Ebay Customers - some of the worst! :-(

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

It's obvious that eBay only wants big sellers, moving lots of merchandise. I buy less and less from eBay, and I usually only buy from small sellers or large sellers that I've dealt with before.

I'd agree with that, simply because those sellers do so much volume they're never really in danger of having their accounts suspended or restricted over a few negative feedbacks from buyers.

With me only selling items occasionally, it could've taken as few as two negative feedbacks in a month to get me suspended.

There is, or at least to be, a seller with hundreds of thousands of feedbacks and only about 90% were positive. That's beyond pathetic.

[Darkwish]

I'd agree with that, simply because those sellers do so much volume they're never really in danger of having their accounts suspended or restricted over a few negative feedbacks from buyers.

With me only selling items occasionally, it could've taken as few as two negative feedbacks in a month to get me suspended.

There is, or at least to be, a seller with hundreds of thousands of feedbacks and only about 90% were positive. That's beyond pathetic.

I agree. It sucks.

[wagegoth]

Darkwish, I don't want to get in an argument, but going through the forums a while back someone had linked to a bunch of the bogus listings. It wasn't a few, it was thousands. There was nothing on them to indicate that they were test listings; it was obvious though that they weren't quite right, something about the seller ID or something else, I don't remember.

eBay's practices have resulted in a lot of small sellers abandoning them. Since I no longer sell there, I don't buy there nearly as often as I used to. I only go to eBay when I can't find the item I want somewhere else. eBay made a poor decision in ending buyer ratings. Having no buyer ratings favors large scale sellers as they can absorb losses or bad feedback (as Irv pointed out) much more easily than small sellers.

[DeltaSierra]

I used to use ebay a lot, but since the changes with feedback, increased charges, and overall suckiness, I've not been using it near as much as I used to.

My Dad used to get a lot of his fishing gear/tackle on ebay, and he's been encountering a LOT of shill bidding as of late. Usually you can't tell if shill bidding is going on, but in this case it was so obvious.

A seller was auctioning off more than 150 fishing lures, individually. None had bids yet, and there was no starting amount. Dad bid $1 on five lures he liked. He was the ONLY bidder at the time. Within minutes, every single one of those lures had another bid, taking the current bid to just over $1. JUST the ones he had bid on, not any of the others. He was suspicious, so he made one more bid on just one, and sure enough - within a couple minutes THAT one had another bid on it, again not any other bids on any of the other lures the seller had up for auction. Since then its happened several times with different sellers. I guess they like to keep their insert fees down by not having an initial price, and then try to bump up the bids hoping that the bidders will want what they're selling enough to enter a higher bid.

[tropicsgoddess]

Yeesh, those are some real "winners" ya got.

[Darkwish]

Darkwish, I don't want to get in an argument, but going through the forums a while back someone had linked to a bunch of the bogus listings. It wasn't a few, it was thousands. There was nothing on them to indicate that they were test listings; it was obvious though that they weren't quite right, something about the seller ID or something else, I don't remember.

eBay's practices have resulted in a lot of small sellers abandoning them. Since I no longer sell there, I don't buy there nearly as often as I used to. I only go to eBay when I can't find the item I want somewhere else. eBay made a poor decision in ending buyer ratings. Having no buyer ratings favors large scale sellers as they can absorb losses or bad feedback (as Irv pointed out) much more easily than small sellers.

If you can find the post/seller ID/item numbers/whatever, I'd love to take a look at them and find out what that was about and let you know.

As for the feedback and other practices, I've seen both sides of it - buyer and seller, both small and large. I've also worked in some of the nastier departments (account security, copyright/trademark, banned, etc.) so I see a lot of the bad stuff that most people don't.

That said, they're trying to bring more buyers to the site and get rid of the less reputable sellers. It has actually helped in that respect, but as I think we can all agree, they could have found better ways of handling some things.

[Seraph]

I left Ebay after being shafted due to their own rules. As you can see here... http://customerssuck.com/board/showt...606#post322606 ...I tried to save myself from a scammer, and got burned due to it.

What was worse, was that one of the auctions I was listing absolutely NEEDED to be canceled once I found out what was going on. I tried canceling, and was told by Ebay that since it was close to ending, all I could do was cancel bids, and explain to the winner what happened. I did so. Someone managed to bid on it in the very last second and won a $175 photo frame (that didn't exist) for $25. I nicely emailed him, explained what happened...and all heck broke loose. He screamed and flailed and such and threatened to leave a negative feedback. Whats worse, is that I then found out he was an international bidder, who had a US address on his account...and the auction was USA only. He demanded it be shipped to the UK.

I got back ahold of Ebay, updated them on the situation of both the scammer and now the int'l bidder (who was getting very nasty at this point and bombing me with emails) and was told "Don't worry, you'll be fine and we'll investigate this and help you out."

Two weeks later, I got a phone call and a woman who talked to me about it. She as well stated I would not be banned from Ebay over this, and that they were working on it.

Right after that? I was banned. I emailed several times asking why, and included emails and logs of what was said to me...to no avail.

So yeah I don't like ebay. :P