eBay cans free P&P requirement

Huzzar!

And hurrah! About time really.

Common Sense Outbreak Alert

The free postage thing was simply a way for eBay to screw their percentage out of every penny of a transaction. Good to see they've found some middle ground for a change.

A step in the right direction

Postage has a cost, so clearly one should be allowed to charge unless it's excessive.

It took them a while to realise but never mind.

IT textbooks on Ebay

Try selling some heavy old IT textbooks on Ebay, and putting in the standard Royal Mail charge of £4.50 for postage, the system doesn't allow this - maximum of £2.75 for this category, however Royal Mail will deliver upto 1.2kg which some books are easily beyond. Only way round this was to list the item as Free to collect and to specify delivery price in the advert. Bit ridiculous and confuses many buyers - finally they may have seen some sense. I can see that the system is being abused e.g. Phone cases from china for 1p with a P&P at £10 for example but there has to be a better way.

A stop sign as this is what happens when a single provider is so dominent in one market, oh and don't they own paypal....

Weey

Forcing people to offer free postage on certain categories was a ridiculous idea, it seemed to be eBays attempt at a quick fix to the fraud going on with delivery charges.

I managed to lose an Xbox controller in the post recently which I sent unrecorded because I wasn't allowed to charge anything. Of course eBay/PayPal done it's usual thing of blaming the seller and refunded the money from my PayPal account without my consent. I then had to claim back from Royal Mail which took about 6 weeks.

This change is very welcome as I feel I can start listing again without worrying about money spent on postage.

Great news!

The free postage thing has infuriated me before as well. Some items such as large reams of cable can be quite heavy, but eBay used to force me to offer free postage. Hence, I had to just bump the price of the item up instead and point out that several quid of the price was in fact covering the postage.

It also used to make Buy-It-Now auctions for multiple items a pain in the backside as well - I wanted to offer discounted postage for multiple sales, but couldn't easily do it as the price for the postage was tied into the price the item was selling at.

Now, I can finally advertise items for sensible prices with a correct amount of postage being charged, and easily offer discounts for bulk purchases. Better for me and for the customer!

High value items

I have sold some higher value items on ebay before, and the only way I would send them is using Special Delivery insured. This could be £10 for postage quite easily, which buyers were comfortable with. In fact this delivery type was the only one I would allow.

Why on earth would you send a high value item by normal postage - the buyer only has to claim its never received, you get charged back and loose the item in the process, even with proof of posting.

They can stick it, just they way they could stick their free postage bollocks

Anyone spotted the problem...

There's a flaw in ebays scam.. I mean plan.

If you look at those prices... then try actually sending them for that price (including purchase of packaging materials) for anything other than the cheapest, most basic postage... which doesn't include recorded and so forth... then it leaves the door wide open for scammers to claim they never received it.

I never send anything through ebay that isn't recorded... too many thieves pulling that kind of scam.

It's not worth selling anything on ebay any more... you pay them twice, you pay paypal and you are at high risk of getting scammed now over the new postage limits.

I'll stick to buying cheap items and get decent stuff from proper shops.

That's why I sell my books etc on Amazon

Firstly they (Amazon) sell the same stuff and when you list your item they seem to be able to get pretty close to the retail price for postage costs when they suggest the postage fee (although you can change it if you think the P&P costs they suggest are too low)

Secondly, I have never been scammed on Amazon over anything or been complained at because the buyer didnt read my desription of the condition of the stuff I was selling.

The people selling (and buying) on there seem to be a little more savvy, maybe not expecting the world on a plate for free.

Did they bother to actualy check the costs?

The limit on CDs is £1.00. I've just checked a double CD weighs about 230g and it would have to be posted as a Packet because of its thickness, decent packaging would then take it over the 250g price point making it £1.85 second class post! Ebays guidlines acknowledge that the cost of packaging and the labour of packing can be charged for. So ebay aren't being consistant at all.

Also I'm sure that some 'Accessories' in the various categories could be large, heavy and cost far more to send than the limits.

They really are shooting themselves in the foot.

Message to ebay: The royal mail has an online pricing calculator!

So everything has to go 2nd class unrecoded then?

Haven't sold anything on fleaBay for a while, so managed to miss the "free P&P" debacle.

Once upon a time I just used to send stuff 1st calss and be done with it, until one day someone claimed they didn't get the item and I (stupidly) hadn't got proof of posting. As a result I had to take the hit. From that day on everything was sent recorded/special, I didn't give an option for normal mail.

However I seem to recall that even back that that just the postage for 1st class recorded for a CD or DVD was over £1. And jiffybags don't grow on trees!

So in order to keep to eBay's rules you're going to have to send it 2nd class, so the seller has to wait longer. The blurb doesn't mention anything about insurance, so don't know if you can only offer with insurance (ie recorded) or not.

And finally I have to point out that even if something is sent recorded Royal Mail will still stiff you over. I sent a DVD recorded, it never arrived and RM didn't know where it was. So I put in a claim for it, and all they gave me was the price of the DVD even though they had completely not fulfilled the service I'd paid them for! B'stards!

eBay: Dead Man Walking

You can be sure of one thing, that any chage that eBay makes (or does not make) is for eBay's benefit, not for their consumers (buyers or sellers).

And does not Amazon’s remarkable fourth quarter results say it all!

eBay: Dead Man Walking

Absolutely everything that eBay says has to viewed through smoke and mirrors; if you want an understanding of what they actually mean, you have to take the exact opposite of what they say! They really do think that we consumers are all stupid.

eBay (aka “the eBafia”) is a criminal organization!

How could that be, you ask? Well, with much effort and some multi-auction analysis, it can be very clearly demonstrated (see the following link) that shill bidding fraud by unscrupulous professional sellers on nominal-start auctions, is rampant on eBay auctions, and the executives “in the know” at eBay, unless they are actually as stupid as they apparently think all we simple consumers are, cannot but be aware of that criminal activity (and, if indeed they claim to be not so aware, I am pointing it out to them here and now).

And yet they do nothing proactive nor truly effective to prevent such criminal activity. Indeed, they have done the very opposite, they have introduced a non-unique masking of bidding IDs, which serves no logical purpose other than to deliberately further obscure such criminal activity and aid and abet said unscrupulous sellers to, by fraudulent means, maximize their sale prices, thus maximizing eBay’s FVF.

It’s even worse in the UK, where the form of bidder masking makes it simply impossible for buyers to detect the unscrupulous, sophisticated shill-bidding professional sellers that undoubtedly infest eBay UK auctions. Needless to say sales by auction on the UK site have collapsed to a fraction of what they used to be.

It’s known as “criminal facilitation” and, in most civilized countries, anyone who knowingly facilitates such criminal activity is also considered to be a criminal. It’s as simple as that! Is it any wonder that, relatively speaking, buyers are staying away, and this business is still going down the toilet the world over?

The full ugly story at

http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=6502877

Just to inject here. . .

Glad to see eBay has rolled over on this one: the way it was so blatantly trying to push up its profits by raking in commission from a compulsory in-built P&P component was one step too far, and one step too bloody objectionable, for too many (including me.)

But let's not confuse eBay's climb-down with anything to do with customer service. eBay works in its own best interests and when that work back-fires -- as here -- then it's time to have a re-think.

And let's not cite the original implementation of this compulsory P&P scheme as evidence of eBay's anti-scam stance. Because it wasn't.

As to other posts on here about the scams that continue on, well, er, that's eBay reality: the company hasn't enough people on the payroll to police its websites so relies upon others to do the job for it -- only it hasn't enough people on the payroll, either, to handle the sheer volume of reports that those others have so thoughtfully provided.

No wonder that continuing inadequacy signals a continuing vulnerability, and no wonder, either, that this vulnerability grows steadily worse.

Recently, I had to warn eBay's tech people of a genuine listing which, when opened, flashed up but briefly (a second, no more) before being replaced with a scam listing for a similar item.

The scam looked 100% authentic, the item number, seller's ID, 'star' ranking, etc etc. The text was persuasive and there was no give-away insofar as the listing required prospective buyers to communicate by hotmail or mobile phone only.

The less experienced could easily have fallen for the error screen that occurred when clicking on the user's feedback history (it looked like eBay was having a temporary technical difficulty, and reporting so) and after clicking on the Ask Seller a Question link, such a user might well have accepted that the message box that opened was entirely genuine.

The original listing, of course, had been well-nigh instantly overlaid in an injection scam, the kind of thing that's not supposed to happen but evidence that unless eBay commits far more resources than is currently the case, then it's still as open to abuse as it is open to business, free P&P or not.

Paris: the injection's entirely genuine here.

"The sell price always includes the P&P."

I suggested that a LONG time ago -- long before ebay had even the *capability* to sort search results by price including P&P. Which it still only partially has -- only the "advanced" search form has the capability to display the initial results properly sorted by P+P&P. You can't make it the initial default with the standard search.

Don't show the "goods only" value at all, not even as an option -- except in the rare case where the seller allows free collection and the seller is within a buyer-specified distance. The buyer doesn't need to know how much of the price is goods and how much is postage. Though the user ought to be able to specify "I will want 5 of them" and have the sort order determined by the seller's postage discounts rather than the price for posting just one of them.

Making bids postage-inclusive isn't a problem. Ebay knows what the postage is, so can subtract it from the bid price.