A month or so later, the buyer put a chargeback on their credit card, got their money back from paypal, and I had no recourse. Worse still, Paypal charged ME $50 more because of the chargeback! Despite my sending them the code (which they requested, and through ebays messaging system), I had to have delivery confirmation from a shipper to prove I sent it. Even though they have the messages proving the delivery/receipt, too bad for me. I tried calling paypal, and that got nowhere. They said something like "sorry, it will cost $200 to investigate the chargeback further, so it's probably not worth it". I told them I'd write it off to my not understanding their policy on "seller protection", but at least do something about the scammers account. Of course they said they couldn't, nor could the refund any of the fees.

So now I'm out the $30 for my item, $50 more because paypal incurred a chargeback, plus ebay fees, plus the guy got positive feedback and went on to do this to other people! Totally incredulous.

Instead of blogging about it though, I've decided to build a company to compete with ebay. Wish me luck =)

Admittedly, there is enough gray area in marketplace transactions where determining "right and wrong" can sometimes prove difficult. But I like to think that we start from a neutral POV, rather than the "buyer is always right" mentality that eBay has increasingly gravitated toward.

2 years ago I caught a lady selling handbags (that she didn't really have) from your site. I caught her because she was having people pay through an account with our service (nextproof.com).

Guess who had to eat the chargeback fees? I did

Guess who had to call other people, inform them the handbag they ordered as a Christmas gift was bogus, then listen to them cry? I did

All that to say, if you (or anyone else) has a successful marketplace, shady folks will swarm to you and you will have no choice but to figure out buyer and seller protection policies.

That is heavy.

http://coinbase.com/

Especially with callmeed's post[1] above...

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4730281

If you'd launched already I would have happily sold my iPhone through you. There's really no way you could have provided a worse experience unless you actively tried.

Oddly enough, that's been tried at least once:

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html?pa...

Most of the big online sites (Paypal is the worst offender, but the others aren't much better) favor buyers over sellers. Amazon certainly works that way, and, as a result, I'm mostly use Craigslist to sell computers and cameras/lenses. I don't sell all that much stuff, though I do it for family members, but I'm familiar enough to have an opinion.

Craigslist has its own dangers, but those can be mitigated through meeting in public or in police station lobbies.

I've never used Craigslist. But is it really common or advised to meat with the buyer/seller in a police station lobby?

Having said that, I dislike the meeting-up aspect of Craigslist. For all of the money I've "made" by selling my stuff through them, there have been countless times where the person on the other end of the phone never shows up and leaves me there waiting.

Overall, it's been a positive experience. I'll continue using them for the foreseeable future.

http://www.craigslist.org/about/press/ebay.stake

That being said, I'm surprised nobody mentioned selling on Amazon. Blindingly easy to setup your sale, if you choose the lowest price on a popular good someone will buy it within the hour. Amazon will generate an invoice and mailing label for you, plus deduct shipping charges from your payout. Scammers are mildly annoying, but they waste very little of your time and don't cost you any money.

I've sold a few iPhones and an iPad on Amazon and it has been great. I'll never sell items anywhere else if I can possibly help it.

Edit: in addition to the iPhones/iPad, I've sold a few games and other electronics on Amazon. Out of maybe 10 sales, two were "bought" by scammers. Amazon sends me an email saying that someone purchased my item, but they may be a fraudulent account. Do not send anything until Amazon confirms that they are valid. It's such an easy, friendly process.

Guess I'll check that out.

Thanks!

My only complaint is the fees, but I accept that as the price I pay for making it so easy and painless and such a convenience to sell nearly anything.

I reached the point where I wrote a little (Shoes) Ruby app that uses a barcode reader and a headless browser to automate the selling :-)

Overall I’ve found my e-bay experience to be very positive. I’ve only had one person who I suspected of scamming me, when they claimed they didn’t receive the item I posted. The vast majority of users are just normal people looking to pick up a bargain. It helps that some of my items are pick up only and that I am not selling electronics.

Every few years an article like this pops up and I get concerned and start looking at other places to sell my products. What I inevitably find is that no other auction site has the users base that e-bay does, so my items inevitably don’t sell, or the price is significantly lower than what I would get on e-bay. It’s possible to build a better experience than e-bay, but up until now nobody has managed to do it.

Finally, I think what the writer of the article was looking for was an ‘unpaid item dispute’. He needed to open once against the original bidder, and if they didn’t don’t pay within a certain time limit, and then I believe e-bay will refund the fees. E-bay also records unpaid item disputes against buyers and will limit what they can do. [3]

[1] - http://myworld.ebay.com.au/sleemancorp

[2] - http://www.grafting-tool.com/magento/index.php/

[3] - http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/unpaid-items.html

And I was able to submit unpaid item disputes successfully for the majority of the oustanding fees or I'd have been on the hook for closer to $70. However, there was a final $2 that they refused to refund because certain selling fees are un-refundable for some reason, and that's what I got stuck with in the end.

But let's give you the benefit of the doubt and let me ignore how entitled and demanding your "Explain" was, and actually explain.

It's not that the transaction was a failure that upsets me, nor is it the actual end cost to me. It was the abysmal entire experience, from start to finish. There are plenty of reputable companies that - when faced with a customer who has had a bad experience are happy to refund them their money and apologize for the inconvenience. eBay doesn't do that, and makes it as difficult as possible to actually contact them to resolve it.

Now, this is entirely speculation based on what I've learned from the comments here and on my blog and via Google, but odds are very very good I would never have gotten that money back anyway. And odds are very very good I would have been on the phone for upwards of 30 minutes in queue.

But ultimately in the end, the fact that I had to pay any money to them after having such a terrible experience, just to get them to stop bombarding my inbox with "SWEAR TO GOD, WE WILL SEND YOU TO COLLECTIONS (also don't reply to this email we won't read it)" is a complete failure of customer service. That's what's unacceptable, not the % of the fees I got back.

The OP goes to the extreme length saying to never sell on eBay, which is a crap response considering what he got back. eBay is a reasonable place to sell products to legitimate customers. Bad experiences exist everywhere, but it is not the overwhelming culture the OP makes it out to be. The generalization of his "bad" experience is not reasonable, so I'd like to know his rationale for doing that.

There's a lot of people echoing my experience here. So if there's a lot of people selling on eBay and getting nothing out of it but losing small amounts of money each time, I'm cool if that's something I prevent.

I gave you a chance to explain your rationale and you failed as all I'm getting is the feeling of someone who has a silver spoon in their mouth. It is a marketplace, you used their resource, someone didn't pay, you said you used one of their protections, it worked, but you needed to get an unrefundable $2 back, so you went to CS who did not want to refund it. There are more people who had a worse experience than this such as losing their item, fees, and not getting any support. If anything you got the closer to ideal case of this and you are complaining about it. That's crap.

I no longer have anything to contribute to this as I am wasting my time here.

Good heavens on some scale every injustice is petty. You imply that the OP's problem is petty compared to more serious eBay dispute - but what stops someone from descrying the pettiness of those thousand-dollar disputes, because someone got screwed on a mortgage, worth tens or hundreds of thousands? What's to stop someone attacking you for bring up an injustice that just involves money when women are being systematically raped and murdered in sub Saharan Africa?

You need to get off your high horse and stop attacking someone for expressing disgust over a small amount of money.

I would add an important fact, one which I've never heard expressed but which I have not seen an exception to: the net sum of petty injustice in this world is far, far greater than the great injustices done in this world. The reason? Because people like you shut down those who would spend the time to fight it. Meanwhile, eBay takes $2 here, $2 there and laughs all the way to the bank with millions.

With the listing on e-bay I got two enquiries, both of which were legit. One of the interested parties ended up buying.

Story time: I sold some eletronics to a guy in Italy. After it arrived, he accused me (in a Google Translate-based English message since he didn't speak German, despite bidding on an article with German description) that I sent a defective item and requested part of his money back. I explained to him that I tested it before sending, and that I would (despite not being required to) offer a full refund, but only if he sent the item back. If it turned out to be really defective, I even offered to pay all shipping costs.

The buyer then messaged me again, saying that it miracously worked after he "repaired" it, and since I did not send him a refund, he left me negative feedback. I tried to contact him twice, asking why he decided to keep the item but still give negative feedback, but he never responded. Only then I tried to give him negative feedback too, but to my surprise Ebay does not allow that. Had I known that before, I would have never ever even used Ebay.

Anyway, I contacted Ebay support, but they said that they do not want to remove the feedback, even though their FAQ states they can remove feedback in situations like this.

http://contact.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?CustomerSupport&...

Solved, done. Your $2 will return to you.

If your buyer agreed to cancel your transaction or didn't respond, you'll receive a credit to your seller's account for the final value fee within 7-10 business days of closing the case.

If you want a refund for your credit, see Requesting a refund of your eBay credit balance.

http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/refunds.html

http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/cancel-transaction-process.h...

Granted it's buried in their help system, but it's there.

eBay doesn't penalise non-paying buyers anywhere near enough, It's a huge waste of everybody's time, especially with time-sensitive sales.

Basically never use ebay.

>... if you had actually sold it there, you’d have to pay the Ebay final value fee of like 5%. Then the Paypal transaction fee of like 7%. Then if you want the money the Paypal withdrawal fee of another like 6%. Wait, why am I paying the same company 3 times for 1 transaction?

If you're a high level eBay user, it's a fantastic place to move goods, but god forbid someone new signs up to buy or sell something. Just like what it must be like to sign up and play World of Warcraft for the first time.

In summer I sold my year old iPad 2 with a broken glass cover (otherwise fully functional, the 32GB/3G model) for €349 (someone bid €350 but told me after the auction that they thought the iPad was not broken – I was already writing off the sale at that point but the next bidder happily paid and left a very positive review). That’s just crazy! I thought I could get €100 or so tops, not half the original retail price!

Selling a camera and an iPod went similarly well. It probably goes wrong sometimes, though probably in a small minority of cases. And really, those $2 for listing the product really aren’t the end of the world. (Also, eBay has since forever been very explicit about those fees and that they have to be paid regardless of what happens. There is no way you can miss that when putting a product on there.)

But when you fail that hard to provide a good product or service and people ask you for a refund, you give it to them. I've done it cheerfully for accounts up to a hundred dollars in fees even. This is just two bucks, and it's more the principle of the thing than the actual money anyhow.

I didn't just not sell my phone, I wasted weeks of time trying to fight their system to do it, and lost probably a good hundred dollars of resale value due to timing.

I have had no problems selling and buying on ebay, in Australia and the UK. Maybe US is worse?

I'm still somewhat mystified how someone looking for a intact iPad could even have stumbled across my iPad. You have to be pretty explicit about wanting to see broken stuff on eBay.

(Resolving that issue, by the way, was actually a bit annoying. The mistaken buyer wrote me an e-mail, pleading me to not give her a negative review and asking for cancelling the sale. At that point you have to ask them to tell eBay that they mistakenly bought the product, otherwise you won't get your fees back. Offering the product to a lower bidder, however, is very painless and it did all work out in the end.)

And this applies equally to WoW and eBay, definitely. At least in WoW you generally have a guild to let you know in advance what mistakes you're likely to make. On eBay, you're on your own.

Codebases exhibit a similar dynamic. Open source projects need to track how long ago their newest regular contributor joined. I think they'll find the results illuminating.

Only use Buy It Now ever. Require Immediate Payment.

Not only are the fees lower for Buy It Now than for auctions, but there's no way for buyers to game you. The listing will sit until someone actually pays you.

With some items you might not know how much they're worth, but it's easy enough to determine the going price of a used iPhone.

This weekend I bid for an item, then 1 hour later decided that I wanted to pay the 10% extra for buy it now, discovered to my dismay that the buy it now option was gone, thought that the seller had manually removed it, got annoyed and retracted my bid, then saw the buy it now button come back (!) and then managed to buy it now.

I have no idea why they'd make the behavior like this...

If you know that Buy It Now disappears as soon as someone bids, then you're more likely to Buy It Now because if you don't Buy It Now, you can't buy it later; you can only bid on it later, and then you might not get it. So if you want it, eBay wants you to Buy It Now.

Buy It Now.

Which is, ultimately, not all that cool honestly. I'll be writing a follow-up about it, but the tl;dr is that it shouldn't take a popular internet rant to get things like this resolved.

… Better just to sell via Amazon and use their fulfillment service.

eBay is great for buyers, a horrific minefield for sellers.

Their customer support will literally only read from their script an no matter how much you reason and try to explain logic to them they just give a scripted answer back. Never doing business with them someone please invent something better.

Your experience would also be bad the first few times selling at a flea market or a street corner. Only with a fair bit of experience can you get your profit margin above zero.

Ebay is a dinosaur and deserves to die a horrible death, it doesn't do what it says - make it easier to sell & buy. Gumroad and others in this space are the future.

However, it should not take until the second buyer of the second listing, and if it is going to take that long ebay should indeed make it easier to get to someone who will actually buy my item.

"Oh, well!" is what most of them say.

It is probably from having my scam detector turned up to high, because of stories just like this. And also bidding on multiple items at once.

It would be nice to have received a "no thanks" from even one of them from the I think six I sent out though. Not so say that I think they "owe" me that, but it would have done a lot to dissuade me from suspecting that most of the bids on my item were fraudulent.

eBay has to balance buyer vs. seller needs and that is not easy. Without the buyers you wouldn't have the market to sell it. Take the refund and try again or sell it on Craigslist. I bet you have more scammers there. (I tried Craigslist first and then settled for eBay after being asked to mail the phone to an overseas cousin 5 times)

It was honestly far easier and satisfying to just give them the two bucks and then report the facts of my experience onto the internet.

Plus, with any luck someone thinking about selling on eBay in the future will run across this post, think twice, and be saved the trouble I was. So I feel pretty good about that too.

If you agree to use a service without reading the fine print, then you're obligated to what you agree to. "Nobody reads it" is not an excuse that a judge uses to nullify a contract.

As a result, my last batch of sales (3 computers and a few other items) had all of the bidders paying immediately upon completion of auction. Whereas my previous batch of sales when I did not know about this option, I had 3 time wasters who never posted payment.

What about them linking your ID to Facebook for new users without let's say 10 feedback?

Went fairly well, but my god ebay's integration with UPS is a complete clusterfuck. It was far, far easier to manually create a shipment on ups.com than trying to get ebay and UPS to communicate.

And honestly, I don't fault them for that part specifically. I used their service which has fees as advertised, okay cool.

But what wasn't advertised was the incredible anti-seller bias, the terrible scammers I'd have to fight, and the absolutely awful customer service I'd have to endure. Normally when a company fails to provide a product that hard, you can ask for your money back and get it.

* It lets people run auctions on their website.

* It ensures that the seller gets paid for the winning bid. The payment details are stored in a credit card vault when the bid is made.

* It uses the seller's account Stripe account to manage all payments.

* It verifies the seller's phone and email. And in cause of disputes, both parties are expected to resolve it themselves.

I've been incorporating feedback I've gotten so far to change the product, so feel free to comment on it.