Why I Like Selling on eBay
Filed Under Miscellaneous | 1 Comment
It’s easy to rant — especially when it comes to eBay. For a change, I wanted to share a couple of positive experiences I’ve had selling on eBay lately. They both involved auctions in which I was selling text books towards the beginning of the school year. The first involved a bidding war in which I was the primary beneficiary and the second involved a kind-hearted fellow eBayer who politely reminded me that can’t spell.
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Textbooks are a great seller on eBay. I’ve been listing them with great success and they’ve constituted the majority of my sales since eBay introduced their “Detailed Seller Ratings” a few months ago. In order to keep shipping and handling fees down, I have always offered the Media Mail rate. It’s slower, but much cheaper than Parcel Post or Priority Mail shipping. Unfortunately this delivery method is impacting my Detailed Seller Rating for shipping time.
I go to great lengths to ship the books I sell by the next day. I send an email to the bidder informing them when their item ships and providing them a delivery confirmation number. After I drop the package off at the post office, there’s not much I can do to influence the speed of the delivery. It recently took two-weeks for a book I mailed from Virginia to arrive in Georgia. (I could have driven it there myself in less than eight-hours.)
That’s why I’m not offering Media Mail as a delivery option anymore. Bidders will pay the extra postage for priority mail and I can stop fretting over delivery times.
Just another example of how eBay’s Detailed Seller Ratings measure the wrong things and fail in their promise of “improving the buying experience.”
Study Contradicts Conventional Wisdom on Best Time to Close an Auction
Filed Under Sellers' Insights | 1 Comment
A common question among auction sellers is, “When is the best time to close an eBay auction?”
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Yesterday eBay announced that Yahoo! Mail has signed on to eliminate bogus emails appearing to originate from eBay or PayPal before they are ever delivered to the intended recipient. According to eBay’s corporate blog, all emails actually sent by eBay or PayPal now have a digital signature (some code that spammers cannot replicate). Yahoo! Mail will scan each incoming email purporting to be sent from eBay or PayPal and will not deliver the message unless an authentic digital signature exists.
eBay states that this functionality only currently works on Yahoo! Mail although they hope to form similar partnerships with other internet service providers in the future.