WHY IS IT NOW HARDER TO SELL ON EBAY ?

[polly.the.cat]

Over the last 18-24 months, l have noticed an extra amount of effort and forethought that has been required by ebay Seller's to list items to Sell. Many factors have brought this about, a number due to changes in the structure by ebay themselves.

However, some have been brought about by the pure greed and unprofessional behavior of a number of ebay Sellers who have made it harder for those doing the right thing.

One reason has been the postage issue change, brought about by ebay because some sellers were posting and item @99c  and then charging $25.00 for postage, to help cover any loss through the 99c sale, if it did not increase in auction time.

The amount of negative media coverage through paper, tv media, and written articles in journals. A quick search through google will show you many of the concerns of the Buying public in relation to ebay, here, and in the USA & UK.  These facts do not do well for Sellers trying to make a "living" or make a hobby a $ profitable outcome.

ebay's New MBG has just added fuel to the fire, along with an increase in Fee structure, ebay Shop costs, AP Mailing costs, and the behind the scene costs that we do not always see or take into account, e.g. taking parcels and postage to the local AP mail outlet, vehicle running costs, etc.

Bubble wrap, envelopes, printing labels, printer cart/ink, assembly of said item, etc, etc,  all take time and effort, then there is ebay to pay at or near the end of your month, next month, it starts all over again.

Those Sellers, ( and they know who they are ) who do not do the right thing by their Buyer, create an environment that is then very hard for those doing the right thing, to survive in.  Some Buyers still believe in once bitten, twice shy.

So why is it getting harder to Sell and remail "afloat" here on ebay ?  Anyone else have some thoughts or advice ?

[lane-ends]

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@casbit33 wrote:

Don't they realize that they would make more money if all listings were free. There would be a lot more items for sale. More sales. More $$$$$. It's not rocket science - just common sense.

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No it would be full of junk that just goes around and around for years, just like quicksales. Buyers would leave in droves. your items would not get found as they would be on page 550 out of a 1000

[foxercase]

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@casbit33 wrote:
I don't get a store subscription because they are not free. After I pay all my bills, I have a total of $12 left per week. I can only use free listings.

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I dont get it, you have 3,000 listings over 8 accounts. How would you even list them all and get them for free?

[casbit33]

I don't list them all, I list as many as I can using free listings. Back when we were getting the promotional listings every 2 weeks of 150 or 200. I was able to relist everything over 2 months. Now the free listings are so rare, I am finding items disappear after 60 days in my unsold account. It's really annoying because I sell items for a lot of other people, not just myself. I feel like I am letting them down.

[della_conce]

The reason its harder to sell on ebay is because of the latest technology, I Pads I Phones and all these gadgets have fried peoples brains and instead of people communicating and evolving they are de-volving . Before people used to make an effort and call about a car , Now everyone just texts , This is not good for our future . This latest technology has taken us away from evolving and communicating 

[heihachi_73]

Except that phones are about two decades behind the times when it comes to data access. I would hardly call that the "latest technology". Paying good money for one or two (or even five) whole gigabytes of data (and sometimes not even that; the smallest plans being in the hundreds of megabytes), paying to send text messages, paying extra in some cases if the person you're calling is on a rival network or landline (I could go the hole hog and say that even paying to phone someone is ridiculous in this day and age; you're already paying for the service, and that includes landlines as well).

Compare that to 1999 or so when even then you could download 20GB per month on cable (yes, it was expensive, and if you went over the limit they would charge you $1 PER MEGABYTE, at least with BigPond; I should know as I racked up a $1900 bill because for some reason they put me on a 200MB limit instead of the 2GB plan I thought I was on!), and had a myriad of free instant messaging services like MSN, ICQ, AIM, and of course IRC servers. And of course, there was Napster and its clones (no YouTube or Netflix back then, and I doubt my old Pentium 166 with its 32MB of RAM could have handled it anyway!)

[*tippy*toes*]

32MB of RAM? How pov! I was the flavour of the street because I had 64MB!!! Didn't make a lot of difference with my dial up 33.3kbs modem though. I hated it when you were half way through downloading something and the blastard phone would ring, cutting you off. Not that you could download that much with a 2GB hard drive. It makes me laugh now that we paid a fortune for our computer with 2GB of HDD and now you can get a thumb drive with 2GB for about $4.

Imagine trying to use eBay with our first computers! It would take a week just to upload one photo, let alone 12!

[heihachi_73]

Good thing "high resolution" in 1999 was 800x600 (or 1024x768) and tiny, highly compressed 320x240 JPEGs of a few kilobytes was the norm. I had a 2GB hard drive too. In fact, I still have that PC, it's used for old DOS games and still has Windows 98 after all those years. 🙂

[*tippy*toes*]

My first one had Windoze 3.11. When I upgraded to 95, I was amazed that you could have more than one thing open at a time. Email AND a single web browser (in my case, Netscrape)! It took me a few weeks to get used to that, I kept shutting the browser down to check the email.

I only got rid of my old one in the last couple of years. I wasn't using it and I needed the room it was taking up. I did play games on it for awhile, but then found it wasn't being used at all. I've still got the HDD in a drawer somewhere (not that I could ever get anything off it, it was pretty big and chunky compared to the slim ones in the laptop.

I've still got a box of floppy disks too. Do computers still come with a floppy drive?

[springyzone]

Do computers still come with a floppy drive?

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I haven't seen one in years, but you can buy a plug in thingy, (I forget what it is called) which will hold a floppy disk.

For those who still have floppies. I threw all mine out a while back.

[davidc4430]

my first puter had a massive 1.2gb hard drive! and that whizzo windows 95 with the video clip from happy days. i must have watched that 50 times in the first week.

now ive got an 'old' vista comp with 2 1tb drives lol and i'm constantly getting reminded 'we wont be supporting your system much longer'

but prices have dropped a lot, shouldnt need to spend $2,500 next time.

i have a floppy drive in my computer bits cupboard still in its wrapping.

went through the constantly burning dvds where i installed 2 burners to make it quicker. havent burnt anything in months now.

easier to stick a usb drive in or an external hard disc.