I hate eBay. It used to be a wonderful and fun experience but they changed the feedback policy so that only buyers can leave negative feedback. Before, both buyer and seller could leave positive, neutral or negative feedback. Since your feedback score is visible to all buyers the higher it is the better eBayer you are.

Buyers and sellers didn’t want negative feedback so if there was a problem with the transaction they would work together to resolve the issue. Now that only buyers can leave feedback the sellers are pretty much at the mercy of the buyers.

I recently started to sell stuff on eBay again. I had that garage sale a few weeks ago and still have a ton of crap to get rid of. It isn’t crap however, it is nice stuff collected by my father who became an antique dealer after he retired. Unfortunately when he was telling me about this stuff I didn’t pay attention because even though it wasn’t crap to him it was to me. He has since died, leaving me with all this stuff that I know nothing about. But I do know it is nice stuff even if it isn’t my kind of stuff. I also know that he squandered my inheritance on this crap and it would have been a sizable one.

So I’m trying to unload it and since I couldn’t dump it on my neighbors I decided to use eBay even though I hate eBay.

I just sold a small Russian Lacquer trinket box. In the description I said it was an antique and that it was from Russia. I stated that I knew nothing more about it and since I didn’t speak or read Russian I had no idea what the words were that had been painted on it (my descriptions tend to read much like my posts here and sadly most buyers on eBay do not have a sense of humor). I started the auction at 99 cents since I had no idea what it might be worth. I had four other ones with prices still on them for $30 but those price tags were from the 60s or 70s and I don’t know if Russian boxes are worth more or less since the cold war ended. A woman bought the box for $11.50 plus shipping which was $5.99. The shipping cost should not have been this high but I hadn’t bothered to reset the shipping cost from listing a previous, larger item.

After, I repeat, after she won the auction she emailed me that the shipping cost was too high and that I should lower the cost and ship it first class. I wrote her back and asked her if she wanted to cancel the transaction. I didn’t want to dinker around about cost and frankly she pissed me off so I didn’t want to refund her through Paypal. I could have and I should have, it would have been fair, but I didn’t want to and after the transaction was completed was not the time to start negotiating price. She said she did not want to cancel the transaction but wanted me to refund her $2 for the excessive shipping. I should have done it but she irritated me by being so stupid to think that she could change the rules at this point. I might have just been having a bad day. I wrote back and asked her why people on eBay wait until after they had won the auction to make changes. I admit it was rhetorical and she must have figured that out.

I shipped the item first class and after the cost of postage and the box I had to buy to send it I ended up spending about $5.50. My time is worth nothing to these people so I don’t even argue that point anymore.

Today I received an email from this woman who is impossible to please. She said that she wanted a refund since the box was not an antique nor was it authentic. I was not going to argue authenticity nor age with her so I told her to send it back and I would refund the cost of the item. In other words I would not refund her shipping costs either way. I knew this would not make her happy but didn’t care. She has the seller feedback to hold over my head and I was waiting to see what she did. I already didn’t like this woman and since she could not be satisfied I decided that this was going to be worth losing my perfect 100% seller feedback score for.

She wrote me back saying I had misrepresented the item and that was cause for a refund according to eBay. So there she was dangling the negative feedback over my head. I suppose a lot of sellers really care about this and will do just about anything so they don’t get a negative feedback score. I used to care about this too until I spent weeks working with a buyer who said he never recieved my merchandise. I presented receipts from the post office but because I shipped over seas there was no way to track it. I called eBay to find out what recourse there was and they opened a case which the helpful eBay guy told me would most asuradly not go in my favor since the buyer had paid but hadn’t gotten his merchandise. I lost a fair amount of money, the items and all the time I spent trying to track down tracking information in a communist country. So I got screwed.

So when this dumb bitch started holding the all important feedback over my head I didn’t care. Give me negative feedback. Does anyone read it anyway?

I sold another item, a Lladro figurine that had been broken and glued back together. I stated this in the auction, I also said in the description that I wouldn’t bother selling it but it matched another one that was in perfect condition and figured people might want the pair. A woman, also stupid, purchased it for $18. She recieved it and gave me feedback right away saying that the figurine had been broken and someone had glued it back together. I didn’t bother arguing with her since she must have hit the wrong key and gave me positive feedback.

I hate eBay.

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