[rant mode=on]

Can anybody tell me why ebay sucks so hard? Does anybody have a positive experience with them?

I tried selling an old car 5 years ago when I lived in the UK. The deal fell through because the bidder was a scammer. Fine. So ebay kept my $50 listing fee and wouldn't give it back (but credited my account with it)

I've tried a few times over the years to get it, inevitably either get promises or no response at all.

So the other day I decided to sell some shit to try and use up my fees.. first thing I listed was a PSP which I bought new 3 years or so ago and have basically never used. After 36 hours, the auction was over the amount EB Games said they'd pay me as a tradein for it so I was wrapped.

Until the bastards canned my auction for "copyright infringement". Apparently stating the firmware revision it runs (due to the fact that firmware can run pirated games, but I never actually said that) is against their policy of selling items with modchips blah blah blah.

Now, a) I didn't say you could pirate games with it, and b) modchips are LEGAL in Australia, as tested in the high court. This REALLY pissed me off.

What's worse is in Australia they used us as a test bed to FORCE you to use PayPal ONLY as a payment method. This was for the "safety" of the users. Nothing to do with the fact they take an additional 3.5% cut of your funds if you do. The Australian high court ruled that it was anti-competetive behavior, thus they weren't allowed to do it.

So in an effort of pissing everybody off further, they haven't forced PayPal as the ONLY option, but they HAVE forced PayPal as AN option. And if you mention that you don't want to accept paypal in your listing -- you guessed it, they remove you again.

I'm so fucking sick of these pricks!

[/rant]

they love me.

have never sold on ebay, only bought...and only ever had one very slight problem..so minor not worth mentioning it, except when I complained to the seller he was a prick about it and basically said 'too bad'
also have been irritated by bidding on something and watching it for two or three days only to have some cockbite swoop in at the last minute and outbid me

have bought and sold a fair amount of stuff on craigslist and have never had any problems at all...

I've never had a problem buying off ebay (well, one, but I ended up giving up on trying to do something about it as I found an alternative way of fixing it myself) but it seems to be every time I try and sell something that it all goes wrong.

And their policies with forcing paypal down my throat REALLY piss me off. Maybe if they didn't cancel my fucking paypal account every time I open a new one (because they link me with this site) then I'd be more forgiving. But they do, so I'm not.

I see craigslist is nowhere near as popular in Melbourne as it is here in the USA...
compare the Melbourne rants and raves section to the Portland, OR r&r..

"swooping in at the last minute"?!?!? That doesn't work. You have to swoop in at the last second. I usually press submit with 5 seconds left and confirm on 2 or 3 depending on the connection and then bam. This is really a serious flaw in ebay. They should call an end to submissions and tehn allow 10 seconds or so to sort the outstanding bids. I feel like a prick when I do this, but started doing it because it was done to me. If Ebay worked correctly there would not be an issue.

There's commercial services such as esnipe which do it for you (I assume they're still around). 1 second left, bang!

What they need to do is what other online auction places do. For example, we've also got greysonline.com.au here, which is an actual auction house which lists stuff online too. Primarily IT equipment from bankrupt companies and "leading financial institutions".

At the end of the auction period, if somebody puts in a bid, it extends the time by 10 minutes. If another person makes a bid in that 10 minutes ... it extends it again. They call it "going, going, gone!" and it just makes sense for both the buyer and the seller. Seller gets maximum price because it gives people a chance to continue bidding against each other, and buyer gets a chance to get the item they want without being screwed over at the last second by somebody swooping in and sniping them.

TradeMe is the main online auction site in NZ and they auto-extend their auctions by 2 minutes after the last bid - same as what pulse just described. It used to be an option you had to select, but so few people were not selecting it that it is now the default selection. You can still chose to opt out of it when setting up an auction, but why would you - like pulse said - it helps maximise your take as a seller!

with the vast 613 syndicate , we should be able to come up with the 'golden fleece" product to sell on ebay. bangin' 'em every sale for 2 bucks or more "packaging" fees.
my head hurts just thinking of that place.

my experience of e-bay is all good, but I too have only bought, not sold. I use the UK one because can get stuff sent to family there instead of huge fees for postage to ship "outside the EU", and because Norway has no e-bay There is an auction site for Norway called QXL but I have only had bad experiences with them, it's poorly regulated by the admin for one and has sellers deciding not to bother selling after all when the auction is over because they did not get the price they wanted. Thanks for wasting my time!

Pulse: maybe you need to register 613 as a business in Australia and then make it clear that you are asking for a paypal account as a private person, not as 613. If they then refuse you can make an official complaint using some law or another I am sure, because you are not the company, just the director or whatever. Or you take direct action...

BOOOM!

or make a I hate ebay & paypal site. Or just write to them telling them that you tell everybody you know, including the users of your site with image views now totaling 38,827,976 that they are fucktards. Good luck.

fossil, now would be a good time to start faking that G.W. Bush memorabilia.

i had ready 2 good Anheiser "bush" products ready to roll. that's the only clues to this classified project



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/12/2008 11:26PM by fossil_digger.

My PSP sold in the end for nearly $100 more than I would've accepted for it, so I guess I'm fairly happy with that, even though eBay was a complete prick to deal with for it.

So now what can I sell next? It's a plus613 fire sale!

Who wants to buy a website? I hear these sites are reputed to be worth nearly $50,000 ....

sell your admin rights for a limited time only. say $100 a week with a contract allowing unlimited verbal and physical abuse of DK & immediate family. Shame i have only $99.10.

Wait.. you need a contract to abuse me? and here i've been copping it for years without this knowledge!

I'll sell my rights of abuse of DK.

Though as he's such an easy target, they're really not all that valuable. There's just so much wrong that you can pick on!

I go on ebay to steal fossil's bids!

too bad you don't know my user name.

fossil posting on ebay here

i hate that dude!