Would you really sell on ebay ?

[Simon]

I said no because I kept my part of the contract and they did not keep their part (I am steadfast on that point). Refund my money (I understand that shit happens) or ship what I paid for - those are the two choices. I am not going to help a huge company do their job for them. Their response was simply, "we would love to help, but we can't do that" and btw they would not give me a refund unless I cancelled the order - which, in this case, is pure, unadulterated BS.

So, I disputed the CC charge (because I didn't get anything) and I got almost instant results talking with a "supervisor". They fixed the order and gave me one of those "free" Prime trials.

They used to have really excellent customer service, that was one of their main selling points. In more recent times though I have been very disappointed, it's no better than average and in many cases worse. You can't even email them anymore, and it seems they have offshored most of the support so it's the same sort of script reading "support" as you get with the phone company. I've started to avoid buying from them because I don't want to deal with the crappy support, I want to be able to send off an email and await a reply, I hate the stupid chat bots.

Yea because now their idea of customer service is to just refund you the sellers money as soon as you raise an issue, the seller still has to pay their extortionate fees so they win either way and the customer is happy so no need for customer services. So at worse the seller looses the goods and get's charged for the pleasure or they may get the goods back assuming they are resalable. If you have amazon ship for you returned goods are often just binned.

[nigelwright7557]

Ebay has millions of customers but millions of sellers to so often its a race to the bottom on price.

Its easy to knock up a website but then no one knows its there until it appears in the search engines which can be expensive to get to the top.

There are other auction sites but their customer base is small.

The only other one I have found where I sell anything is face book.

[Trader]

This is funny, yesterday I read an article about the "Silk Road", they efficiently sold drugs worldwide C2C.

Now eBay has this monopoly alone.

[nigelwright7557]

While ebay has millions of customers it also has millions of sellers all subscribed to the race to the bottom on price.

A couple of months back I turned over £500 on ebay, great stuff.
So did my monthly accounts and outgoings were over £600 !
So only person who made money was ebay.

I have since thrown a lot of cheap stuff listings out and kept my more unique higher value items.

[Simon]

I came to the point where I stopped looking at other peoples pricing and decided that it was my way or the highway. I did quite well as a proper business and turned over £1.9k one january, this then halved each month until by April I had no sales, strangely my stuff could not be found on ebay for looking and instead all the chinese stuff was front of the que. So I jacked it in, flogged off all of the remainder of the stock to a member on here and won't sell anything for under £10 now on ebay. But for some years I did well with just basic through hole components that apparently people are happier wait for from china.

[Jan Audio]

Yes in this hobby you easy get to the point you can open a shop.

[Simon]

Yes in this hobby you easy get to the point you can open a shop.

That is how it started, with IRF540 MOSFET's, I bought more from RS than I needed and noticed that ebay had electronic parts for sale and that prices were not cheap. So I put them on and soon was buying to resell and then went professional. It all started pretty much as a joke, I never thought anyone actually bought at those prices.

[LECKO]

We've had a couple of bad problems with Ebay sellers, BUT, we use Discover Card and they are pretty good dealing with bad deals. One they will investigate, and as Discover pay Paypal, if Paypal don't do anything, then Discover sticks Paypal the bill and reimburses us.
One seller sent us THREE of the same item ordered, they argued we'd ordered three, but order clearly stated one, they refused to authorize return so we got two for free.
Last order was for a Tek 2213 scope for parts $30 plus S/H, which wasn't much, scope arrived in record time IN PERFECT condition and fully working, seller even threw in a power cord for free. His ad stated not working for parts only. I'll buy again from that seller if he has anything I need.
There's always one bad apple, but many people are honest and just want to make a living.
I'm expecting two Ebay orders Monday, a Tek 2246 problem scope that will probably end up as a parts unit, for $112 it's worth it, tube and P/S worth more than that, and an old Heathkit I bought for sentimental reasons, I built that model in the early 70's, again going cheap.
I'll post on what state they are in after Monday.

Just as an addon, a couple of years back I bought seven for parts Tektronix scopes, they arrived well packaged and I stored them away until I had time to check them out. Three were 2465's. I brought one down to the office that was complete and labeled "NO POWER". Slipped a known working supply in it and voila!! worked perfectly, all four channels. The seven cost 200 bucks plus S/H. One was a 2215 and another 2246, both with defective P/S, once I get some time, I'll repair those. The 2465 has more than paid for that order.