What's Happening on eBay These Days?

     What's happening on eBay these days? The bicycle world does quite a lot of business on eBay as most of us know. Many of my walk in customers have been talking about eBay because of the changes, mostly to the sellers and most of the talk is the new defect rating and the impact on small business practices. 
     
We have been selling on eBay since 1999 (At this time eBay was a baby and an awesome place to buy and sell). Since then we collected 10,000 positive feedback. Keeping in mind that we are in Canada and cannot provide tracking for a reasonable cost we survived quite well and are actually top rated sellers. Recently it has become a rough marketplace and the selling criteria only allows 2% "defect"...defects are any question about shipping, refund, return, neutral or negative feedback, asking where is my item...ect.                  
    You are Defective to eBay to go over 2% and the defects seem very easy to get. One that concerned me most is the refund defect. If a buyer wants to cancel a transaction the seller can get a defect for issuing a refund. Collect too many of these are you will loose your top rated seller and the 20% discount or be ejected. We were defective for refunding the "Wrong Way". On the bright side they emailed us after telling us on the phone a few days ago they will not remove. Today they removed our long lasting 20% discount as a result....sigh....

This email is being sent to you regarding our phone conversation we had on 8/17/14 concerning some defects that were showing up on your report for the following items:
Item:  271542813488 / Buyer ID: raga*****
Item: 281297072084 / Buyer ID: fama*****

Item:  271411244488 / Buyer ID: hlly*****
Item: 281285996084 / Buyer ID: qurt*****

Since you had processed the refund in PayPal back to these buyer's, these will count as a defect simply because the Cancelled Transaction was not performed in eBay under the Resolution Center.  Please make sure that anytime a buyer wants to cancel a transaction, these transactions get processed in the Resolution Center so the defect will not count against you.

Thanks,
eBay Customer Service

   Are any of you sellers on eBay? We are considering not using eBay in the future and have currently pulled listings...not totally sure yet the future. Have any of you have eBay seller problems? Currently sell on eBay? From Canada? Tell us your comments and give us your opinion!

   Google vs. eBay.  As I am to understand Google had a bit of a spat with eBay. eBay's Alexa rank really dropped and so did sales. I'm going to save this for a future blog post. 

                                      Please post your comments!