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I applied for the grant Sunday and the money was deposited either yesterday or today.
This couldn’t have come at a better time, and I wouldn’t have known about it without this thread popping up. Thanks for the link Amandaw!
As far as I know, changing handling time is immediate. The only caveat is that items with open offers cannot have any details of the listing changed, including handling time.
I use business policies, and when I change stuff like handling I’ll sometimes get an error that one or two listings couldn’t be updated, usually because there’s an open offer or something. The rest update in 1 to 2 minutes depending on amount.
Just sick.
Imagine, right now, that you were given 10 million dollars. All your financial problems solved, entire generations of your family don’t have to worry about living costs – what a dream, right? Now realize the people who did this probably made 10x that and were still terminally pissed off at some internet nobodies writing a blog, but instead of just trolling and being obnoxious in the comments section like a normal person, they launch a multi-level attack that involves Illuminati-level mind-Fing. Going back, I’d probably take 90k of that 10 mil and donate the rest to avoid whatever brain disorder you get from seeing too many zeroes in your bank account.
And anyone who is laying off staff and spending a few hundred mil on a bar is a doofus. To the gulag with these punks.
I wonder what put them over the edge? Maybe 2 decades of articles like “eBay gives out free shipping supplies coupon to store owners – is this the end of eBay?”, “eBay in death spiral after stock falls by 0.00000000001 of a point”, and “Unpaid eBay intern fails to deliver coffee to CEO – eBay’s 4th quarter earnings now in jeopardy” finally took its toll on them?
Just kidding. Reprehensible behavior by eBay. The good news here is that this is enough drama to keep ecommercebytes writing 100 articles a day for the next 5,000 years.
I finally have an answer to this.
SixBit uses “GetSellingManagerSaleRecord” as documented here: https://developer.ebay.com/devzone/xml/docs/reference/ebay/GetSellingManagerSaleRecord.html
This is only available to premium store (& higher) owners. Looks like I would need to pay $15.99/month for access to it.
eBay: “You want access to basic data about your transactions? That’s gonna cost ya, buddy.”
It’s been a while since I’ve dealt with the details of this, but IIRC, the actual cost of shipping isn’t offered up by eBay anywhere except the orders page. There’s no way to programmatically access the data either via eBay’s API.
I used to track the cost by hand. Now I let GoDaddy handle it and try not to think about how my inventory system is technically incorrect on my gross/net numbers each week. COGS is the only tax-related information I get from it, so that’s fine.
If I had to engineer a solution: Currently the data is offered up by PayPal. You would need to cross-reference order IDs. This would only work for USPS shipments. For FedEx and invoice-based shipping methods you’d have to do something else, like parsing the eBay invoice each month.
This is one of my hopes with managed payments and the new API options that are offered: https://developer.ebay.com/managed-payments#finances
I haven’t looked into it much yet. I’ll be forced into MP in July and will likely retool my inventory system to bring in the actual cost of shipping is included in the API.
ebooks and consulting are fine, but things get scummy once we get into the courses and “reseller schools”.
These courses are often presented as get rich quick schemes. Many claim you’ll make the cost of the class back from your first week/month of sales alone. The same thing is said in multi-level marketing schemes. We’ve already seen articles/reviews confirming this.
Legal status as a metric for right & wrong just doesn’t seem like a good mindset to operate under, but since we’re mostly talking about the morals of some obscure YouTube reseller taking large sums of money for basic Google search knowledge I don’t think it’s worth the time to deconstruct it.
Also, J&R should sell a 1 page PDF that just says “SELL TRASH, BE FREE.”
It’s 21 business days.
And damn, I was hyped to check out eBay’s chat feature, but it was even worse than phone support when it comes to circular logic and total nonsense ruling.
My situation: Buyer opened a request on April 10th. I believe sometime mid-May I should have been able to close the case, but I waited until May 23rd to ask eBay to close it. A case was created and immediately closed in favor of the buyer. They were then given another return label and allowed another 21 days to return it.
The CSR I chatted with said the buyer never got a shipping label the first time and that I should have checked to make sure they got it. Nonsense – my returns are free and automated. I even have a message from eBay clarifying that the return was automatically accepted and a label was given. Later, they said the case should have closed automatically because the buyer didn’t use the shipping label they got when the return first opened, but because I escalated the case they were given the extension. So did the buyer get a label the first time or not? I swear, these CSRs expect you to have the memory of a goldfish.
Just to confirm the CSR wasn’t paying attention, I asked what I should do in the future if a return isn’t automatically closed after the window closed. “Escalate it.”
Summary:
* Escalating a return case will close it, but also give the buyer an extension (?)
* eBay’s return system randomly doesn’t give return labels to buyers and it’s our job to send return labels ourselves, despite that not being an option for sellers and the entire process being automated to begin with.
What, you’re telling me that doesn’t make sense to you? It’s a whole line of new logic/reasoning called “eBay logic” that will be taught on every college campus come fall 2020. eBay Logic 101, taught by Prof. IndySales.
Reminds me – back in college, the first week of every school year you’d see a tidal wave of freshmen riding bikes across campus. A week later, none. At the end of every school year, you could swipe up bikes for a fraction of the cost that’d just been ridden once.
Will probably be the case here, I suppose. Look for cheap bikes this fall!
Only a matter of time before RalliRoots does something crazy and gets wiped off the face of the earth by the IRS or something. I read through that post and apparently they’d requested the buyer purchase the item via PayPal’s “Friends and Family” option. What kind of business requests you use that function? No PayPal fees if you do that, right? And the charge can’t be reversed or disputed (apparently.)
90% of the time I see their name pop up online, it’s them defending themselves against a new line of accusations. It’s a miracle that they’re able to operate and pull weird scams like this despite all the information being out there about their various bad dealings.
1) Look into regional rate A boxes. Free from the USPS and roughly 10x8x6.
2) I’ve offered multiple shipping options and the default is the one chosen every single time. Maybe once a buyer requested a faster method.
3) I pass the discount to the buyer. Great competitive edge.
4) Anything over a certain size/weight goes FedEx – even if it’s cheaper to go USPS – because FedEx properly handles packages. Kind of varies from listing to listing, but usually over 16 inches in any direction = FedEx.
This is what I did before I moved to flat rate shipping. I still use calculated for FedEx. Now I just assume that I’ll lose money on the shipping occasionally, so it’s just another cost to factor in to running things. I noticed a huge uptick in sales once I switched from calculated, so I credit a bulk of my sales to just beating everyone else on shipping.
And just to note, if you’re selling a lot of vintage-y, niche stuff, people will pay whatever the shipping is. If you’ve got a lot of competition, then you start weighing the pros/cons of losing money on shipping to get a competitive advantage.
I use Tape King 2.7mil 3″ wide tape. 6 rolls (60 yards/roll) for $17 on Amazon. More width means one strip to seal each side of the box. With “normal” width tape I found myself using 2 strips to seal each side, although that probably just speaks for the quality of the tape.
If the eBay tape were better, I’d use it, but the few rolls I tried insisted on ripping every 2 or 3 pulls through the gun.
What’s next? 1,000 day return window?
I’ll admit – I always thought it was 30 day free returns for TRS.
Anyway, I switched from 1-day handling to 2-day handling during lockdown and decided to keep it as I’ve started listing again. The stress of packing every day was not worth it, and the added time I now have during the week to source/list is more important in my book.
No problem! Hopefully this will put some people at ease about going out sourcing.
Update on Goodwill Outlets: Available bins are cut down by 50% and spaced out across the warehouse. Same deal with retail stores – 1 cart per person. 60 total people allowed in at a time (I think? I didn’t count.) Once you cart is full, you have to check out. If nobody is waiting on a cart, you can come back in.
No face covering = no entry. Fair enough. This is the case for most businesses near me.
As expected, it’s up to you if you want to keep 6′ between you and everyone else. At times my space was violated, but I took myself out of the situation instead of asking them to move. It’s just a reality of shopping at the bins.
Overall I was really impressed by their ability to wrangle everyone in what is otherwise a lawless, chaotic environment.
I had a buyer do this not once, not twice, not THREE TIMES, but FOUR. I was scammed on the first two transactions, didn’t realize it was the same person on the 3rd, and finally got to deal with their real account on the 4th, which was registered to an LLC about 30 minutes away from me. eBay refused to let me cancel the transaction despite the PayPal, email, and name matching across all the orders.
