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I’ve ran into these kind of listings before. I’m no prude, but DAMN. It’s always electronics, too.
The worst one I’ve seen was someone who was taking screenshots of porn and photoshopping his items in to cover up the explicit bits. Got a good laugh out of me, although the listing would seemingly not go away from “recently viewed” bit on eBay’s landing page.
In the category of “weird and creepy”, a guy who registered his eBay account in the early 2000s had a young woman posing with his items. His store is probably OLDER than her. Also – pretty sure it was his daughter? Or this guy rolled up to the local sorority house and dangled a bottle of Tito’s out the window? Weird move, friend.
Never sure what to do with these listings – report, or steal the idea and hire one of these Instagram models to pose with some heavy vintage electronics? Hmm.
They’ve completely crumbled in my area. No more room in package drop-off, so you have to wait. Staff was down to 2 clerks. Total wait is unknown since the line only moved twice when I was there. The mailboxes were full and rejecting mail, so people were just leaving stuff in boxes on the floor. There was also huge bins of unprocessed mail just sitting in the lobby completely unattended.
I went twice today and will try a third and fourth time if needed. If it’s this bad on my next trip I’ll dump everything to 14 day handling and forget about it for a while.
Had a buyer from PR purchase something, but no shipping options were available that fit the item. Priority Mail wasn’t an option at all. I had to cancel.
Those multi-disc CD players aren’t really designed to be shipped long distance. They’re incredibly fragile inside and easily go out of alignment. If it can’t go FedEx, I just don’t bother – USPS will drop it, flip it, and otherwise give it zero chance of making it there in one piece. Your packing doesn’t matter because the units aren’t designed to be in any other position than sitting flat on a table.
eBay likely won’t remove the feedback. Maybe they’ll make an exception for GSP, but just in general “it worked when I had it” isn’t grounds for removal.
Even tracking this with the eBay API is borderline impossible. I’ve never been able to reliably pull this data from them – it randomly disappears, changes IDs, etc. Total mess. It should be a flat list of offers sent back and forth, but instead it’s this weird, overly-complex system that I’m sure even the eBay devs hate working with.
I usually say “Hi, I’ll need to cancel the order and have you repurchase the item with the correct address.” or something
eBay used to have a warning that would pop up if you tried to change the address saying you were no longer covered. If I remember correctly, having the right address on file with the buyer protects you with PayPal – eBay might agree to the address change, but PayPal won’t.
Gotcha – Trump is Hitler 2.0.
Well, nice talking to you, Sam. Great comments and very insightful. I think we all learned something from this.
It’s annoying that for like 12 straight posts you’ve painted the entire American public as a bunch of mouth-breathing, room-temp IQ-having dummies who just get whipped into a panic at the drop of a hat. You just breeze past any evidence of the contrary and continue with your FUD.
Log off the internet for a bit, wait until social distancing barriers have dissolved, then go talk to some normal people. I think you’ll find people other than yourself are capable of intelligent thought.
Things have oddly felt a bit more positive here. Last week we were labeled as an “up-and-coming hotspot”, which I think helped solidify the need to really pay attention to social distancing and stay at home guidelines. Nearly everyone is wearing masks now. So far, the stress on our healthcare system seems to be manageable, although new areas are being opened up to handle an influx if needed.
Sales have been up and down, but with little/no money spent on new inventory, gas, or supplies, I’m doing OK. This week I’ll be doing a bit of spring cleaning and will likely sell off some personal items to help boost sales.
I’m continuously surprised by what people are spending money on. Initially I found myself looking at some of these sales and going, “Okay, we’re in a pandemic – do you REALLY need this?” but now I assume some people are managing to work from home, or just have a good safety net built up. A month ago this seemed like the worst-case scenario for eBay sellers!
The data isn’t nearly accurate enough to say for certain if any of this is true. I live in a hotspot (surgeon general’s words, not mine) yet there’s no access to testing and the numbers of infected/recovered are “unreliable.” We were told that “the next two weeks will be brutal” a week ago here, so if you don’t hear from me in a week, well………….
I noticed I hadn’t heard anything about California in a while. After all, they were the initial epicenter for COVID-19 and stood to suffer the most thanks to lack of information on its effects and proper treatments. Turns out they’ve started to flatten the curve and currently sit at 349 dead and 15,076 total cases. Polar opposite of NY: 122,911 cases with 4,161 dead.
COVID-19 loves densely-populated areas full of people who have already been choking down heavily-polluted air for years on end. Wuhan, New York, Chicago, and up-and-coming hotspots all have this in common. If CA and NY represent best and worst-case scenarios, then we can start paying closer attention to similar areas and act accordingly.
I said “a few months.” Once we pass the curve, I see no problem with opening up county-by-county. Resources should be freed up by then. It makes absolutely zero sense for it to be all at once. The only other choice is to wait until 2021 for a vaccine. Surely we’ve all got 14 months of savings ready to go, right? Right?
I don’t see any evidence that suggests that this is happening in any of the states with only county-specific lockdowns. It didn’t happen here. If you have sources, link them.
I’m hoping that in a few months we can see some states opening up county-by-county. I know Trump & Crew were floating that idea, and while I think it would have been incredibly stupid to try it in April, by May it seems like a slightly easier pill to swallow. Why should a rural county with only 6 cases stay in lockdown? It doesn’t make sense.
As for China, who knows? I don’t think anyone in their right mind would believe any information they put out – they were saying <100 people had died when it was actually double or triple that. They say the virus attacks the lungs, so that suggests that people in areas with worse air quality are probably at a higher risk of infection (see: NY and China.)
I don’t think it’s a good idea to start thinking as far out as June/July since these social distancing measures and lockdowns are relatively new. We also don’t really know how the virus will react to warmer weather.
Although your customers might be confused if they’re not scanned on time, eBay says they’re wiping out any defects given the various stay-at-home orders. You can’t go down in standing – only up.
The problem is that the outlook changes daily because the data we have is completely unreliable. Months ago they said the infection rate was 10x worse than the flu, but now they think it’s only doubly as bad given the unknown number of asymptomatic carriers and lack of testing overall.
The models that started off this fiasco were closed-source. We don’t know what math was going on behind the scenes, just that the output painted a situation that would have put us in apocalypse mode mid-April. We’re now a few weeks away from that and we’re not even close. A person behind one of those models later came out and said that his adjusted model showed significantly lower casualties in the US with a PEAK in mid-April.
The lesson here is that we know basically nothing. What we can be certain of is that any information coming out is likely be invalidated by the start of the next day’s news cycle. A week ago you were a paranoid freak if you didn’t donate masks to medical staff. Now they’re saying the spread of COVID isn’t as bad in countries that have been wearing masks. Oops!
One thing that can be agreed upon is that the stay-at-home and social distancing guidelines are working to some extent. If we had more accurate models, better healthcare, and more wide-spread testing (like a 1st world country would have), then we could actually give an estimate of when this thing actually peaks and when it’s safe to start loosening restrictions geographically. As you mentioned, that’s the worry – people don’t know how much longer this will continue, and anyone saying they do know is 100% lying because the data we have is rotten to the core. If you we were able to tell people that this will burn out in 6 months, then you can at least put some systems in place to keep those people above-water for that time. But if you can’t give a timeframe and just keep telling them to wait, they’ll get antsy, and then the least of your worries will be COVID.
