"Everyone is certainly entitled to their opinion. But I believe you'll have a much different opinion after you sell a couple thousand items."
You are absolutely correct. I have not sold nearly enough to be called an "experienced" seller, compared to others, but I have enough experience to know how disgusted I am at eBay. At first glance (and by the hype spouted by eBay execs) the coming changes look great. Buried deep within the new information are a lot of startling and nasty details.
The most blatant "falsity" is the decreased fees statement. So what if they decrease the listing fee by a nickle? What they buried deep in the new policies is that the FVF has been raised by more than 3%? That is a lot of nickles at the end of the sale. But we've become accustomed to increases in fees no matter where we do business. That issue alone would not have caused the mass exodus from eBay that we are now seeing. It's going to get very ugly.
Buyers are already trying to "extort" from sellers under threat of negs, not knowing that the "no negs for buyers" hasn't started yet. eBay is already pitting buyer against seller.
Not ALL buyers are bad, just as not ALL sellers are bad. But the playing field won't even begin to be a level one come May. The *newbie* sellers on eBay will be educated in good time. But not to worry, the thousands and thousands of fleeing eBayers will have built up all the other auction sites for you, so you will have an established place to go to when you take off the rosy glasses and see reality.
If you are interested in more FACTS, please visit http://forums.delphiforums.com/boycottebay/start.
Just a little of the shape of things to come:
And before you say those sellers who receive the "scarlet letter" are bad sellers and deserve it, I will tell you that is the canned answer that eBay has been spoon feeding all of us since the announcement of the changes came at the end of January. But it is not true.
Example: I sell a lot of books. If I ship by the least expensive method, Media Mail, it can take the post office up to 10 days to deliver. I have watched my DSRs go lower and lower and lower in the shipping time category, and this is going to ultimately put my listings at the very end of every search, no matter that I have a perfect FB score, or when my auction ends, or any of the other "fair" search results.
Now, I could offer ONLY to ship by Priority Mail. Then I would receive (I assume) very high DSRs for shipping time since that only takes 2-3 days to arrive. But it would tank my "shipping cost" DSRs. How in the world is a seller supposed to win under conditions such as that?
And that is the least of the problems these changes are going to make. I could go on and on (and if you think I already have, believe me, you haven't heard the tip of the iceberg) but there's no point. I STRONGLY URGE everyone to do some research. You can do it on eBay but they have so vaguely worded the new policies that it amounts to nothing more than double-speak. Get out into the internet and look around. There are forums and videos and news reports EVERYWHERE. The site I put in above is a forum started when eBay kept banning people from using their accounts based on something eBay didn't like. They kept pulling posts from the boards and removing auctions (again, no refund of listing fees!). We were forced to go off-eBay to even talk about the changes - whether we supported them or not. I thought America was the land of free speech, but apparently it is not.
This debate can be fought into eternity. Time will tell. I sincerely hope I am wrong, but I doubt it.
Deb
