Leaving Ebay

Here are all the reasons I’m stopping doing business on Ebay.

Ebay got full of itself and the new policies say it all: “We want big resellers”.

Well, they forgot that they need buyers, too. Buyers that are casual resellers..

Since 2006, I’m a casual user of Ebay. I sum up mere 50 sales/pruchases, all of them reaching 100%.

Over the years, Ebay introduced a couple of changes:

• no more negative and neutral evaluations for buyers. If something goes avry, that leaves the seller with the only option to say nothing.
• refactoring of the website. A pity. I skip the ergonomic part to jump to the search one. Google gives better results than Ebay. Add this terrible search engine to the crisis and you’re selling nothing.
• Since June 09, Paypal/Ebay protect you no more. See my previous post.

My latest sale was the last on Ebay, really. I resell my Canon 5D for 1500$. A good price, you say. That was the only nice part.

I posted the item like the others; being honest and descriptive. I posted pictures of the camera body under every angle I could find. I mentionned that the camera had no scratch. That was all.

My first deception was to discover that I’ve been raped by Ebay: 50€, then Paypal: 50$.

My second deception, was the buyer. At first, he sounded kind. I explained him about the funds being held by Paypal and to leave a positive feedback as soon as possible.

I even offered (means he paid nothing for it) the buyer 40€ of insurance in case the postal service damage or lose the package.

24 hours after the delivery, the buyer contacted me to state that there were mismatch between my description and the camera. He talked about a BIG (his words) scratch. I looked closely at the pictures I took of the body and notice a thin dotted white line, about half the size of a cat’s hair. Ok, my bad, I said there was no scratch and there is one. The buyer claimed me 20€ for the repair. I’m still wondering how this can be fix.

Secondly, he said the viewfinder, the sensor and the mirror need cleaning. I believe him with my eyes closed. Despite having the camera sent every year for cleaning, the 5D’s sensor is a magnet to dust. Yet, I mentionned nothing in my ad about the sensor/viewfinder and mirror being clean. The buyer claimed me 46€ for the cleaning.

Because I didn’t want a dispute and wait months until my funds were released, I offer to pay the cleaning.

The only answer I got 48h later from the buyer, was the Paypal payment for the cleaning.

Since then, nothing.

No evaluation, no thanks. Not a word. I think I’m ready to wait 21 days until I get my money.

I’m done, sincerely. I’m honest, do favor, be kind and in the end I’m raped all the same.