My Fellow Acoustic Guitarists, a word of caution re: E-Bay

[RareBird]

I've sold a few guitars and musical electronics through E-Bay this year for the first time. All went well until my last transaction which I believe there is something substantial to consider if you're inexperienced using E-Bay. I found during the course of selling my instruments and devices the first few times, persons claiming to be potential buyers asking me why don't I set the transaction up as a "buy now" instead of an "auction" in which case they would "probably" buy my items. After looking around through E-Bay's functionality I found no way to change the sales format from "auction" to "buy now". Apparently it was unchangeable after the fact and for ever hold your peace. I still had no clue what the benefit would be to either party why to use "buy now" versus "auction".

After some months passed, I found I needed to sell my Martin XC1t Ellipse guitar because my automobile inspector would not pass my vehicle, saying my tires were dangerous in their current state even though there were only 30K miles on the original Good Year Sports radials that came with my '02 Ford Mustang. I took his word for it as the tires looked like they were rotting a bit as opposed to going bald and might indeed be a bit dangerous. So, when preparing to raise money for the tires by selling this sweet Mexican Martin I really dug but decided I had to part with, I arbitrarily chose the "buy now" price function instead of the "auction" function when preparing it for sale on E-Bay. As it tuns out, I was able to sell the guitar within 5 days--facing some bartering and counter offers I did not expect since I did not choose "auction". I eventually accepted a figure close to what I was asking and I sweetened the deal by throwing in a Zoom re verb unit that was in nice condition and which worked perfectly for that guitar if you'd be playing it though a bass amplifier with no re verb like I often did.

Here's the part that threw me and the reason I'm writing this bit of advice here on the forum. If I'm wrong please forgive me and advise me where I've erred. E-Bay charged me almost $49 for the listing which, as I said, lasted no more than 5 days. I checked my records and saw that I was charged only $19 for listing a new Breedlove Atlas for auction earlier in the year which took at least three weeks to finally sell. After having a canary, I had to back-track to see what I might had done to cause this since E-BAY LISTS NO CUSTOMER SERVICE PHONE NUMBERS ON ITS SITE.

I found out by retracing my steps that it was my choice of the "buy now" option instead of the "auction" method that made the difference. I made that choice entirely arbitrarily with no information whatsoever to guide me except the seeming popularity or urging of others in previous deals to do so. In retrospect and with what I know now I have no knowledge if these persons who made these suggestions or "urgings" to me were indeed potential buyers or "shills" for a service which, based upon this latest experience, gave me pause to wonder if there isn't some institutional fraud going on here with E-Bay.

The "buy now" sales function is there for a logical reason--it allows people who advertise cheaper stuff which is likely to stay listed for so long that the fees charged to cover the listing would soon grow to be more than the actual unit could possibly justify advertising. Thus the "buy now" function does away with listing fees but manages to be profitable to E-Bay by the change of the listing fee modality for a set percentage of the amount of the entire transaction. How that would work is that, say, a $10 coffee cup were listed for 5 months. If the auction function were used with pictures and so forth of the coffee cup, it would cost the advertiser approximately $72 in fees making the cup a net loss of $62. With no earnings for the cup realized at all. If the "buy now" function were used, the cup would have sold for $10 with only 10% of the total of the transaction being required to be paid in fees. The cup therefore brought the original seller $9--assuming there were no special intrinsics about the cup in which people were willing to pay more than the $10 asked for it.

The "auction" fee modality is very different when involving something of significant value which is likely to have a market materialize for it shortly, say withing a few days to two months for instance. E-Bay merely charges set rates for the advertisement and what additions you may decide to add to enhance the view of the product (such as more pictures and more intricate detail of functionality). If you have a $10,000 item that takes a month to sell, you would probably pay the listing fees of approximately $20 or so. If you didn't know what you were doing and put it in as a "buy now" optioned item, you could find yourself being billed by E-Bay for roughly $1,000 with E-Bay doing just about as much in the way of service--allowing you to post a picture, describe your item and wait for the lucky sale while E-bay never touches, smells or otherwise sees your property it is is being paid to help you liquidate.

The arithmetic I used is completely hypothetical and there are nuances that effect the final assessment of fees which subtract from your profit. But there are issues of great financial significance at stake here with many ethical side dramas that should probably be considered but sure do not knock you over the head if you just happen to judge E-Bay by your own experiences.

For instance it becomes more and more interesting why absolutely no customer service phone numbers or related functionality are around for questions. E-Bay can certainly fall back on it's self-congratulatory merits of being a pioneer of total automation where it can claim there is no need to talk to any representatives and any discrepancies must be documented and submitted by e-mail wherein answering the e-mail still carries no phone number of any one to call whatsoever. But what this also happens to do is create a convenient "mistake machine" which always favors E-bay in that either they get paid their fees properly or they get their fees payed many times over improperly by happenstance of convenient misleading in which it has been assumed that no human being ever had to actually "lie" in order for the party paying the exorbitant and errant fee to indeed make that wallet-lightening choice.

Isn't it further interesting that with the current sophistication of computer animation that could easily serve the proud fully-automated business in handling the vast human-intensive process of illustrating or otherwise differentiating the wisdom of such a choice as to which model of advertising and sales the selling party would be billed for, potentially costing the selling customer quite a bit of money is completely undressed in E-Bay's assumed "modern" system of merchandise sales automation? Some of you folk may think I'm a jackass and may not like my humor on this board but I can assure you that I am not enough of a jack *** to be the first person to have written to E-Bay about the "tilt" of their table in the years since they've been making all there fortuitous mistakes that wind up with people paying the wrong and the very high fee only to either be told in e-mail that it was our fault for not reading all the institutions right (if we receive an answer at all) or if there have just been millions of us over the years all chalking it up as our own unfortunate personal experience in which the right thing to d o is just eat the $37 or the $45 dollar "mistake" we made and dutifully accept it as our own shortfall in not reading every piece of fine print or telling ourselves that we are somehow lucky we sold our item and made enough not to have wage a long war on the funky table that tilts undue profits into the pockets of E-Bay because $50 or a $100 isn't enough to keep fighting about with an organization that has no phone system and apparently belief it should even need one--no need to cut its own greedy throat by getting one because no one understands the **** Information Technology Revolution anyway except he who know how to make plunder look like honest and meek blunder.

Since they have no customer service function with real people explaining the real procedures and reasons to choose one method versus the other, their silence is deafening all but for the sound of that ringing cash register. Careful my guitar-pickin' buddies that that bell does not toll for thee.

[stream]

They raised the Buy It Now final value fees significantly a couple months ago, but they left the auction fees the same. They did it pretty stealthily, and someone who hasn't been on eBay for a year or two wouldn't have noticed. As a result I switched all my listings over to auctions with the Buy It Now added.

You do need to do your homework with eBay before selling anything so that there are no nasty surprises - especially with expensive items.

[Buck62]

Moral of that long story...

Always sell on a forum (like this one) or locally on Craigslist to avoid selling fees, PayPal fees and a bunch of headaches.

[jpfeiff]

That's an awfully long post to basically say that you didn't read their rules before posting your sale. "Buy It Now" has ALWAYS been more expensive to the seller on eBay than a regular auction. eBay is a business, after all....better to get yourself informed about a service you are paying for BEFORE you use it. Live and learn....

[66strummer]

Not surprising they dont offer customer phone support. With the massive number of customers (buyers and sellers) they would no doubt spend a fortune on representatives to answer phones, etc.... I'm betting most of the responses by email are automated. Sorry to hear. You should shorten your post up IMO and just mention the basics. A lot of people wont read thru that lengthy post and wont respond to it. I've been skeptical about selling on Ebay myself. Bought a ton of great stuff on it, so I cant really knock it but selling is another story. Got to definitely watch your step apparently. Better luck in the future with them, Rarebird. We all run into this kind of thing somewhere along the way. If it isn't Ebay it's something else where the Fine Print gets easily overlooked. I'm sure I've done it myself enough times...... BTW, how's the AD-80 holding up? Still got it I see. I just found out mine had a plastic saddle in it. That's getting replaced in a hurry. That was a surprise too.....

Ryan

[SeamusORiley]

also worth remembering is that Paypal is owned by Ebay.

You get a fee for listing,
you get a fee for selling,
then they take ANOTHER cut for YOU being paid.

not too bad for ebay!

I know that some sellers with good repuations are no longer using paypal. There has also been a lot of discussion about what happens when someone claims that they received a box of nothing (just weighted down).

This was a scam that has been used at ebay for quite awhile and paypal used to just refund the money BEFORE the investigation; great for buyer, not so great for seller.

I think they may have modified these rules since the last time I checked, but I feel that I would much rather buy here, on AGF classified, than on Ebay.

I know you don't get the large audience, but having bought and sold DVDs here, I had nothing but good experiences....just a thought for ya.

[mudbean]

Originally Posted by jpfeiff

That's an awfully long post to basically say that you didn't read their rules before posting your sale. "Buy It Now" has ALWAYS been more expensive to the seller on eBay than a regular auction. eBay is a business, after all....better to get yourself informed about a service you are paying for BEFORE you use it. Live and learn....

+1

Don't they tell you exactly how much your listing will cost when you set it up? They sure used to.

mud

[Tomo]

I always felt that the only thing ebay does is provide additional revenue to UPS and fedex. It seems that people (at least me) buy something, use it for a while, and then try to sell it for what they paid. If one guitar is sold three times, the shipping company makes a killing on transporting one item to three different customers. Kind of like a rental store.

I'll bet ebay accounts for a large percentage of UPS revenue.

That being said, I love to buy and sell on ebay.

[spock]

As someone with over 950 all positive transactions on EBAY - including many nice guitars - I absolutely love the place. That having been said, I do my homework on each and every transaction, regardless of price, and if I'm selling, I figure ahead of time what things are going to potentially cost me to sell them including PayPal fees assessed to me. It's like anything else, there are a few bad apples in every bunch, but if you look before you leap, paid heed to smart business practices including diligent questioning and information gathering, and walk away from things that don't seem on the up and up, you can still score some very impressive deals on the Bay. Just my 2 cents worth.

Tim

[cotten]

Since this thread is about eBay first, and acoustic guitars as a distant second, I'm moving it from General Acoustic Guitar Discussion to Open Mic.

cotten

[Dotneck]

I couldn't pay attention long enough to read the whole rant. But I have a question. Can you really leave an auction for a coffee cup up for five months? The longest auction I ever used was 7 days.

Its been a while since I've used ebay to sell anything so I don't know....maybe they changed the rules again and auctions can go five months. It wouldn't interest me...

[brian a.]

The eBay customer service number is 1-800-701-3229. It was established in July 2008 to help answer questions and provide help. Didn't you get the email???