EBAY CLOSED MY BUSINESS THAT DID 800K PER YEAR

[exxos]

Another eBay victim after 23 years of selling. People know what I think of eBay and PayPal already...





Our late moderator ran the why eBay sucks website..

https://web.archive.org/web/20201003083 ... ucks.info/

I wrote a ton of stuff on that site as well.

Including my own personal ebay horror story from 2013 ! Wow how time flies ! Over a decade since I got banned from ebay and paypal !

http://web.archive.org/web/202003201707 ... ror-story/

I'm behind AL 100% with fighting eBay.. Though when companies get large like eBay, it's almost impossible for justice to happen Its whyebaysucks site was created to "fight back" but it was more like just shouting into the void in the end.

Amazing how these large companies can screw over the users which built THEIR platform. Its just the norm these days sadly. Always hard working people vs the corporate monsters!


I think all the sellers livelihoods are always hanging by a thread. I never took any notice of the warnings people gave me back in the day. In the beginning I did extremely well and even had the PayPal credit card and I think only had one dispute out of several years of selling. I had a completely clean slate until the eBay started getting greedy starting to punish sellers for all sorts of things as they cannot solve.

One thing which always stuck with me saying I heard, it was directed more towards PayPal at the time, but

"it's not just IF you get banned, but WHEN !"

How true that turned out to be, and how naive I was not to take notice.. Because why would I, I was doing extremely well at the time....

Even talking to people in person years ago.. I remember one guy said "the trick is not to argue with people".. I thought myself, yeah I learned that in the end. As soon as I started getting those reviews I just used to say "you want my help and give me views, good luck with your problem" was emailing them would be a complete waste of time the matter what you said or did. It also proves how ignorant that guy I spoke to was. There are so many angles and so many bad practices by eBay is really quite incomprehensible have a majority of people simply do not see them...

Myself and DrF watched ebays forums during the whole INR pandemic. That was the final straw me as 50% packages mysteriously went missing and eBay told me to do better when it was clear the buyers were just scamming on mass. Is what led to the sellers sticking random barcodes on things to make it look like they were trapped so buyers could not claim INR so easily.

Of course eBay own forums were deleting anything and everything which painted eBay in a bad light. The only post remained with the ones which were blaming Royal mail liveries and everything is tied eBay to part of the problem, hundreds of posts and even hundreds of pages of posts pointing the finger eBay all got deleted on mass... Not exactly breaking any laws I suppose, but not exactly good business practice either.. I suppose they constantly get away with the same and these days people just do not bother even mentioning problems so much anymore.. Why bother...

[alexh]

I've never seen this Al guy before? Is he "famous"? He looks like a bit of a Del boy. He should have Trotters Independent Traders on his van. "This time next year, We'll be millionaires".

Half of his Youtube videos about how to sell on eBay (and I only watched a half dozen) are total nonsense. Like normal "influencers" he's probably not actually making any money through his business but through his videos, advertising, to "wanna get rich quick" people trying to follow him (and probably loosing their shirts in the process) and selling books on the subject etc.

He also doesn't seem to care about his customers, reselling things that appear to be obviously broken, "sold as seen". Selling used rechargeable batteries without testing them (and looking at some of the videos in the wrong packaging without the correct postage)

[exxos]

I think that's all a bit harsh.. He has several people working for him at least 3 deal with customer support alone. He's done videos on problems and how he deals with them. He does videos to help people, likely gets money from the videos but bit much to call it a get rich quick scam. Wages cost money and money has to be generated somehow to pay for staff. He did say when he shut his other depo down recently he would keep paying his staff for some months. As to if that's true.. Can't say.

As to what selling advise he gives, no idea, I don't watch such videos as I don't sell on eBay. He was mostly the person I started to follow over the whole EU GPSR mess. He seems to have some fight in him over others who, well like me, just give up in the end.

The used battery thing I agree is odd. I don't know how he deals with that. But scrap yards can operate the same. They don't tend to test stuff. They just sell you the item and if they are reputable they will refund or replace. If Al does that, maybe I don't know. Sold as seen, well can be questionable, if he does that, no idea, buyers should be told up front. Maybe he buys them tested, we don't know. I'd rather question why buyers are buying used batteries in the first place.

Whatever anyone thinks, or whatever he did or didn't do, there are now at least several people out of work again because of eBay. I know fully well you can't win no matter how hard you try.

I'm as mad as hell about it even after I got banned 12 years ago from eBay and paypal. They couldn't even tell me what I did wrong. Their rep couldn't even work it out. But my appeal was rejected. IIRC they pointed me to the main index page on my site where the only thing it could have been was it said "mods and hacks". That page wasn't even linked to my store at the time. Nobody had even visited the page for months according to the logs. So they didn't even visit the page to verify anything. But I never got a proper answer to the ban. I had been with paypal for years, only 1 case in all that time. I even had the PayPal credit card.

Now mix in my 2+ year battle with trying to get off Microsoft's block lists when they can't even find any reason for the ban..

Now mix in Google banning me, after giving them all the information they requested including utilities bills etc, still banned me and I can't do anything about it..

Cloudflare blocked me from some websites for no reason like stopforumspam.. The list goes on and on..

People selling on eBay etc don't realise their livelihoods are hanging by a very thin thread. One slight hiccup along the way and your shut down, game over, goodbye. Its happend so many times now it should be a crime. I've talked to a lot of people about all this over the years. Other than those few which speak up on Youtube etc, most won't bother. Because what's the point. I suspect while problems increase, the people speaking out gets less and less as time goes on. That in itself is a huge problem.. I've sent loads of letters and articles about all this to news and media outlets. They don't care. Al now knows the ugly truth about it all.. Love him or hate him, he's a voice which we need.

Imagine if I still sold on eBay. It's one of the biggest selling platforms. Buyers go there and can pay more for items than if they went to a independent site. My site almost doesn't exist compared to ebay. Imagine what things would be like if I had more sales and what I could have accomplished by now. Rather than abandoning multiple projects, mostly due to lack of funds.. But also other factors.

It paints a picture of how things are these days.. I'm one person, I can't fight multiple big cooperations all day everyday.. At the end of the day everyone is just trying to make a living. But it's becoming increasingly clear as time goes on that it's becoming harder and harder for companies to survive or even get a foothold in the door these days. Louis Rossmann has even done videos on it all.

I hate politics, but governments need to wake the hell up and help people who have their livelihoods destroyed by bots and big companies. Keep putting taxes up to compensate is treating the symptoms not the cause of a lot of problems.. I could go on but it's not my intention to turn all this into a political debate. I'm just sick and tired of people's lives being destroyed by companies who don't give a crap. Its happens to me all my life. I'm sick of it all. Others should be also.

Commence hatred..

[russellnash]

I found the linked article to be a very long read but also very interesting. I was thinking about selling some stuff about a year ago but without reading anything at all about the subject I decided it was asking for trouble.
If people are entitled to send something back, get something for nothing and so on then they will do that. I bought something recently and the seller offers that I can return it to the other side of the world free of charge for any reason whatsoever. That is very customer friendly, but as you have often said, there is no such thing as free postage.
Ebay used to be somewhat different. In approximately 2010 I bid on a Mega ST with colour monitor. The seller never sent it to me and I lost the money. A little annoying, but that doesn't mean making unrealistic terms for sellers is a good idea. I didn't use it for years until about 4 years ago when my Atari interest started again. Generally when I buy something that turns out not really to be what I want I just accept that I made a mistake and take the loss.
One very good point that is very relevant today is that the writer speaks about people hiding behind a computer screen. In real life you were also anonymous unless someone knew you, walking into a shop. paying cash, no name and address. It looks likes any kind of anonymity will be coming to an end soon if everyone doesn't resist it. I don't think it will help Ebay sellers at all but it will increase the control over them even more. Your tax bill will be sent to you a lot easier, too.