Once we’ve successfully sold our items and done our little high-five-happy-dance, there’s still the shipping with our eBay and CrazyGuy postings. We have to find the right box and packing materials. It’s got to be sturdy, but it has to be as light and small as possible, so we spend a fair amount of time in our “packing room”, searching through boxes.
We’ve learned that Priority Mail is the best bet, so Chelsea bicycled up one day and brought a collection of boxes home, to save aggravation and time.
Once we’ve packed the box we need to weigh it, then go online to the post office website and estimate the postage. Normally we’ve done all this before we ever post the ad so we can tell the buyer right away what postage costs will be. When the buyer has paid we still have to print out a shipping label and get to the post office.
CrazyGuy isn’t so bad – it’s a really nice group of people. The buyer goes on our website, pays on PayPal, we get the notification, we print the label and head for the post office. We only lose the three or four percent that PayPal charges us.
eBay is another story. We posted several items a few weeks ago, figuring that the nine percent they take would be worth it if we actually sell the posted items. Chelsea worked her way through the whole process of posting the ads, dealing with all the changes one by one.
Three of four items sold, so we were happy. We got everything ready to go, checked my phone to make sure the money was in our PayPal account, and headed off to the post office on our bikes.
I stayed in the lobby keeping an eye on the bikes while Chelsea braved the line. Suddenly she was waving at me frantically. “It refused our card!” she hissed at me. I got on my phone immediately and saw that the money was there, but as I scrolled around the little mini screen, I saw that they had a hold on the funds!
We had only brought our PayPal card to the post office, so we were completely stuck. We clearly weren’t going to solve it right there, so we put the packages back on the bikes and headed home.
How many of you read all the policy updates your bank sends you? How about reading your cell phone company policy updates? Right. I don’t either. Therefore I didn’t read the updates on the eBay policies that came through last April. I wasn’t going to need eBay, so why bother? Oops. Bad idea.
It turns out that eBay has dramatically changed its policies, not just its fees and posting procedures. Even though I have been a member since January 2003, and I have a 100% satisfaction rating in both buying and selling, I do not have twenty-five sales yet. That means until I have a successful twenty-five sales, eBay/PayPal will now hold my money for up to three weeks.
I am never one to take things sitting down, so I went on eBay and PayPal and researched my heart out. I discovered that I could print the shipping labels through eBay and the shipping fees would be released as soon as the package had a tracking number. Then they’d release the remaining funds in three to five days if the package was delivered and the buyer left positive feedback; longer if no feedback was left.
Are you tired and confused yet?
I understand the reasons for the changes, as they want to protect the buyers, but that meant our money was held up until the buyer got around to leaving feedback, or else we waited even longer for the release of funds.
I’d like to say it was quick and easy once we understood the system with eBay and PayPal, but that wouldn’t be true. They released the funds on one of the shipments but not the other, even though the second one had actually arrived before the first one, and the buyer had left immediate glowing reviews. That meant time on the phone with eBay, whose customer service rep apologized and released the funds, but who told me I then had to call PayPal.
The PayPal representative apparently had no simple way to check with eBay, even though eBay owns PayPal, so he had to type in the tracking number. He input the number incorrectly so of course there was no record of the shipment. After ten minutes of discussion, I told him patiently that it looked as though their system was broken, and I was caught in a Catch-22.
He finally called eBay directly, and voila, my funds were released in seconds.
We are nothing if not clever, so on our next round of eBay listings we were prepared. But I was confident too soon. Three of our five items sold; we had the labels and timing down. We understood the system, and we worked it properly. Imagine my horror though, when I discovered that the buyer of our most expensive item lives in Hong Kong!
Let’s just skip to the almost-end of this story and say the saga isn’t over yet. Communication is painfully slow with the buyer. There was an error in calculating the shipping so I’m going to lose twenty dollars on it. I can either lose the twenty dollars, or wait until December 20th and ship to a location in San Francisco, if I can talk the buyer into giving me a US address. After the shipping I still have to wait a week or more for the funds to be released.
Bottom line? I will net less than fifty percent of the original sales and shipping price and will have waited nearly a month (or even two) to get my money.
(Update: I finally got so frustrated that I spent twenty minutes on the phone with eBay and found out I could cancel the sale. I worked my way through the system, refunded the buyer’s money and let him know I wanted to cancel. It took another week, but we reposted the item, with clear instructions in our ad that we expected payment within forty-eight hours and we don’t do international shipping under any circumstances. It sold, the buyer paid within an hour and we got it out in the mail the next day.)
We have certainly learned a great deal about domestic shipping, international shipping, the vagaries of human nature, and the policies of eBay and PayPal.
I can’t wait for it all to be over.