I came across someone once [on a forum, not ebay] who wanted payment for his time spent wrapping items up and going to the post office. That service added $25 to the price for 3 boxed games, on top of a generous amount for actual packaging materials and postage fees. Time is money!

Only bad user experience I've ever had, was a user who didn't reply to my questions. Other than that, I've been pretty lucky in my eBay adventures.

A guy from Italy displayed the shipping cost for a used boxed sound card for USD150 to Malaysia. It was displayed as "economy" class, which is not tracked or insured. The bid was around USD 9, I think.

I asked him why the cost for shipping is so high, and that I have dealt with sellers from Italy for items that are bigger than this item, and I just paid a fraction of this so called shipping cost.

His reply was : (He reaffirmed that was the actual calculated cost, and then goes on to say - ) "That item's actual value is around $100." And he/she/it asked me to 'compare the selling price' with other sellers online.

??

I thought of arguing with him to point out, that, 'if he thinks it values so much, why t-f- he just doesn't place the starting bid at 100 itself? '.

But then, I didn't want to waste my time with this joker.

'if he thinks it values so much, why t-f- he just doesn't place the starting bid at 100 itself? '.

To get around eBay fees. It's against eBay rules and you can report 'em for it. And the listing will usually get pulled pretty quickly... eBay's customer service is generally bollocks, but they react much faster when somebody's trying to cheat 'em out of money.

I paid an extra 26 CAD$ for quicker and tracked delivery of book from Canada. After a couple of weeks I got concerned as the item hadn't arrived. The seller didn't care and was not able (I thought willing) to provide a tracking number. After a few exchanges with him I started a not received action against him. A couple of weeks pass and lo and behold the book turns up ... .with a 7$ stamp on the plain non padded envelope. I asked him why he'd failed to use the extra payment I provided to supply the service I'd requested - he just said you got the book didn't you! ebay were useless; as far as they were concerned the book turned up and postage costs were nothing to do with them.

Well, i'm from Portugal and i can say that there are many jackasses around the globe. 😁

One time trying to get 5 unboxed soundcards from UK:

Dear sprcorreia,

Hi,
Checked with a few couriers Fedx DHL etc best I can find is Parcel Force (see attached). UK VAT is 20% so the cheapest is GBP £30.23 + £6.04 vat = £36.27.
I did not think it would be cheap to send them but you would be receiving about £150+ of sound cards.

Regards, Dave

Dear (seller),

Thanks, but that postage price is too high. I usually receive stuff sent with Royal Mail much, much cheaper. That is what i usually pay to get a big box with several KG of stuff inside. And those 12+ years old cards are not worthy all that. Thanks.

- sprcorreia

Dear sprcorreia,

Yah,
I do agree the postage is expensive, just goole earthed you, your place is just opposite the football pitch, its 1,469 miles from my place to your place so going off the cost of fuel, plane, road or boat I would say its reasonable, just think of all the people that handle it on its long journey including customs, they don't work for free !

You asked how much it cost to ship so I told you the cheapest price I can find for a 3.5kg box 30x20x10cm £1,469 miles thats how much it cost. Rather than get the huff over the price you should say thanks for looking for me only I am to lazy to do it myself. Nobody has got any money in Portugal so I had a hunch I was wasting my time.

Have a really nice day !

What else can i "say"? 😵

Ive seen people ship things to people living next street. Lots of people are just too damn lazy and unfriendly.
A guy from a local auction house i buy from would rather have his buyers pay 3x more for something thats 5x cheaper than shipping than send it using normal post system that is actually realistic for the price and item bought.

I've been pretty lucky, no rude ones and generally very helpful. I bought an IBM ps/1 the other day from interstate, and the seller offered to bring it with him on a trip he was taking which happened to have a stop over in my city. That's pretty generous! It weighs about 13 kg's.

I find this eBay story of mine unusual...

Awhile back, I got a box set of all seven seasons of Star Trek Voyager from someone on eBay for about $100-something. (Forget the exact price.) The seller had hundreds of positive feedback and virtually no negatives, so I figured it was worth a shot.

I got them fast enough but I was slightly suspicious of the build quality. Then, after the first few discs, I started having major playback problems, then discovered that the discs were not reigon encoded, among noticing a slew of other very tiny discrepancies compared to a legit Season 1 box I had, so clearly I ended up with bootlegs.

I contacted the seller who was apparently shocked that such a thing happened and offered to refund everything, including the cost of shipping, provided I sent them back. Sure enough, I sent them back, got my money back.

...a mere two weeks later, over a dozen negative feedbacks appeared on this account related to bootlegs and it was shut down. o_o;

I'm still trying to piece together exactly what happened and how a seller who was being pleasant and had hundreds of positive feedback over the course of a year would suddenly get numerous negatives and end up gone. *shrugs*

I wonder if people sell their eBay accounts? An established account with years of positive feedback would itself become valuable - maybe they sold it to someone dodgy?

badmofo wrote:

I wonder if people sell their eBay accounts? An established account with years of positive feedback would itself become valuable - maybe they sold it to someone dodgy?

Someone dodgy who was nice and refunded all my money, including the cost of shipping? (OH, and the cost to ship the box set BACK to them!)

Yeah, this is why my experience here was so confusing.

Most of my other eBay experiences have been well enough, or if things do go wrong things get resolved without too many issues. (When I was trying to get my first Leisure Suit Larry collection I got sent a Harry Potter game instead. The seller let me keep it and sent me the right thing free of charge.)

Sounds like the DVD person just sold things on behalf a third party without personally inspecting them, then it came back to bite them when their supplier started shipping fakes.

Similar thing happened to us. I bought a box-set of Buffy for my wife, and what we got was a fairly impressive knock-off.

If it weren't for the obviously inkjet-printed disks, I probably wouldn't have even noticed, since it was a pretty good effort packaging-wise. After a few weeks, I noticed that the embossing on the faux-felt covered inner box read: "Buffy the Vampire Slaper."

SquallStrife wrote:

"Buffy the Vampire Slaper."

Buffy was many things but never a slap(p)er. Hot damn I loved that show; I don't usually go for blonds but for SMG, I'd make an exception.

Into each generation a Slaper is born. One girl in all the world, a Chosen One. One born with the strength and skill to slap the shit out of vampires.

I've only had one or two really intolerable experiences with eBay buyers (and elsewhere), and really there were darn near enough to drive me away from the whole thing forever. The worst was a trade with some idiot who didn't think it necessary to warn me beforehand that his definition of a "sealed game" required pristine, unbroken shrinkwrap treated only with lighter fluid (not rubbing alcohol! It leaves streaks!!!). This, of course, after he decided to send me the item he wanted to trade. Ugh.

vetz wrote:

I asked a seller in the UK for shipping to Norway were I live. The item was a socket 7 CPU which weights 20grams without packaging. He replied that it would cost 5 GBP without any tracking. Since I have full knowledge of the Royal Mail prices I knew he was charging quite some over the actual cost, so I politely said that I would not pay that price and if there were anyway he could reduce it? I also gave him this link since many sellers in the UK are not aware of the international prices and dimension limits:
http://www.royalmail.com/sites/default/files/ … t_April2013.pdf

Maybe he wanted to make sure the CPU had adequate packaging. Maybe he was using special CPU-packaging that costs money itself. Maybe he had to deal in the past with people who insisted that he had not used adequate packaging and that the item was broken when it arrived and that it had fried the motherboard it was supposed to be used in and that he had better refund all shipping costs and the original value fee and extra fees for the trouble he had caused.

Jorpho wrote:

Maybe he wanted to make sure the CPU had adequate packaging. Maybe he was using special CPU-packaging that costs money itself. Maybe he had to deal in the past with people who insisted that he had not used adequate packaging and that the item was broken when it arrived and that it had fried the motherboard it was supposed to be used in and that he had better refund all shipping costs and the original value fee and extra fees for the trouble he had caused.

5GBP equals up to 500gram in shipping weight in the UK. If he were going to use a special CPU packaging for a CPU that had a buy-out price of 2GBP that would be a huge waste tbh. I never asked him to use inaqaduate packaging, just linked the prices and said the shipping quote was more than I've paid in the past for a CPU. If he were serious he would have replied like a civilized human being. He had no right calling me idiot and blocking me from all his auctions when I was nothing but polite to him.

vetz wrote:

5GBP equals up to 500gram in shipping weight in the UK.

Surely the dimensions of the package must also be taken into account? Even a slightly bulky package would cost more to ship than an envelope of the same weight, I would think.

If he were going to use a special CPU packaging for a CPU that had a buy-out price of 2GBP that would be a huge waste tbh.

If it saves him the trouble of dealing with an irate customer, it would probably be worth it. Those not interested in the higher price can just buy elsewhere.

Jorpho wrote:

Surely the dimensions of the package must also be taken into account? Even a slightly bulky package would cost more to ship than an envelope of the same weight, I would think.

No:
"For Letters, Small Parcels and Printed Papers, the length plus the width plus the height of the item
must be no greater than 900mm, with no single dimension greater than 600mm."
A CPU, even with crazy packaging is within this. Only weight matters.

If it saves him the trouble of dealing with an irate customer, it would probably be worth it. Those not interested in the higher price can just buy elsewhere.

As I say again, if he was a serious seller he would (or should) have informed about this in either the messages or in the auction, not told his potential customer to F off. I highly doubt he was going to use a special CPU packaging that cost money as he wasn't a Ebay seller with that many items for sale or number of feedbacks.

I live in Canada and I once bought a speaker cone diaphragm from a US seller.
It was BIN with a shipping price to Canada that seemed fair. All in all It was slightly less expensive than the next competitor.

So i proceed with the BIN and immediately pays with paypal, case closed i thought.

Next day seller writes to me and says i forgot to pay for the "paperwork fee"...

Im like "what?" He points out to a line somewhere in a paragraph of his listing where it is stated that International buyers will have to pay an additional 20$ for the additional paperwork at the post office.

So i politely explains him how this is BS and nobody does business that way. And that if he wished to charge an extra 20$ that he should add it to the "handling charge" of his shipping calculator instead of writing it at some random place in the page. That doing it like that is not standard practice and will only lead to trouble and confusion.

Then he proceed to scold me about how it is so much trouble and a waste of his time to deal with us Canadians and that selling international was his partner's idea and that he didn't want anything to do with it to begin with. Then he says he will file a non paying case if i dont pay the 20$.

After a few rough exchange I eventually switched to Diplomacy mode and eventually got him to ship me my item without paying the 20$ but jizz i couldnt believe this guy was for real.