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Ebay Seller Hub down.. See comments in Random Thoughts section of Forum
mike in Atlanta
Found them. On the lower end of sold prices we see several of each of the ones you have that sold individually all fell into the $77 to $85 dollar range. Then we see some sold in pairs of two’s for $152.50 one is the Pauline Hall that you have and the 2nd one is MARCHIONESS KILDARE which you don’t have. Then two Annie Pixley sold singly each for $146. The only others we see is a set of three with very old images and can’t make out the names at $303 for all 3 in a lot.
Hope that helps fill in some of the puzzle a little bit.
Mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
I know.. I know.. but just to know that you got your “first”. 831 feed backs and 34 full pages of positives and now we get our first. Sure it is only a “blip” but guess it had to be a first time. mc 🙂
Hey Ryanne.. now that you bring this up, we set that number years and years ago. It may be time for us to revisit that and change it to allow someone with more strikes against them to be able to buy. What do you have your account set to?
I guess if someone is a big, frequent buyer, hundreds and hundreds per year and they don’t pay a few times no big deal. But, if someone is a low volume buyers, a few dozen per year and they have 2 strikes, would make me wonder. On the other side of the coin, one could say, who cares, sell it to anybody regardless, if they don’t pay, don’t ship and just resell.
mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
It is probably just as Ryanne says. Try changing your preferences to allow a higher number. BUT, I still have mine set to 2. Even though she is a big buyer, doesn’t mean she will pay.
On another note if it is something with PayPal or something else, there is might be this work around. Ask her what her offer is going to be or what she is willing to pay. Once you get that amount, go in and change the listing from make an offer to just Buy It Now for the price you two agreed on and make it instant payment. That way, see sees it, buys it and instantly has to pay for it. Just an alternative. Who knows, if you don’t know what she is offering, she may low ball you to an unacceptable level anyway and everything becomes a moot point.
mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
It may seem like out in the country if you come up from the south or going east west. But Erlanger is just south over a big bridge from abigger city and that is Cincinnatti, Ohio. I lived and worked both in Erlanger and Cincinatti for about a year. One of my in between printing jobs.
So in a sense it is just a 15 minute ride North over the Ohio River to a big city.Yeah really do wonder what they do with all the stuff they pull or keep???
mike in Atl.
It may seem like out in the country if you come up from the south or going east west. But Erlanger is just over a big bridge over the ricer and that is Cincinnatti, Ohio. I lived and worked both in Erlanger and Cincinatti for about a year. One of my in between printing jobs.
So in a sense it is just a 15 minute over the Ohio River to a big city.Yeah really do wonder wht they do with all the stuff they pull or keep???
mike in Atl.
That is interesting and makes me think… Pitney Bowes is the company Ebay sub-contracts the physical part of the GSP program to. That is where you are sending your GSP items to in Erlanger, KY. Makes me think if they are keeping the item, does Pitney Bowes have some sort of outlet either brick and mortar or online like Goodwill does] in order to resell what they keep in order to try to re-coupe some of their costs??? Hhmm…
mike at MDC Galleries
No, if you sell something by going through the “Make an Offer” and they do and you accept, Ebay does not enforce the pay immediately rule. It gives them 48 hrs. I believe.
What we do, we assume and agree with Jay, that 99.9% of the buyers are honest and have good intentions. So if we accept, an offer we go ahead and pull that item with the days other items. We then pack it last after our items going out today and then it is ready to ship same day when the buyer does pay. If in a very few [rare] cases the buyer renegs and doesn’t pay then the item goes back into storage but at least it is ready to ship fast whenever it sells again.
You know Terri I thought the same thing earlier when I saw the post. Also of a little puzzlement. If LauraLux participates in the GSP program, then how was someone in a country where an item is prohibited or a country you can’t ship to end up being able to buy in the first place. In our case GSP is our guard dog. If it doesn’t go through GSP we don’t bother with it, even though we could do an end run. Ask buyer to cancel, change the listing and re-buy and things like that. But was just a puzzlement as to how this transaction was purchased? Did the buyer see the GSP pop up and then contact you do do something different? If so, you as seller and them as buyer won’t have much protection. just curious.
LauraLux, since it is your listing, care to share?mike in Atlanta
P.S. .. Hey, give the automated return assistant Ebay offers a try. May just take the complete concern out of the whole process in the future, especially if your returns are real low. mc 😉
Those little ones did OK in the beginning. About 15 to 20 sold. What sold were the more intersting patterns. What’s left are the after math of being cherry picked a year or so ago. We are about to go into the portfolois of the large silkscreen pices I did over the last few decades. These fluids are going to get dumped in the next few weeks and the bigger, nicer, better higher end pieces will start to go in the store.
But thanks for asking. Will let you know when we get some portfolio pieces in their. I have 12 pieces from Sol Lewit that he gave me from the poster run I did for him back in the early ’80’s. Those will be collector pieces and target about $125 to $190 each since they are fine art posters, not a limited edition print. Also will have many I did for Richard Wellings of his New York and Hartford, CT. skylines. I have multiples of those also. All of these are investment pieces and these artist are known and can be found. Some of Sol work sold at Christie’s New York for over $50,000. Maybe I should put these posters of his Wadsworth Athenium wall drawings up for auction and see what happens first.
I will list some of my work after I get the higher end pieces listed. It will probably be some of my geometric 3-D wall sculptures first, then some of my optical and architectural type prints next before I do any of my flat paintings.
We really want to clear out and move all of the collected prints we have acquired from other artists work first. I may call up some old contacts in New York and offer them to those dealers at a lot for them to re-sell. Still deciding and working out all of this.
So, again thanks for asking and BTW.. my input is nothing more than an old guys opinion. That and $.50 will get you half a cup of coffee!! 🙂
mike in Atlanta…
Sorry about all the stuffy business stuff. But maybe a good topic for Jay. “How to run your Ebay Store with a business mind set”.And in the future you may try what we do. Just sign up for Ebay’s automated assistant. Any requests for returns is handled automatically by them. We have only had a few instances but this is what happened.
We get an email from Ebay, it simply states that a buyer has a complaint. They deal with it. Usually we never hear or see anything else anywhere. Or we get a notice a buyer wishes to make a return. Ebay automatically issues a return label and after 5 days so, far the few we have gotten just close after 5 days and again we never hear anything else. Most buyers are “fishing” for money back or are going to try to pull a scam. Our “employee”, yes Ebay works for us, handles our Customer Service Desk and handles everything. If something is returned Ebay aks us if we wish to apply a restocking fee or not and everything is then done. We get it back and we re-list and resell.Remember this is just “stuff”. It is “inventory”. All businesses have emplyee theft, in house breakage, customer breakage, returns. All dept. stores have Cust. Service Desks and I bet everybody here on SL has returned something at one time or the other. Did you get to speak with the store manager, company owner or company president…No!. It is because these things are just standard business procedures. The business term is “shrinkage” and it happens in every business. I ran a 15 million dollar company and we had returns, errors on our part, all of the above. All I did was see that number on the bottom line of my monthly P&L sheet.
The same applies to an Ebay business. somethings I see online sellers just getting to “close to their stuff”. This is not personal, it’s business and just a bottom line cost of doing business. If it is only a small percentage of your ANNUAL numbers, forget it, don’t think about it and just move on. Too much wasted energy and time. Think of how long you spent on this issue and then multiply that times $20, $30 or $40 per hour you should be billing and you wasted 3 times the cost of the item at times.
When we had our six antique booths out at a huge mall, my wife or customers broke or stole over 40 items in a 36 month span one time. That averaged out to approx. 1 $30 to $40 dollar item every 30 days. That’s $1,440 dollars during that period. I just handled the numbers and went on with business, and we re-arranged the booths so she didn’t bump into things and the mall installed security cameras but still had thefts.
This weekly looking at your numbers is like investing in the stock market and then watching the ticker tape everyday. Same for errors, omissions and shrinkage. I see so much “hand wringing”, “sweating on the things to small to do anything about” type of things.
Once you start to approach your store and selling activities as a business, create WRITTEN SOP’s [standard operating procedures] for everything you do then just follow your SOP manual on all situations. This kind of work and worry over $7, -$12 dollar return shipping costs is nothing. If you do say, $25,000 a year and have $50 a month return postage fees, remember that is nothing more than like our once a month breakage or theft situation. $500 out of $25,000 is only .02 same for $250 out of a $12,500 ebay store dollar volume.
And next time you have a “Return Request”, think about my analogy… that is just a customer, walking back into your store after a purchase, going up to your service desk and handing the item over to one of your employees and asking to do a return. You stay back in your office, concentrate on the business at hand, “Running Your Business”, and let the front desk handle the situation. Who cares. You have your total revenue, store brand and future sales and success to worry about. Not a piddly $30 shirt return. It is going to always happen.
I have seen this in Jay’s response and approach over the year’s here. He just doesn’t get his shorts in a bunch over anything. Even if a defect happens, there is a procedure to handle it and like Ryanne’s phone call technique [SOP] to her Ebay Rep, you get it resolved and many times even removed.
But this is just one Business Guy and Artists opinion on how we approach all of this. I control my store, my inventory, my policies and how I conduct business. My customers do not tell me how to run my business and my business doesn’t control me, I control it.
Now next time you hear from a customer and they belly ache about anything..here’s your answer. We don’t want any of our customers to be dissatisfied in any way, please return the item and we will give you a full refund. case closed, end of story. Problem handled and solved.
If you get a bait and switch, a ruined item returned, anything, who cares, It is an extremely small percentage of your total scope of doing business. If it’s an internal problem of something you are doing wrong, then fix it, if it is a jerk wad of a customer, let it slide. And only as a last result, throw money at it, i.e. a partial refund [customer bribe], then do it and be over it. That is what they teach MBA in business school.
But guess you can see I haven’t had my morning coffee yet, which led to more of a rant than an answer… but hey we are only people on the SL forum trying to help in some way or another.
Respectfully submitted and nothing personal.. Now go sell us $500 worth of “stuff” in the next day or so .. Better still go make something you can sell! 🙂 Good luck
mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
If you are inquiring about the “edit 500 listings at a time comment”, I would certainly think so since all we have is the mid-size Premium store, and if I so choose to edit my listings from within the Ebay form [now mind you this is on a computer NOT a CELL PHONE], I am allowed to do them 500 at a time. I just did a double check again and yep, my Premium store editor is showing 500 at a clip.
mike in Atlanta
Just saw this as I was bouncing around listing this morning.
You made me smile :-). Think you meant, “Translucent” sheet. If you use an “Opaque” sheet the light won’t shine through it. It is “Opaque”. LOL. It is just early and am just getting my morning coffee down and this made me smile. Good start to the day!!!
BTW: The one we used to use before it got broken, was a 24″x24″ square piece of 1/8″ thick acrylic-plexiglass TRANSLUCENT [milky] sheet. Then I had glued a 1/8″ square piece of balsa wood strip across it in rows about 2-1/2″ apart. We would lean the sheet up against the wall at a slight angle with one of our photo floods behind it. then turned out all other room-area lights. It lit up [glowed] great. It acted just like an X-ray light box you see on TV shows.
Then we lined the slides up across the glued on thin wood strips [they acted like a thin lip to hold the slides]. We usually put about 12 slides across in a row, and only about 3 or 4 rows depending on how many we had. This gave plenty of white border all around the outside. Then we did one photo of the whole group of 24 – 48 slides. Then we took the balance of the photos by coming in close and focusing only on about 6 to 9 depending on the arrangement cluster of photos. That was close enough that when a buyer used the “zoom” feature on the listing they could see each photo fine.
We haven’t done slides in a long time and that big sheet got broken in half down in the basement studio when used on another project. We do have a few metal boxes of a n aquisition which has been sitting in the old piles waiting for me to construct a new one.
Give it a try and make yourself one, then you will have that for any future shots.
For digital guru’s scan the slides on a flat bed scanner that has the slide and film conversion, then use an app to collague 4 – 6 slides together in a montage shot and use that.
But the “opaque” sheet, we don’t think will let light through it. LOL 🙂 🙂
Ok..back to listing and more coffee.
mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
