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Tonight I received 2 exact orders from the same buyer.

Buyer e-mailed me almost immediately and told me one of the orders was a mistake and would I please cancel it.

I went and filed for a transaction cancellation as I have done many times in the past. I don't guess I have ever read what happens after you file one of these because I was totally blown away by what I read on the Your case is now open screen as shown below:


Skip down to the bullet points.

The first one reads " If the buyer agrees to cancel the transaction, this case will be automatically closed and you will receive a Final Value Fee credit." Fair enough. That is what I expect to happen.

The second one reads " If the buyer declines to cancel the transaction, this case will be automatically closed and you will not receive a Final Value Fee credit." This is insane. The buyer makes a mistake. Asks me to cancel.. If the buyer does not agree after I file for the cancellation, I do not receive a Final Value Fee credit.

Can someone please explain to me eBay's reasoning on this?

        

I run another blog at onlinebuyertips.com While researching good buys on the internet I ran across a coupon offer from an eBay seller.
You can see this offer here.  As you can see this offer is on the eBay site.

Upon further investigation I found eBay has a page of FAQ's concerning coupons. You can access this page here. If you scroll down the page you find at the bottom a section called Seller Questions. One of the questions is "As a seller, what do I have to do to accept coupons?"
Their answer is " Sellers simply need to accept PayPal as a payment method. Coupons are automatically converted to regular currency at the time of redemption, so sellers will not be aware that a coupon has been used to fund the payment."

Have I missed something? Are all sellers now allowed to accept coupons? Is this a trial? Does anyone have any insight into this?

        

Even though February had 3 days less than January my eBay sales were up 34% in February as compared to January.

Even better news is that my eBay fees were up only 10% in February over January.

The reason for this was the reduced cost of FP30 during the month of February. At the old rate of 35¢ per listing I could not list all the items I would like to list. With eBay running a special of 10¢ per listing I was able to list with reckless abandon.

Next month when my rate falls to 5¢(I have a Premium store subscription)  per listing my sales should  look even better.

How were your sales on eBay for February compared to January?

        

or just the sites I use most often?
The 2 sites I use most often are eBay and Facebook. Today on eBay I have received duplicate orders twice. eBay charges me two FVF's but I only sell one product. I have to apply to have the transactions cancelled to get my FVF's back and the buyer has to agree. Is eBay so hard up for cash they have to double bill? Also, I went to pay my eBay bill tonight. Guess what? They won't accept my payment. I tried to pay with PayPal. They told me that since I had a credit card on file I might be paying twice if I paid through PayPal. Since the credit card I had on file is expired I tried to pay with PayPal anyway. Pay button was disabled and would not work. Went to change my credit card info and it said if I changed it I couldn't not pay my current bill with the new credit card. They are double billing me and won't accept my money?

I use Facebook a tremendous amount. I have almost 600 friends and read every post by every friend. Since Facebook has made changes recently this is impossible. Are they trying to end my addiction? I don't have these friends to show how popular I am. I am interested in everything every one of my friends says. Maybe Facebook is just a popularity contest as some have said over the years.

Your thoughts, please

        

Click Here for all the details

        

eBay announced a sale on fixed-price format for store owners today starting tomorrow, February 2 and ending March 29.

Store owners will be able to list items in fixed price format for just 10¢. The new rates taking effect on March 30 will have fixed price rates of 3¢ to 20¢ depending on what store subscription you have.

This is a great time to try out the fixed-price format, especially if you are not planning on upgrading your store to a Premium or Anchor store.

Click here to see today's announcement at eBay.com

        

The eBay Spring 2010 changes are good for me. They don't seem to be for the majority of sellers.

They are good for me for several reasons.

1) I have in the last year added more 30FP multi-variable listings. I have been able to list 24 shirts in one listing for 35 cents a month. That will now drop to 5 cents a month. The ability to list 24 different items(8 different sizes, 2 different colors) for only a nickel a month is great for me. I had plans to double the number of such listings soon. I will probably have approximately 500 FP30 listings soon. With the savings of 30 cents per listing that will be an automatic savings of $150 per month with the $49.95 store. Since all  of my FP30 listings will be in the clothing category and sell for less than $25 there will be no increase in FVF's for me there.

2) I also have almost 3000 unique items in my store. My fee on those items will increase 2 cents each for a net increase of $60 per month. That $60  should easily be offset by the increase in sales I should see from these items being included in search. I have recently been raising the prices on those items and sales have been good. I have been raising the prices with the intention of keeping them high for a few months and then heavily discounting them to try to clear my stock out. With the listings showing in search I will probably wait longer to try to liquidate these items. I also have several hundred unique items that I have not listed. I will now begin to list those items again.


As I said at the first these changes will benefit me. A lot because of dumb luck. I see a lot of smaller sellers leaving eBay with the new changes. I think eBay's new motto to sellers should be "Grow or Go" because it seems that if you don't things are only going to get worse.

How are the changes going to affect you?

        

This is quite a change in the fee structure.
Click Here to read about it at eBay.com

        

Ina Steiner at auctionbytes.com has reported that eBay will announce the first changes for 2010 next Tuesday the 26th.

Ina and several others think that eBay will probably lower insertion fees and raise final value fees. There is some speculation eBay will do away with eBay stores like they did in the UK a year ago.

The Dow Jones Newswire is reporting "Donahoe said the company has made significant progress in restructuring the way it charges sellers to list products on eBay's site. Front-end listing fees, which used to account for about 70% of seller fees roughly two years ago, now account for about 30%."What that really means is we have aligned our incentives with sellers. If they don't succeed in selling, we don't succeed in collecting fees," he said."

That has not been my experience. My listing fees are still much higher than my final value fees.


Sue Bailey is reporting at tamebay.com that "There’s also something revolutionary coming to the Clothes, Shoes and Accessories category"
No one seems to know what that is.This really interests me since I sell more in that category than any other.

        

I sell shirts on eBay. Most of them are used. Until all the changes were made I was selling 15-20 a day. This has now dropped down to about 5 a day, on average. since used items are getting more and more difficult to sell on eBay I decided a couple of months  to price them at the lowest possible price I could just to move them out.

I priced most of the t-shirts at $4.99 each with free US shipping. This has been a complete disaster. Very few sold at that price. I did get a bunch of best offers at $1 and $1.50. They were offering me $1 and $1.50 for a shirt with FREE shipping. I may be crazy but I ain't stupid. I would be better off just to send the fools a couple of bucks and keep the shirt.

A couple of weeks ago I started raising the prices on my shirts. Most t-shirts are being raised to $9.99 with free US shipping. This is working pretty good. A couple have sold at that price and one even sold internationally at that price with $11.95 added for international shipping. Today I had one international buyer offer me $6.50 for a shirt I had at $9.99. I accepted because the International shipping charge was $12.95. I had another (US)buyer today offer me $7.99 for a shirt I had listed at $9.99 with free shipping. I accepted. I ended up getting $3 more for a shirt than I had it offered 30 days ago.

As I was writing this another offer of $5 came in on one of the shirts I had raised to $9.99 from $4.99. I did not accept but made a counteroffer of $6.99 reminding the buyer that this included 1st Class mail shipping.

Needless to say, I will be busy for the next few weeks raising the prices on all of the shirts that I have not already raised the price on.