third time on this case, providing them with tracking #’s, etc. I received an email in return once again, but something was funny – it was written to me as if I were the buyer in the dispute. Curious, I sent off another email, this time with just a bunch of random, nonsensical words strung together. Sure enough, here comes an email back from Customer Service assuring me that they have read my email and are addressing the matter.

I send hundreds and hundreds of dollars to eBay and PayPal every month for years on end, and all they give me in return is grief and automated response emails.

Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto

A Tale of Two PayPal Accounts

I have a theory about PayPal. Mind you, this is just a theory – mostly conjecture on my part – but based solely on my experiences with PayPal, I think it my very well be true..

When it comes to SNAD or other complaints made to PayPal, I think that there are 2 distinct classes: Those who pay through PayPal using their credit card, and those who pay using their PayPal balance.

I think that if you pay using your balance, and then dispute a transaction, PayPal will usually side with the other party, or at least attempt to actually review a case – whatever is easier,

On the other hand, if you pay through PayPal using a Credit Card, they will ALWAYS find in your favor, no matter how ludicrous and unfounded your complaint might be. This is because PayPal knows that you can always dispute a transaction with your credit card company, and the credit card company will almost always find in the cardholders favor, up to 45 days after the transaction is complete. Yes, PayPal can challenge the credit card company back, but this costs them money to do this, and is a lot of work, so I don’t think they can really be bothered to fight on your behalf. A seller can sell anything, say a AS IS NO RETURNS a thousand times in listing and PayPal will immediately honor the buyers SNAD complaint. I’ve been burned by this on several occasions.

Please comment me with any info you might have confirming or denying my suspicion – I’d really like to the to the bottom of this.

Lessons Learned

Initially, I never had an issue with PayPal. Being an honest seller, I was usually able to work out any disagreements that I might have had with an unhappy buyer. Yes, over thousands of transactions, I did have a couple of buyers who were not happy with a transaction. This is just a fact of life selling and buying on eBay. For the first few years of working with PayPal, I don’t ever recall ever getting to the point where PayPal had to intervene.

Then one day – it finally did happen. There was a SNAD sale that I could not work out with the other party and PayPal was called in to mediate. The funny thing is, I was a buyer and not a seller in this transaction!

I purchased a used digital SLR, and paid slightly more then the going rate because this came with an extra new battery, still in the OEM packaging, at the time a $60 value. As I always do, I tested everything upon its arrival, and found that the new battery was DOA. The seller’s attitude was “tough luck” – no offer of a return or even a partial refund for the bad battery. It got to the point where I decided to contact PayPal. After much deliberation, PayPal decided that the seller was in the right and they did not have to accept a return or offer a credit for the bad battery, Lesson learned

Ultimately, I was OK with this. Even though I paid extra for the battery, I still got a great deal on the camera if I compared buying it from a local retailer. That’s really what eBay is about – you can get great deals on lots of different items, but you do assume a little extra risk. Again, it’s like I bought the camera from a guy in the next town at a yard sale instead of paying full retail at the local photo shop. I was able to save significant money, but I shouldn’t expect the same level of customer service that I would expect at a local retailer. If I discovered a little something wrong with the camera a few weeks down the road, I don’t think I would bring myself to knock on this stranger’s door to demand a refund or credit. Maybe I set myself up with bad karma when I complained to PayPal – I should have kept my mouth shut.

A few years down the road I purchased a new updated digital SLR. The old one I bought on eBay started acting flaky – the shutter button did not work reliably and I had to resort to using a remote shutter release. Other than that, the camera still worked fine. So I sold it on eBay AS-IS, with a detailed explanation of what was wrong with the camera. I even included a price quote from the manufacturer detailing what the repair would cost. I listed and sold the camera for about ½ of what similar models were selling for, as it had the shutter problem. You guessed it – the buyer never read the listing, snapped up the camera at the bargain price, and then was upset about the shutter issue. They admitted to me ‘I never read the listing and didn’t know’. Well, not to be too unreasonable, I explained that the item was sold AS-IS, as described, and he really received exactly what he paid for. Not good enough – he filed a SNAD complaint to PayPal and even though he admitted that the camera was accurately described, they still gave him his money back. It seems that at this time, PayPal had adopted the attitude that the buyer can return anything for any reason within the first 30-45 days. (Actually, I have my suspicions that there are 2 classes of PayPal users – I’ll discuss this in my next post.) He returned the camera, but it was missing several accessories that were part of the auction. When I complained to PayPal, they said that so long as he shows that we received the item back, the case was closed. (Yet another post topic)

Lesson learned again.

You’d think with me learning all of these lessons, I’d be getting smarter.

A Long Time Ago....Part 3

Well, my eBay business continued to grow and grow. Most people buying on eBay were happy. I was making money. My fellow eBay sellers were making money. And eBay itself was making money….Lots of money. Everybody was happy. And then things slowly started to change….

For me, the start of the decline was when PayPal reared it’s ugly head. PayPal’s initial claim to fame was buyer protection – if a buyer paid for an item and then didn’t get it, PayPal could refund their money. This seemed like a great idea, but in actuality, it was fixing a problem that didn’t exist – at least on any significant scale. If an eBay seller was stiffing buyers, the feedback system would destroy their reputation, they would have trouble selling other items on eBay, and they would soon be out of the eBay business – problem solved. Again, PayPal was initially seen as a boon to sellers – instead of waiting a week ot more for a check to arrive in the mail, they could receive payment in a few hours time.

When a buyer first wanted to pay me via PayPal (I think this was in late 1999) I had no choice but to set up a PayPal account. Soon, it seemed that every other buyer wanted to pay via PayPal. Again, this was not a bad thing – the small percentage that I paid PayPal was offset by the added convenience of not having to run to the bank to deposit checks and money orders.

Life was still good in the eBay world. I did not realize at the time, however, that the seeds of decline were now firmly planted and ready to sprout…

A Long Time Ago....Part 2

…. And oh the junk we sold! Every week, my pal would stop by with more of it, and up on eBay it would go! It was so exciting to watch people bid and bid, anxious to be the lucky winner of an auction.

DISCLAIMER: I never actually sold ‘junk’ – I sold very collectable, quality items that people loved. However, since I was not a collector, it was all junk to me! Which leads me to the First and MOST IMPORTANT Law for all eBay Sellers: NEVER GET EMOTIONALLY ATTACHED TO THE STUFF YOU ARE SELLING.

Now, not only was eBay very exciting back then, it was also very free and open with few rules and regulations. This was never a problem, per se, as eBay employed a brilliantly simple way to keep dishonest people off of their site – the eBay Feedback system. It worked amazingly well – if a party was happy with the transaction (as they usually were) they would leave positive feedback for the other party, which would kick up their feedback score by a point. Unhappy parties would leave negative feedback, which would lower the score by one. A high positive feedback score meant that that person was a good one to do business with.

Here is an interesting little tidbit about the early days. Sellers were usually more concerned with the feedback score of the buyer than the buyer was of the feedback score of the seller. Any reputable seller soon had a feedback score in the triple digits and no one was afraid to buy an item from them. Buyers, at that time, were more of a problem. Many would win an auction but never get around to sending the seller payment. Obviously, it was a waste of time and money for sellers to deal with these deadbeats, and many would often refuse to do business with buyers with low or negative feedback.

Most problems between Buyers and Sellers were resolved quickly and amiably with a few emails back and forth. Ebay back then was recognized for what it really is – an on-line garage sale – and parties who were in dispute would deal with one another like you would with a friend or a neighbor in real life. There was a real spirit of community back then, and eBay was a fun place to buy and sell. Like they sang in Rocky Horror, “It was great when it all began…”

A Long Time Ago, in a Cyberspace Far, Far Away… Part 1

Back in the mid 1990’s, my IT business was accumulating surplus stuff that I didn’t have a use for. Plus, tech gear is like fresh fish … it never improves with age. As a proud member of CompuServe (remember CompuServe?) I happened one day upon their classified ad section. Wow, I thought to myself (which, by the way, is my favorite way to think) I finally found a way to unload all of my…uh…. experienced gear. I gleefully listed all of my ‘junque’ on the classified section with mixed results. (I recall waiting in a sleazy Parkway rest area in order to unload a surplus Electronic Cash Drawer to a guy who never did show). Well, it was a great concept, but their had to be a better way….

Well, a few years later, my travels in CyberSpace had expanded somewhat. I learned of a strange new world outside of Compuserve which I explored using a thing called NETSCAPE and my trusty $450 US Robotics HST modem. I used the Internet Yellow Pages as my guide and I discovered secret recipes for chocolate chip cookies and other forbidden knowledge. I also discovered a place called eBay.

eBay at the time was what I was looking for – an effective place where I could find new homes for my old, but still useful tech equipment. II signed up for an account, started listing my stuff, and the rest is history. As one of the lucky few with a digital camera (a Kodak DC-40 that cost $500. Was the size of the paperback edition of War & Peace, stored photos on a PC Card and transferred them to your PC with a Serial cable) I had soon sold old my stuff, and now, thoroughly hooked, I went looking for more stuff to sell.

Well, I had a buddy who collected stuff. Lots of stuff. More stuff then you could imagine. He had also collected a wife along the way who insisted that their home be dedicated to things like kids and little Tykes rather then copious amounts of other stuff. Well, he resigned, time to start thinning the herd – but where? Out to dinner with the wives one night, we had an epiphany – I could sell his stuff for him on eBay. And so I did.

Before we knew it, we were making money. Lots of money. The postman would drop off envelopes and more envelopes every day, chock full of checks and money orders. Pity my pal’s poor wife – it turned out that the more stuff I sold, the more he collected, so her little plan backfired. But as much as she disliked the stuff, she liked the extra income. And life was good.

From the Beginning...

As Dennis Miller often said, “I hate to get off on a rant here….” But some things should be…no…must be said, about the changes going on in the whole eBay world, especially from the seller’s standpoint. I’ve sold lots of things on eBay over the past 12 years, and initially found the experience to be a good one. However, like many sellers, I have found things going downhill for the past couple of years, and this once gradual decline is starting to feel like the luge run at the 2010 Olympic Games (how’s that for a topical reference!)

One secret to French cooking is supposedly the way you have to cook frogs. Seems you can’t just dump a live frog into boiling water, as they will instinctively jump right out again, splashing you with the boiling water and ruining your day as well as your dinner. It seems you must place the frogs in a pot of cool water that you then slowly bring up to cooking temperature. This way, by time the tasty little amphibians realize that they are being cooked, it’s too late. One way you can look at the changes in policies and attitudes towards sellers over at eBay is that they are adapting the French Chef’s frog cooking technique …by the time that most sellers noticed the difference, it was too late to do anything about it. Ribbit, Ribbit.

My hope for this blog is to document these changes from the eBay seller’s perspective, and hopefully create a forum where fellow sellers can discuss these changes as well as coping strategies…even if these coping strategies mean getting out of Dodge.

I will do my best to keep this blog updated, and update it often. Hey sellers- do your part - please be sure to enter your own comments and advice, and let me know you’re out there.

‘til next time…