dougv.com | The Web home of Doug Vanderweide

User Name: jenduane
Product Purchased: War & Peace Avalon Hill Napoleonic Wars Board Game; 1776 Avalon Hill Revolutionary War Board Game

Product As Advertised: Yes
Shipped Quickly: Yes
Customer Service: Good

One time, while browsing books at the Barnes & Noble, I came across Titanium eBay: A Tactical Guide to Becoming a Millionaire PowerSeller, a guide for running a business on eBay. Because I wasn’t selling on eBay at the time, I just skimmed it while drinking my coffee.

Among the book’s many good suggestions was one which predated all the current Law of Attraction hype: It basically said, don’t say what you won’t do; say what you will do. In other words, don’t say, “I won’t ship outside the United States,” say, “I ship anywhere in the United States.” Those two sentences say the same thing, but the latter sounds so much better than the former.

Another thing it suggested was keeping shipping rates as low as possible, because high shipping costs are one of the leading contributors to disputes on eBay. Especially when someone is new to eBay, he doesn’t understand that the shipping costs will seriously impact the actual sale price of the item.

eBay does about as good a job as it can to advertise the shipping cost for an item, but in the heat of a bidding war, many people won’t notice the shipping cost and will suffer significant buyer’s remorse if it is high.

Or worse, they’ll consider you a scammer. When I sell, I charge $9 for shipping, and say, up front, I’ll cram as much merchandise into that flat-rate box as you buy and will fit; it costs $8.10 for a flat-rate Priority Mail box.

In spite of that, one woman accused me once of padding my shipping to cover costs. I can see where she would get that idea, since I also always start bidding in my auctions at $1 (Another great tip I got from Titanium eBay: If your item is worth owning, the market will bid it up to a good price; a high minimum bid will only discourage buyers. It sounds wrong, but it does work: Two pieces of software I couldn’t sell at auction with minimum bids of $50 and $100 sold for well over both prices when I set the bids to start at $1.).

Although eBay’s rules specifically ban sellers from padding shipping costs to cover other expenses — such as the fees eBay and PayPal charge — many retailers do just that. I don’t mind buying items with overpriced shipping, myself, so long as the shipping rates are well-publicized.

But if I’m going to pay a premium for shipping, you’d best ship the item yesterday.

All of which applies to this vendor, who got a lukewarm positive rating from me. Why?

If you check out the listings for these items, you’ll notice that the wording is very negative. It basically takes a tone of, “You’re going to be a problem. I am now going to list every jackass trick I think you may pull. I’m also going to waive all liability for a bunch of stuff, so you can’t bitch about it.” Again, you can approach confrontation one of two ways: Positively or negatively. These listings might not be aggressive, but they sure are negative.

The other issue is the absolutely absurd shipping rates charged by this vendor. Both games came in a single flat-rate USPS box, but I paid more for shipping — $17.60 — than I did for both games combined. And that was after I asked for a combined shipping reduction (they reduced shipping costs by $6.20, or 26 percent).

I would expect the listing costs and Final Value Fees for each of these games came out to somewhere around $5 combined, and PayPal probably took another $2 for transaction fees; add that to $8.10 and it comes up to $15.10, meaning this vendor probably made about another $2.50 off the sale by charging high shipping.

That’s the kind of thing that woman was accusing me of doing.

I believe the reason I got these games for so cheap was because the vendor copped such a negative attitude in the listing, making it sound like they were going to send an incomplete game via garbage truck, charge a premium for it and hire a lawyer if I bitched.

It turns out everything was fine; if anything, this was one of the better eBay transactions I’ve had. And I’m not even really complaining about this vendor’s bad practices, since they helped me get two games for the price of one. So let this be a cautionary tale to other vendors: I can’t find anything about this transaction that is “wrong” — if anything, it’s one of the smoothest I’ve had on eBay — but I don’t feel good about it, either, and seriously question if I’ll ever buy from this vendor again.