Using eBay these days feels like playing World of Warcraft.
If you're a high level eBay user, it's a fantastic place to move goods, but god forbid someone new signs up to buy or sell something. Just like what it must be like to sign up and play World of Warcraft for the first time.
Eh, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just lucky, but selling stuff on eBay (which I have done a grand total of three times during four years or so) always seems to work out for me.
In summer I sold my year old iPad 2 with a broken glass cover (otherwise fully functional, the 32GB/3G model) for €349 (someone bid €350 but told me after the auction that they thought the iPad was not broken – I was already writing off the sale at that point but the next bidder happily paid and left a very positive review). That’s just crazy! I thought I could get €100 or so tops, not half the original retail price!
Selling a camera and an iPod went similarly well. It probably goes wrong sometimes, though probably in a small minority of cases. And really, those $2 for listing the product really aren’t the end of the world. (Also, eBay has since forever been very explicit about those fees and that they have to be paid regardless of what happens. There is no way you can miss that when putting a product on there.)
I mentioned it below, but just to reply specifically here: eBay is very specific about fees that have to be paid regardless of sale, that's cool. I'd understand it totally if the auction just failed to be successful or if I'd backed out or whatever.
But when you fail that hard to provide a good product or service and people ask you for a refund, you give it to them. I've done it cheerfully for accounts up to a hundred dollars in fees even. This is just two bucks, and it's more the principle of the thing than the actual money anyhow.
I didn't just not sell my phone, I wasted weeks of time trying to fight their system to do it, and lost probably a good hundred dollars of resale value due to timing.
Don't accuse me of something I didn't do. I very clearly marked the iPad as broken in its title. It was also categorized as such. I tried it out: When you search for iPads you have to explicitly mark a checkbox to even make broken iPads (including mine) appear in the search.
I'm still somewhat mystified how someone looking for a intact iPad could even have stumbled across my iPad. You have to be pretty explicit about wanting to see broken stuff on eBay.
(Resolving that issue, by the way, was actually a bit annoying. The mistaken buyer wrote me an e-mail, pleading me to not give her a negative review and asking for cancelling the sale. At that point you have to ask them to tell eBay that they mistakenly bought the product, otherwise you won't get your fees back. Offering the product to a lower bidder, however, is very painless and it did all work out in the end.)
Yeah, there are all kinds of tools and procedures available to you but not made obvious, and all kinds of unwritten rules and guidelines to be aware of that you're never told about. Things you only learn because you get burnt once (or more).
And this applies equally to WoW and eBay, definitely. At least in WoW you generally have a guild to let you know in advance what mistakes you're likely to make. On eBay, you're on your own.
Also rules change between regions, in AU eBay they encourage an email address on the listing for support. In the US the API will give you some abstract message about policies which you have to go away and guess yourself what it might be (turned out to be the email address)
At the risk of going off-topic, this is yet another example of regulatory capture at work: as systems evolve they often forget to cater to outsiders.
Codebases exhibit a similar dynamic. Open source projects need to track how long ago their newest regular contributor joined. I think they'll find the results illuminating.
If you're a high level eBay user, it's a fantastic place to move goods, but god forbid someone new signs up to buy or sell something. Just like what it must be like to sign up and play World of Warcraft for the first time.