Thinking of Making Quick Cash Selling Your Stuff on Ebay? Think Again

Yeah, I'm pretty much not going to bother sell with them any more after this. I've been selling on and off there quite sometime, my seller rating is 100%, and I've sold hundreds of dollars worth of stuff. They made enough off me with their fees, yet they still want to withhold payment on me.

It not that big of deal for me since I don't use them that much, but if someone is just trying to make some money so the lights aren't shut off, selling on ebay isn't going to help you in the short term.

That stinks. It would have been nice if you knew beforehand whether or not they were going to hold payment. I would not have had told my son we could sell his games on ebay had I known that they were going to withhold payment. The change must be something recent, since I sold items and got payments instantly within a couple months ago.

Good tip there Daprof! I might try it out one day

As the OP said...
Payments from your buyers will generally be available immediately:

• It's been more than 90 days since your first successful sale and
• You've had more than 25 sales transactions and
• You've had more than $250 in total sales
• Your seller performance rating is "standard" or above.

So it looks like it just applies to some sellers.


As far as selling goods, why not try Amazon? You dont pay fees unless something sells. Sales can be very quick with people looking for the goods. You can see at a glance what to price your item at (check what others are selling theirs for) And it is so easy to list your item.

You do have to wait till payout time but with the ease of use it may be a viable option.

That's ridiculous. You have to take financial risk to prove yourself?

PayPal fees are an insurance for Ebay. They should take the risk to have you as a new customer / trader.

This looks to me to be in line with the general PayPal attitude of keeping people's money as long as possible. As has been posted many times on the WF, many people have experienced that when they have a lot of money going into PayPal, PayPal then blocks their account for 6 months or more, preventing them getting any access to their money.

They are doing this in other ways too. Right now, a payment I've recieved is "on hold" for no reason whatever, I've contacted the buyer and he has given them full details that the payment should be released to me, yet they deny having recieved anything from him, and just say they might get around to reviewing that hold within 30 days, maybe.

If you think about it, that means PayPal can invest that money, knowing that they don't have to give it back for that period. Since they are doing that to large numbers of people in various ways it is one way they can make more profit, by investing all the money they keep for a while before they let the person who owns that money actually get it.

I wonder how many millions of people they are doing this to right now, and how many billions of our money they are making interest from, by refusing to give it to us when they should.

Let's hope someone comes up with a much more honest system than PayPal, and quick. I read a rumor here that Visa is in the process of making an online payment system? Hope that's more professional and more honest than PayPal.

Chris

Sorry for the long-winded post but this thread made me want to tell my recent horror story. If if you got a minute or two, humor me.

I've been an ebay top-rated powerseller for years, I had (still have, actually - just haven't gotten around to canceling yet) an ebay storefront and recently ran into the same problem. I have sold on ebay since 2003, but was never really serious about it, (too busy affiliate marketing and building adsense sites) until around 2007 when I got sick of "internet marketing" and decided to get serious about ebay.

I did great for nearly 4 years until I started using a certain drop-shipper (I'll leave them nameless) and they screwed up a few orders, getting me my first negative feedback in over 1300 sales and 4 opened cases because of faulty merchandise and/or order mixups. I thought I had contained the problem, I canceled the listings asap and took care of the refunds, that's really all I could do in that situation.

A week later I get a message from ebay saying that I no longer qualified as a top-rated seller because of the negative and 4 open cases in 90 days I guess. I then log in to Paypal to begin filling orders and find that all of the money for the last 24 hrs in sales (roughly 8 items) is being held until I "establish a good standing on ebay". The kicker is, all 8 of these items are drop-ship products - meaning I have to pay out of my own pocket to purchase and ship these items to the customer, and wait until confirmation of delivery before I ever see a dime of this money.

In one week I ended up having to cancel the listings for every drop-ship item in my store (some that were best-selling products) and ended up paying like $2,200 out of pocket to get the items I sold out to customers. I eventually got that money back of course, but it was enough to make me stop dealing with ebay all together.

I was already on the brink. Their fees were getting higher and higher (all together probably 12% of gross profits) and they now include shipping cost into the final value fees as well! Not to mention that there is hardly any protection for sellers anymore, and you live in fear of negative feedback and regularly take losses in hopes to avoid them.

Thank goodness I was an IMer before an ebayer and had the good sense to build a list from all my ebay customers. The only way I have been able to survive is by running email promotions since I made my stand against ebay. I even took it a step further and actually sent out emails to my list and announced that I was "firing ebay". (This went over very well with them strangely enough, lol.)

I miss the old ebay, but I'm afraid it's gone forever. I have officially Donald Trumped their ****s. ;-)