eBay

oztralien · ‎24-11-2016

Why do people use this Global shipping, their prices are of the planet. Looked at a small gasket set selling for £5 from UK & global Shipping quote £32.54 postage. I just avoid any one who has Global Shipping & I know quite a few people who do to.

4channel · ‎11-08-2020

@oztralien wrote:

As they say I'm back, Interesting the comments from a thread I started quite a while ago, I would like to give an example of how Pitney Bowes works. I wanted to buy a spanner, cost 9 pound but they wanted 23 pound postage plus an exorbitant import duty. I emailed the seller to see if he could lower the postage & he said he could not. He sent all his goods to Pitney Bowes for 2.80 pounds & they do every thing. He ends up receiving 6.80 ponds for his article. He could not work out that he could have sold it to me for 9 pounds charged me 10 pounds for postage which he would have made another couple of pounds but he only ended up with a lousy 6.80 pounds going with Pitney Bowes. Also a lot of people in this thread don't realise Pitney Bowes is owned by Ebay.

Kudo for you for coming back and also pointing out the loss for the seller and the other added expense for you. The problem is that many sellers don't even know that they have their auctions latched on to by Pitney Bowes. Almost like a parasitic leach, it attached itself to an auction and becomes a middle man. Imagine having a middle man at your place of employment where the inserts himself between you and the person that pays you, and he skims / takes a cut from your pay. Well, this thing works in a similar way. Yeah, I hear about the supposed benefits but when you look at it rolled out in front ot you like a roll of wallpaper with the history of many people who have used / been subjected it it, I doubt very much if there's that much merit!

I don't know anything about PB being owned by eBay. I know they made franking machines or sold them. I do remember too some of the advertising pics of yesteryear by PB that today might have feminists shaking angry fists at them.

Anyway, some good news. Many sellers that I have approached have been more than happy to change listing to normal post. One seller who was a bit distant (Turned out to be a good guy though) had no idea what PB was. He'd been in the game for a while. Funnily enough some of his listings were by shipped USPS and others by PB. And there were similar and same items going via both modes of shipping.

One poor lass in the UK believed that having PB on her auction was a binding agreement and any deviation from that would be manipulating (yeah you heard it right), manipulating the system for her and my gain. Anyway I enlisted the help of a UK stranger (Great guy) to bid on my behalf. He did and won the auction for a couple of pounds. Popped it in with the item that I got from him and sent it to me. Had the lady let me buy it now she would got four times as much at least. *Sigh*

tazzieterror · ‎11-08-2020

@4channel wrote:

...

Kudo for you for coming back and also pointing out the loss for the seller and the other added expense for you. The problem is that many sellers don't even know that they have their auctions latched on to by Pitney Bowes. Almost like a parasitic leach, it attached itself to an auction and becomes a middle man. Imagine having a middle man at your place of employment where the inserts himself between you and the person that pays you, and he skims / takes a cut from your pay. Well, this thing works in a similar way. Yeah, I hear about the supposed benefits but when you look at it rolled out in front ot you like a roll of wallpaper with the history of many people who have used / been subjected it it, I doubt very much if there's that much merit!
...

🙄

Look who's back with a bad analogy! How does GSP skim from what a seller is paid? Oh wait, it doesn't - the seller only pays the normal domestic postage component.

Imagine having a delivery man at your place of employment who inserts himself between you and some of the people that pay you, and says, "oh, you need that to go overseas...no no, don't worry about the paperwork—just give it here and I'll take care of it."

There's a better comparison for you.

The problem with your "roll of wallpaper" analogy is that you assume you're looking at the wall, when in fact all you're seeing is a frayed edge down near the skirting board.

Anyway, complaining about GSP is old-skool—jump on the Managed Payments bandwagon, 4channel, that's the new eBay controversy.

NEVERMIND ON TROUBLES!!! LET'S DO HOBBY!!!

4channel · ‎05-10-2020

Re: Global shipping rip off

in reply to zanadoo_56
on ‎05-09-2017 02:10 PM

@imastawka wrote:

Zanadoo, all GSP sellers only ship domestically.

You buy, and they only ship it to Pitney Bowes.

Pitney Bowes ships it internationally.

Some of the sellers only ship domestically but many ship overseas as well. It's just that they haven't set up pricing for shipping on their page. And as zanadoo_56 said here , "there are still sellers who don't realise they are signed up for it".

Quite often on a GSP listing, I get reply from seller saying, "I didn't know that I had GSP on my page" and "Yes I ship to Australia. I'll work out the shipping cost and get back to you". There was even a well-seasoned seller who had no idea what GSP was. He had half of his stuff with GSP and other half with USPS First Class Int. and there were similar and same items in both. A good guy he turned out to be, but he was a bit cavalier with things which might explain why his auctions / sales were like that.