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Its been down lately, that’s for sure. But how often does it all of a sudden get busy? Pretty often. Although there are plenty of good reasons for people to restrain their spending right now (stock market, inflation, being two major ones), my experience is very rarely react reasonably to things like that. Remember the splurge we all got when the first economic stimulus checks went out!
I can’t remember the last time I shipped to Germany so I suppose if they did get booted from GSP it wouldn’t be a big deal.
I was migrated to the new listing tool and for a whole day was repeatedly logged out when I was trying to list. The next day it was fixed but certainly had me worried for a while.
I keep waiting for something like this to happen with all of the products shoplifted en masse from Walgreens and put up on ebay. But since those aren’t as valuable as high end shoes, its probably going to take a while to sort out from a law enforcement perspective.
You can save some substantial money on rent by moving out of the immediate Bay Area. You have to be willing to go about an hour away and be careful where you move to (some suburbs here have the same problems we are trying to get away from– crime, etc). I’m too ashamed to even say what we pay in rent right now. Oregon used to be the place of choice for California emigrants, but now its Nevada and Texas. People are particularly aggrieved by state taxes in CA (10+%), and those states have none.
We are going to be moving after almost 15 years in Oakland. Buying still doesn’t make a lot of sense, for us (although in any other place, it would make total sense), but saving something like 40% on rent and getting more space by moving to a semi-rural area in Northern California.
Definitely in the future always and only use global shipping program for international orders. It has saved me many times.
I usually just give them my best offer, maybe higher than I realistically would take because the question is silly.
A business I owned was audited. It was not just a letter, but the agent came in, looked at the records (QB files), books, etc. In our pre- audit review, we found a couple areas where we owed money– maybe 1000 dollars inaccurately categorized. They worked for 3 at our office days (why they had to be physically on site to look at a QB file? no idea) and found nothing else other than what we found. Colossal waste of tax payer dollars. It probably cost them more money to do the audit than they got back. Really shook the nerve of our new company and left us scratching our heads–Considering all of the very blatant tax fraud I have seen, I couldn’t figure out why we were targeted. I don’t know that I have any advice other than if you keep track of expenses honestly, and with the aide of a CPA filing your taxes reasonably, there isn’t much they can do. My guess is that a ebay type store of the sort we are running is probably small potatoes to them (compared to the biz I had that was audited, totally different type). But who knows. The whole experience left me changed, feeling that the government is not your friend as a business owner.
I haven’t been posting stuff as often because things don’t seem to be moving that much. I put about 10-15 new things up a week. It is confusing to me too. I do some promoted listings but not too many. I don’t do coupons but send offers almost daily. I have been selling things, but the volume is way down the past 2 weeks, and the past year as i said is down 50 percent almost. It could be that the pandemic cleared me out of a lot of stuff or something. I sell “old weird stuff”, not commodities. Maybe I will try promoting.
I’m glad some people have had some sales. Mine have been in the toilet. I sold about 50 dollars of small stuff the last week. My sales are down 50% compared to 2020. I have 2500 items.
I definitely would not offer free returns for my store. If you sell a lot of commodity like items such as amazon, maybe it is worth it, but for “old weird stuff” like I sell, no way. Most returns I get are based on people not reading the description at all. I’m convinced most people don’t read beyond one sentence of the description.
That’d be great. The last week I had 3 sales get cancelled for non-payment, total $100. This would really button up the loophole that shouldn’t be there anyway.
Your response in handling the situation was nothing if not generous. Some people just have an axe to grind, and it has nothing to do with you.
The pandemic has sadly pushed many people past their psychological breaking point. Many who didn’t have too much of a problem before just can’t handle the stress and are unable to think rationally anymore. So there’s that too.
Never underestimate the drain that a few difficult clients can have on your business. If you have the patience of a saint, bless you. Since I don’t, I block people without a second thought. I’ve run businesses for 20 years and one of the huge benefits of ebay is the ability to block doing business with someone in the future–easily.
