Dear ALL,
At the end of the day we sellers feel that Ebay doesn’t care about it’s sellers, their main aim is just to exploit fees from sellers in one way or other. Ebay thinks all the sellers are earning millions by selling products on ebay, so paying few thousand extra to ebay would be piece of cake for them. But that is not the case. As per my experience at the end of the month our profit is meagre 50% of ebay fee (considering service charges of CC & OBT + 10% Service Tax). Now if ebay is asking us to pay fees before hand for incomplete deals I was not at all surprised, because that’s the motto of Ebay “ Exploitaion Of Sellers and Free Goodies To Attract New Buyers”.
By this time you all sellers must have realised that selling on Ebay is a time consuming process & it is not as easy as it was with baazee. So our workload has gone up by 200%-300%. To reduce the workload I though I should keep all my products for only paisapay buyers so I do not have to waste time for UPI. But guess what ebay’s buying procedure is so intelligent that it doesn’t ask the buyer to select the payment method, in its first stage. And most of the buyers (That’s my experience) just disappear after that , they never go to the second stage. I really thing ebay thinks all sellers have plenty of time to waste on Ebay or as I said before all sellers are earning millions so they must be having employees to help them do the things on ebay.
Next innovative idea ebay (baazee) implemented is “Paisapay service charges will be inherent now”, by hiding the paisapay service charges from buyers & putting it on sellers head , they feel that buyer’s will be happy , and Seller’s they do not have right to be unhappy because they is no competition to ebay. So sellers do not have choice , they just have to bear with whatever rules ebay will force on them . The major disadvantage of this system was now buyers feel ebays prices are higher than local market. (5% fees+3% CC). So retaining a buyer has become very difficult now, Many of my buyers bluntly said to me on my Face “Ebay is not cost effective any more”. And that is true as face value has gone up. All of you just think “Will you go to a Petrol Pump who charges Rs. 49 per litre(as CC charges are inherent), or would you prefer to go to pump where Petrol is available at Rs. 44.50 as CC charges are applied only to CC buyers. So at the end of the day even offline buyers has to pay service charges for not having CC.
Another innovative idea of Ebays guys is they do have dropped Order Ids, They ask us to work with item ids. So now if we have to uniquely identify an order we have to combine Item id & Ebay Id. Which is again a tricky thing as a same buyer can order same item twice. So this system of identifying an unique order is not perfect.
Ebay is alive today because they do not have competition. And last but not the least “Ebay is Pathetic , Baazee was excellent”.
Thanks you all, if you have read all the above lines. I am closing my business on ebay as it is not worth investing time any more. So my advice to you all would be to write to rediff & indiatimes. Check out if you can sell on their sites or just get one 10 to 6 job, that will give you more money & peace of mind as well. (As your ebay business increase Ebay might ask you to pay 50k before hand for it’s invoice).
Regards And God Bless You All. (Rather God Saves You All, you know from whom).
Ketan S.
