Pain in the eBay arse

[kalowski]

Am I wrong here?
Just sold a smart watch on eBay. It's 18 months old so £20 for a watch I paid £200 is fine by me. Better than me just throwing it away.
The guy who won the auction though, is a pain in the balls.
Since winning he's messaged me a number of times: have you got a warranty, do you have a receipt, when did you buy it?
I said that since I got it from Amazon I will have a receipt and2if he lets me remove any personal info I'll send it. This was yesterday afternoon. Got a message last night - "Have you found that receipt?" Fuck this guy, I haven't even looked yet.
And I wake this morning to another message: "Can you send it next day special delivery?" Twat hasn't even paid yet, and that's not what I said in the auction.
If I just tell him to fuck off and relist it, can he give me bad feedback?
Although I do worry he may have some special needs that means this is his behaviour.

[Janie Jones]

My advice - close him down, he's trouble. Obviously going to re-sell the watch, you let it go too cheap. Unless it's damaged, 10% of retail price after less than 2 years is far too cheap. So end the transaction now, take a hit on the fees you will still have to pay and aim to recover the fees when you relist and hopefully get something closer to £40-60, that's what I'd expect for a 2018 apple-type watch, if that's what you mean by 'smart watch'.  Upper end of that if I'd got box and papers.

Matey will give you bad feedback but you can apply to eBay to have it removed, it's a simple press of a button.

[Janie Jones]

Just to add, I've cleared 2 dead friends' houses using EBay, I have 4 accounts and have been selling mine and my kids' stuff on it for years. Sometimes I hope to make money, sometimes I just want to get something out of my house without it going to landfill. I have heartwarming moments that make it all worthwhile, like when people tell me about J R Hartley moments or send me photos of them getting married wearing my old dress, or of some item of vintage tat with pride of place in their home or, ahem, 'man cave'.

I also have moments of fist-gnawing frustration and anger. When you're dealing with the general online public, you're going to encounter customers who are drunk, clinically manic, unable to understand written English very well  or just downright fucking cunts and because eBay ALWAYS sides with the buyer, you just have to take this on the chin and try to focus instead on the lovely feedback you get from most people.

[kalowski]

Cheers. Good advice all round
The strap is a bit warn but the rest is fine
It's a Huawei Watch 2 in perfect working order.

[vanilla.coffee]

The buyer has to agree to ending the transaction.
It's a pita and he can still leave bad feedback afterwards.
Hope it works out ok.

[ollyboro]

My other half makes a decent second income selling on the Net, but by Christ does she have to deal with some dumb cunts. She recently got a load of Curtain Lights. Experience has taught her to explain everything to the nth detail. Her ad clearly states she's selling curtain lights - not curtains for a fucking tenner. She must have had 30+ messages asking about the size of the curtains (no, not beef) the colour of the curtains, the weight of the curtains. Jesus. Apparently her offer of free delivery to anybody in the TS1 to TS8 postcodes also includes Newcastle, Skegness and fucking Plymouth.

[Janie Jones]

I think people often scroll through listings on their phone while they're driving a minibus full of orphans or something, they seem to barely take in any details. Yesterday I got a rude chaser from a bloke who on Thursday night had accepted my counter-offer in which I'd clearly stated, 'Please note that I can't post this until Tuesday 1 September'. He's all like, 'This item hasn't been despatched! I needed it for the Bank Holiday weekend!' Even if I'd posted it Friday morning, he'd only paid for 2nd class post so he'd never have got it in time. I hope he dies screaming and his passengers survive.

[ollyboro]

Last Summer we had some Bluetooth soundbars for sale. I took one round to a woman's house and she paid me thirty quid. A couple of hours later Mrs B gets a message from the customer saying she hadn't understood the advert, and thought she was buying a set of headphones. The box I handed over to her was three fucking foot wide. How wide does she think her dumb head is?

[idunnosomename]

Go round his house and sort him out

[touchingcloth]

I've had several times where I've sold things to people who have collected and paid cash, who didn't test the stuff I was selling even though I offered when they came to collect, and then got back in touch hours, days or sometimes weeks later to complain about some fault or niggle or other.

[Marner and Me]

I sold quite a rare football shirt to Malaysia and he was questioning me about it even after it had arrived, basically said to him, I brought the top and shorts, didn't think it was for me (got them for a steal and sold them for a profit) I have no idea of it's history. Saying it can't be an old shirt as the labels hadn't look worn etc, even though you could tell the item was original and had been used by the previous owner. 

[Sebastian Cobb]

Last week I bought a laptop on there. First the seller missed my building number off, so it got returned, then it arrived poorly packed so the screen got panned in.

They were thankfully quite helpful and seemingly technically switched on, they accepted my proposal that they refund th £40 for a replacement screen rather than I sending it back for a refund. Turned out the screen was only held in with a plastic bezel so it took basically no time to refit too.

[Pseudopath]

My mate is making an absolute killing selling used trainers to deviants on eBay. The buyers ask all sorts of weird questions about locations in which the items have been worn ("Have they been worn in the sea?", "Have they seen the inside of a ladies changing room?", etc.). Apparently the grubbier and smellier the better.

We did look up one of the buyers on LinkedIn and he was a head honcho at some multinational investment firm. How the other half live, eh?

[Hand Solo]

I completely fucked off eBay and just use Facebook marketplace instead, had much less hassle and no fees.

[Famous Mortimer]

I finally deleted my eBay account - I may have mentioned it on here before, but I sold a phone, the buyer didn't read the bit where I said it was locked to a certain network, started complaining, then bricked the phone and said "I want a refund". eBay sided with him, even though there was a message on eBay from him saying it worked when it arrived. Their explanation was "we can't prove it was something the buyer did" despite him saying he was going to try and remove the network lock, and failing.

I lost $200 on the deal, so all I can do is never give them another penny. Clearly it works for some of you, but I found the deck stacked against me to a weird degree.

Facebook Marketplace isn't much better. I put my old (quite nice) stereo system on there, with the make and model of all the parts clearly labelled. Numerous messages of "what model number is it?" and offers of $50 for something I've got listed at $400. Oh, and because one of the photos has the tops of the LPs on the shelf underneath the stereo in shot, I've had a dozen "can I buy the LPs?" messages. I instinctively don't trust those sort of messages, from occasions of selling LPs in the past. Dealers / shop owners will just offer me 10% of what they're worth then get annoyed when I don't accept immediately. I'd rather give them to charity than deal with people from the internet, honestly.

[Glebe]

Day Today horse names.

[Janie Jones]

I completely fucked off eBay and just use Facebook marketplace instead, had much less hassle and no fees.

Yes but can't all your Facebook friends see all the woeful old shite you are trying to flog, and pity you? Also do you have to make your account public?

[bgmnts]

Does nobody here use anything like Gumtree or Preloved then? I've sold on Gumtree and it was relatively painfree despite some chancers.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Buying on gumtree is always a weird faff when arranging to meet. It's like the sellers don't actually want to do that part where you actually turn up and buy their wares.

[The Mollusk]

I don't know what it is about places like eBay that will reduce what I can only assume are otherwise intelligent and decent people into stupid fucking cunts. I sold a bunch of stuff on there recently (belated thanks to Janie Jones and holyzombiejesus for their advice on this) and had people making offers of less than half of the starting bid amount I'd set. "Yeah I know this is a collectors item and it's clearly worth at least the amount you're asking but would you be willing to accept far less than that?" Suck your dead mum.

[kalowski]

See, I'm not fussed and will happily take a fraction of the original amount (the strap is a bit worn) but I'm not selling to this goon.
"When can you post it and when will it arrive?"
How about paying for it, you cunt?

[touchingcloth]

Yes but can't all your Facebook friends see all the woeful old shite you are trying to flog, and pity you? Also do you have to make your account public?

You can choose where to share your listings. I'm a member of a Brits in the Algarve FB group, pretty much solely because if I want to sell things which there is more market for among ex-pats than the Portuguese (English language electronics, vintage furniture, books) it works quite well.

[idunnosomename]

sold loads of old shit on ebay, only problems I've had were my fault, but two years of it and I've had no negs. tend to sell older merch with niche appeal rather than new electronics so less open to scammers i guess

[The Mollusk]

sold loads of old shit on ebay, only problems I've had were my fault, but two years of it and I've had no negs. tend to sell older merch with niche appeal rather than new electronics so less open to scammers i guess

Some of the stuff I was selling was very niche appeal (an art book by extremely questionable borderline nonce-territory artist Trevor Brown, an FM3 Buddha Machine collaboration with Throbbing Gristle) but still had total bellsprouts noising me up with pissy offers. You've been fortunate, no subculture is so small to not include at least a few penny-pinching goblins.

[idunnosomename]

to be honest I've been extremely surprised how well operation tat get rid of has gone. got fucked over on a boglin once, just relisted it

[Blinder Data]

I just don't have the patience for it, unless the item is worth maybe £30+. Just fuck it off to a charity shop pronto.

[touchingcloth]

I just don't have the patience for it, unless the item is worth maybe £30+. Just fuck it off to a charity shop pronto.

The trouble is you never really know what's worth £30. I tend to put stuff which has a reasonably certain value (e.g. an old phone where you can see a lot of previous sold prices for the same model in the same condition and of the same age) as slightly above the going rate on buy-it-now but also allowing offers. If I have something I suspect is low value I'll add it as an auction with P&P set to cover what the actual shipping costs will be, and it's quite surprising which items will trigger a bidding war.

[Icehaven]

I've never actually sold anything on ebay but I did put an unplayed electric accoustic guitar and case on there a few years ago. I think it was about £300 new so I put it on at £150, and almost immediately had some prick nearly demanding I sold it to him for much less, and trying to tell me I was being 'unrealistic' and that I'd never get more than what he was offering. I could see he was just a pushy chancer so I told him to sling it and ended up keeping the guitar as I couldn't be arsed with more of that, and I'd only been selling it for room anyway, I wasn't desperate for the money. Put me right off and I've never even tried to sell anything since, I'd rather give it to a charity shop.

[phes]

Sold several hundred things on eBay and as a rule of thumb, people who send messages are a waste of your time and energy. I don't bother responding to any messages unless it's a necessary logistical thing. It's all there in the listing.

[peanutbutter]

I always list stuff at a way higher price with best offer enabled and telling people to ask questions and stuff beforehand. It's pretty clear which offers to reject usually.
Probably helps that I generally sell niche enough stuff.



Seems like tons of buy it now and auction ones wind up having to be repeatedly relisted