SCREWED by eBay!!!!

[TSherbs]

I just read the entirety of this thread. There is some real pain and angst here. I feel badly for anyone who has to make their income via ebay transactions and then rely on the transportation of these other services and the hundreds of persons along the way (if the shipping is far).

I have a full time job and rarely purchase anything of much value from ebay and have never sold on ebay (I have sold only a few pens, or traded them, privately). I am not a risk taker. I would insure every item that I sold and sent.

Another mitigation is to not buy and sell so much. How many pens do we need? How many expensive ones? I have not owned a new car in a long time (not since 2005) in part because I don't want to worry about scratches or damage. I don't want to lose money because of the actions of someone else.

I also have a friend who is a problem-fixer for FedEx at a shipping facility. He is working 12-hour shifts all through COVID because his daily package volume at his facility has gone up 100%, but hiring and van purchasing and warehousing has not (not in his region). He said that they have to coordinate dropping packages onto pallets in the parking lot (not even into the loading bays) in the heavy times because they cannot handle the volume of trucks coming in. Then they have to move the pallets inside as they can get to them in order to process them. Our purchasing habits (unabated) and the COVID shifts to online delivery have wreaked havoc on an already stressed system that makes money by cutting margins thin. Yay capitalism.

[Ole Juul]

I just read the entirety of this thread. There is some real pain and angst here. I feel badly for anyone who has to make their income via ebay transactions and then rely on the transportation of these other services and the hundreds of persons along the way (if the shipping is far).
...

I feel badly for people too, being endowed with way too much empathy for easy living in a cruel world.

However, on an intellectual and practical level I think that someone who gets hung up on individual transactions is not suitable for Ebay. Ebay as a platform for sales gives you access to one of the world's biggest markets. I've heard business people go about that kind of advantage and explaining that they fully expect to loose up to 10% of their revenue on various kinds of losses such as scammers and idiots. That is not at all important to a business person. The thing is to keep an eye on the total sales and not individual ones.

I think if you're attached to the items you're selling, you're going to have emotional problems with Ebay. I know it's not for me.