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05/22/2018 at 11:04 pm in reply to: Can't do partial refunds on damaged clothing if you don't offer free returns? #40753
Thanks for the helpful response, MyCottage.
“you will continue to handle it as before, which means basically throwing yourself on ebay’s mercy, or at least the CS rep’s mercy.”
If that’s the case, that would be good news – ie, things would be no worse than before. I’m just worried that I’ll get the “ebay no longer gets involves in buyer/seller arguments” response that Jay & Ryanne mentioned getting. I guess we’ll see. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s not like I’m expecting a deluge of returns, much less a deluge of returns where the item has been damaged, so it’s not like the apocalypse is coming on June 1st 🙂
This makes me think: Some sellers are adding a handling fee to cover the cost of offering free returns. Well, with the issue I’m discussing here, I may have to add a handling fee to cover the cost of NOT offering free returns! LOL.
I feel like everything would be fine (ie, just raise my prices to cover new costs) if I didn’t feel like I was competing with the self-made sweatshops so much. Time to source more unique items!
Marjean,
I think I understand what you were thinking when you thought you could ship on Tuesday. If weekends don’t count (first bullet), then if the purchase is on Sunday, then it should be treated as if the purchase was on Monday, in which case you could ship on Tuesday. But that’s not how it works, so technically weekends sort of count. Or, another way to put it is that if a purchase comes in on a weekend, treat it as if it came in on Friday. They really should make that clearer.Luckily now in the Orders view the first column tells you what day you need to ship it by, so that’s what I go by now, which is great b/c I don’t have to think about their strange “weekends don’t count – sort of” rules.
For some reason this date doesn’t show up for GSP sales, though – not sure why. So for those I still have to count. (I have 3-day handling time).Thanks for sharing this, Amatino.
I was very excited to find my first longaberger basket a couple of weeks ago (b/c I heard this brand mentioned on youtube as a bolo), but after I looked at solds, I became discouraged. Luckily it only cost me $1.Retro,
My hypothesis is that the sale itself drums up business, b/c it sends messages to sellers telling them that the price has changed on items they have been watching or have viewed. I have no proof of this – it’s just what I believe happens.
Sonia05/19/2018 at 11:28 pm in reply to: New Catalog Based Search & Ebay's Re-Structured Business Model Plans #40435mycottage,
thanks for the example of a product page for an item that has new and old versions for sale. As a buyer, I think it’s great that they prominently show the lowest price for the new item. That’s what I want to see first. As a seller, I think that’s fine, too – they can see that now anyway, just not as easily. And bargain hunters (scavengers) can go browsing through the used items. I really have no problem with that. They can make it a little less clunky with a more modern-looking UI, but that’s another matter.lady in red,
Can you give us a link to search results that show only 3-4 items when there are many more (hidden) items that fit the bill?05/19/2018 at 9:30 pm in reply to: New Catalog Based Search & Ebay's Re-Structured Business Model Plans #40424“I think pre-owned/used listings/products will not have as high of a standing as they once had which may cause listings to be overlooked or not viewed at all.”
AE,
Like MyCottage, I’ll just have to agree to disagree with you on this interpretation, and just check in on it in 2-3 years and see where we’re at. My opinion is that buyers are going to get pissed off if they are not shown the cheaper, used options. And there are tons of items that are discontinued, so the only option is used.05/19/2018 at 8:47 pm in reply to: New Catalog Based Search & Ebay's Re-Structured Business Model Plans #40418PS – we also had to use hierarchy/grouping to scale this community. First it was just one thread of podcast comments per week. Now it’s a forum with categories (groups). Doesn’t mean any particular post gets de-prioritized or hidden – all it means is organization and an easier way to find a thread on a topic of interest.
05/19/2018 at 8:44 pm in reply to: New Catalog Based Search & Ebay's Re-Structured Business Model Plans #40417Grouping listings and only showing new items are two completely different things. Grouping listings (ie hierarchical organization of search results) sounds like a good thing to me. It’s the standard way of scaling anything. Having to deal with individual listings one by one is antiquated in this world of thousands of search results. When you have a company, once you hit some threshold of employees, you start creating a hierarchy to keep things organized and manageable. Same goes with search results. Same goes with clothing – all my t-shirts are in the same drawer.
As for only showing new items – where does it say that’s going to happen?
05/19/2018 at 8:36 pm in reply to: New Catalog Based Search & Ebay's Re-Structured Business Model Plans #40416Ok, that wasn’t quite ALL I have to say. After reading through this thread, I’m left with the need to see a very specific example of how product catalog is going to lead (intentionally or not) to pushing out scavenger-type sellers.
1: Could someone provide me an example of how this product catalog thing would negatively affect a listing for vintage pyrex?
2: Let’s take another example. One thing I have for sale is a very gently used pair of Merrell boots – nearly new I would say. So how is product catalog going to negatively affect that listing? While this *is* something that will compete with big companies selling new Merrell boots on ebay, many buyers are not going to be happy if ebay doesn’t show them the cheaper option of buying my used pair. It sounds like there will just be grouping, like on Amazon. As a buyer, I think that’s a great idea. As a seller, I don’t see how this would really hurt – it’s just a more compact (hierarchical) way to format and organize the list of items that are the search results.
What am I missing?
05/19/2018 at 8:23 pm in reply to: New Catalog Based Search & Ebay's Re-Structured Business Model Plans #40414All I have to say is that I couldn’t stop laughing when I read the phrase “Spectrum of Value.” I still can’t stop! So happy not to be in those conference room meetings anymore where such terminology is discussed and used!
Although, you know, it might not be a bad name for an ebay store… LOL
habnab,
the first post now has a link to the spring 2018 update page where product catalog is mentioned, which links to a detailed explanation.As someone who worked in the product planning process at a number of large software companies, I can tell you that it’s not just about the difficulty of improving new features on old platforms, though that is often a concern, it’s also about business priorities. Resources are limited, there are never enough people to do everything, so what do you work on first? Management just doesn’t care that much about this type of usability issue (that has a workaround) when compared to a) issues/bugs that are leading to customer service being flooded with calls, and b) new & exciting things that you can present to the CEO and the board and write press releases about. That’s just the way it is, and is part of the reason why I found that world very frustrating.
So, personally I don’t think you need to be sympathetic. Accepting, yes, since this is unlikely to change. But whenever there is an opportunity to provide feedback to ebay, I plan to continue to communicate that spending a little bit more time on issues like this and/or the ones posted in the “ebay feedback” part of the forum, would go a long way toward keeping sellers happier, more productive, and spending less time talking about using other selling platforms.
I would just tell them that you don’t know how to send them another return label, that they should call ebay to find out what to do.
If they don’t get it back to you intact, then I’m pretty sure you don’t have to refund them, so I wouldn’t worry about that.
I suppose you could also call ebay to get the case closed, but I personally wouldn’t do that right away b/c it’s not a big deal to me if they happen to return a few days “late”. Everybody’s human, and I like to give people a break if I can – just adding positive karma into the universe, b/c I also like others to give me breaks.
So Cal Joe,
Yes, I was surprised the first time I realized this. I guess that’s their way of trying extra hard to get you to commit to a higher level store before you actually need it. Bandwidth sold by Internet service providers is the same way. If you go over your allowance, your per-Mbps price is a LOT higher than it is when you stay within your allowance. They would prefer if you bought a higher level subscription and used less of it. Of course, there’s more sense for bandwidth providers to do this, b/c they need to know how much capacity to build out and need to incentivize customers to not just flood the network all of a sudden. Although ebay needs to know how much capacity to build out as well, their higher listing fee when you go over your allowance is, while annoying, not high enough to be much of a deterrent to listing more. And I doubt that they’re worried that someone is going to come in and just flood their system with a billion new listings overnight.
OK, so let’s also have a 500 or 600 item store subscription between basic and premium – that’s what would help me the most, and the savings would be meaningful to me. But really, at some point, it really just doesn’t matter all that much. $5000 in listing fees would be a lot for me (small store), but if you have 5000 items in your store, then $5000 per year should be a drop in the bucket. And, as sigilini pointed out, my example doesn’t make sense because the break-even point is at 3400 items, which means it’s only $3600 per year for 5000 items.
Anyway, it’s just different choices of what problems/challenges/costs to prioritize focusing on. Different strokes.
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