Bitch Bitch Bitch - about self employment

[Fierce Critter]

OMFG. I can't believe the customers I've been dealing with lately.

People who blip over my auction descriptions and write their own rules for how much & how they're gonna pay, people who can't understand uber-simple e-mails, etc.

Gads, it's been an incredible run of this kind of BS lately.

eBay instituted new automated invoices and stuff that is supposed to make it easier to complete auction transactions. But they really don't help because they depend on people having up-to-date and accurate information on file with eBay, such as addresses, etc.

I refuse to use their new features because, say for instance someone lived in Indiana when they registered, but moved to California and didn't update their information. If they use eBay's auto invoicing, they compute postage based on the OLD address, and end up paying waaaaaaay too little for shipping.

I REALLY wish there was a more lucrative service out there. But nothing gets the traffic like eBay.

Sigh. It's days like this I miss working for "da man". Customer service is a bitch.

/rant

[soothsayer]

Thus proving there is no shortage in stupidity. When will the morons go away????????

[Nienna]

OMG I SOOOOOO KNOW!! I'm living on Ebay money myself these days.... Please kill me.

[lullaby1031]

I've never sold stuff on ebay - but I've heard from friends that its a bitch of a time trying to get your money and products sent to the right places. Sorry you both have to deal with that.

Can you two post up your sellers link? I browse through there often looking for little stuff.

[Troy Spiral (13)]

On amazon, before you "finalize your order" a thing pops up and says "is this still your current addres we should ship to right here??"

Im assuming they must not have that for the new ebay stuff your refering to?

I bought something off ebay about a month ago, cant remember if it even asked me what my address was... im assuming it must, but people are just uber-lazy and dont read it? ouch =(

[Fierce Critter]

eBay doesn't have a confirmation note that pops up like that, Troy. It might help things if they did. But in my experience, they'd probably disregard that, too.

The problem I keep running into is just that - people DON'T read entire descriptions. Since I started selling 5 years ago, I've changed my standard description a dozen times trying to figure out how much or how little to put in it to get people to follow the guidelines I need them to follow.

I use a ton of HTML in order to make things stand out with colors, text tweaks, graphics, tables, links, you name it. Doesn't matter.

If it's too wordy, people stop reading before they get all the necessary details. If it's not wordy enough, people don't know what my rules/guidelines are.

I worked all day on yet another new description format the other day. Did my damndest to cut out as much unnecessary wordiness as I could in order that people will at the very least read what MUST be read in order to keep me from going totally insane. We'll see if that helps.

I can't share my ID yet, as I'm going to be changing that soon. Right now, my ID in no way represents anything else related to the business, and I need to fix that in order to possibly in yet another way help eliminate confusion. Going to change it to the same way our e-mail address reads, so that might help.

Things were much easier before they instituted all this automation. I used to sell 20 items a week without problem. Now, I can barely sell 5-10 without at least 3 people totally making up their own rules about how things are going to go. Gads.