Guest post: eBay, the scammer, and the seller Part 2

This post is going to deal with open cases and the further impact the scammer has on your eBay sales.

Firstly, just a thank you to the two readers of this blog who used the TRS10 redemption code and a reminder to the readers of this blog to use the code ‘TRS10’ for a 10% discount on your purchase from by eBay stores. Click here and here to access them.

Ok. So now that the scammer has got his free product the real repercussions start. There are 4 levels of sellers on eBay; Top Rated, Above Standard, Standard and Below Standard.

The level of the seller determines where on the page they will be when someone searches for an item they are selling. So a Top Rated will generally be right at the top followed by Above Standard, Standard and at the very bottom of the (or 6 pages later) the Below Standard seller will sit. So the higher you ranking, the more sales you will potentially make.

All sellers will generally start at standard or below standard and work their way up. There are various requirements to climb the ranks, amount of sales (quantity), amount of sales (monetary), DSRs and open cases to name a few.

The maximum amount of open cases the seller is allowed to have to be at the lowest rung (Standard) is 1% (so for every 100 sales there can only be 1 open case, or for every 1 case that is opened 100 items need to be sold to counter that case). Tough, I know!

Ok, so one would assume no problem, as long as the case is closed or sorted out I am safe... No! An open case is any case opened against the seller and even if the case has been closed it is still counted against the seller. Only cases found in favor of the seller are not counted.

So this case that this scam artist pulled can have a detrimental effect on the seller. It can put him from Top Rated to Below Standard just like that. And obviously being Below Standard makes is very hard to rank even Standard. The lower you are on the page the less sales you make, so the longer it will take to compensate for the case.

And these cases stay for 3 months so it can take a very long time for the seller to dig himself out of that hole.

Hope this (and the previous) post hasn’t been to long and boring! In part 3 I will discuss how to look out for a scammer, what the seller can do about it and, most importantly, what eBay are doing about it.

Guest post: eBay, the scammer, and the seller Part 1

In days gone by the best way to be a scammer on eBay was to list a laptop for sale on eBay for an attractive price and send the buyer an empty box.

However this has now changed. The best way to become a scammer on eBay is to be a buyer. When scammers first turned to buying items to get their kicks one of the most popular ways was to use two accounts. Lets assume you want to sell your MacBook Pro which is worth about $800-900 second hand (brand new value $1,500). So in order to attract as many people as possible to bid on your item you start the bidding at a low price ($50 or $100). Now a scammer would log into his first account and place the starting bid (let's say $100) and then log into his second account and place a bid of $1,500 thus ensuring no one would out bid him (I mean who would pay more for the item second hand than you could buy it brand and new?). Now, about a minute before the auction is over he would retract his second bid of $1,500 and the item would be sold to the next highest bidder, which in this case would be himself at the incredibly low price of $100 and he would end up with a MacBook Pro for $100. Obviously the seller could appeal or refuse to sell it and besides this is a very complicated way of getting a free item and eBay have tightened this up, the bid you place is the MAXIMUM you want to pay and the bidding gradually increases as more people bid.

But by doing this scammers now have easier ways of getting free items. All they need to do is claim the item 'never arrived', and to ensure they get their money back they will open a case against you with eBay. Let me explain a bit about cases in eBay. There are two forms of ratings on eBay. One for the buyers and one for eBay (which the buyers don't see). For the buyers there is feedback which obviously the higher the percentage the more trustworthy the seller. eBay generally don't get involved in feedback (unless it dips below a certain percentage or the seller suspects foul play) in which case eBay will intervene and either suspend the sellers account or remove the negative feedback. The way eBay monitor the sellers is by detailed seller ratings (DSR) and by open cases (cases opened by the buyer against the seller).

DSR are those 5 stars you see when leaving feedback for a seller. These rate the seller and the more 5 stars the seller gets the better.

Open cases are any cases opened against the seller for any reason and these are opened in the eBay resolution center. It could be for item not as described, haven't received the item, item is damaged etc...

Now, for a scammer, leaving negative feedback is pointless especially if the seller had thousands of positive feedback. So the scammer will open a case against the buyer claiming he never received the item. Before anything happens the buyer and seller have to communicate in the resolution centre in eBay. After communicating, if the buyer is still unhappy, he escalate the case to eBay who will look into it and make a final decision. Since the case is harmful to the seller the seller may just decide to give a refund and be done. But if the buyer escalates the claim, 9/10 eBay find in favor of the buyer. So the scammer will buy an expensive item and pay for the cheapest shipping (thus ensuring there is no tracking on the item) and then open a case and escalate the claim to eBay and get his money back.

It is that easy to get free items from eBay! (I have essentially written the scammers handbook for eBay! although any scammer already knows this and is no deep dark secret.)

In part 2 I will discuss how eBay is very one sided and even once the scammer has received his money back the seller is still being scammed.

Yossi's Guest Post

Hello to all the readers of this blog. So apparently I said I would write a guest post about the joys of selling on eBay, so here is. I haven’t had much experience in blog writing although when I was at college studying Media Production I kept a running blog of the goings on at college. This can be found here although it hasn’t been updated in over a year.

Since this post is all about eBay I would like to extend a special 10% discount offer to the readers of this blog. Click here and here to access my eBay stores and once you find the item you like, put the code ‘TRS10” in the notes section when checking out and I will refund 10% back to your PayPal account.

Anyway, here goes my rant about eBay, or more precisely, the stupid buyers on eBay. I am going to present of list of actual buyer messages followed by the response I would love to give, but having to keep a professional manner can’t.

Q: Hi there,

I haven’t received my item yet. Please can you let me know where my item is?

Looking forward to hearing from you.

A: Are you serious? You purchased your item 2 days ago and as your item is being shipped from the USA did you really expect the item to arrive in the UK in 2 days??? Really?? Use some brains.

___________________

Q: Hello, I see your item is for sale at $35 plus shipping. I can buy the item direct from the store for $20. Can you come down on your price?

A: If that is the case why don’t you go to the store and buy it from there. No I am not coming down on the price. No one is telling you to buy it from me.

___________________

Q: I have left you negative feedback because the item doesn’t match the skirt as I thought it would.

A: Really? So because it doesn’t match correctly, you are leaving negative feedback? Moron, next time check the color first.

___________________

Anyway, that is it for the time being. My next post will be about how eBay is one-sided and favoring the buyers way too much…

Wondering justly

I asked the following on FB but didn't get any pertinent responses, so I figured I'd go for it over here too:

What would the Rebbe say about the hordes of hippies, yuppies, and various other invasive species currently gentrifying Crown Heights?

Meanwhile, in other news, after long discussion with everyone's favorite tippler and toppler, I have come to the conclusion that when you believe in something you should just say it outright. So, without further adieu, and in the interests of spurring further commenting from our wonderful commenters:

The reason I have not attended a poetry slam in many months is because I believe it is morally and religiously wrong.

There, I've said it. Now I can go to sleep with a clear conscience.

What's to be done?

Fifteen year olds have many admirable traits. One of these is not their belief in their own infallibility, which is manifested in their believing themselves to be always right. Another distasteful aspect of the personality's of many young adults is their desire for "dirty" conversation. One unfortunate consequence of these two behavioral traits is the general disregard for polite conventions in conversation.

Both of these traits are understandable- the one a result of immature youth yet to taste the nectar of gray, the other the result of hormonal changes and other such things. As such, the bearers of these traits can not be castigated for having them; they can be taught to control themselves, and even to change them and begin the process of maturation, but to criticize? It can't rightly be done.

There is another species altogether, one that has long passed the age of crude humor and that realizes its own humanity, its own ability to make mistakes. The people who make up this group are not necessarily immune to the charms of the fifteen year old life, but rather recognize that while it may have been fun at the time, it is now time to move on. Because these people have lived the life and have come to recognize its deficiencies, they are uniquely suited to moving beyond it. There are certainly times when aspects of this life are acceptable; in a bar or among close friends, there can be no gainsaying the fact that behaving like a fifteen year old has its merits.

Be that as it may, there are certain people who do not appear to grasp the essential points of getting older, namely the recognizing of one's social standing and location in time and space. Whether these people are deluding themselves or merely have had their development arrested is outside the purview of this article, but the object is clear in either case. These people, being unaware (for whatever reason), or at the very least deluding themselves, are very firmly entrenched in their behavioral patterns. The reason they're so firmly entrenched is because they, like people many years younger, believe themselves to be infallible, and even worse have not the redeeming quality of being young and foolish. The result is a horrendous lack of social sense, grace, and tact. These people wouldn't know etiquette if it hit them in the head with a baseball bat.

What is to be done with these people? Apparently they are beyond the pale of humanity. Unlike their younger brethren, they have no future perfect. In point of fact, they have moved beyond the normally allotted time which is reserved for maturation and thus seemingly will live the rest of their lives in blissful fifteen year old-land. Blissful, that is to say, for them, for their contemporaries will undoubtedly be too polite to point out their failings. I suppose there is always the chance for a late blooming, but these sorts of things can't be counted on. Is there no other solution?

A Minyan grows in Brooklyn

I had several conversation-worthy happening occur this Shabbos, but none struck me so much as a new Minyan I participated in this morning. 770 is great when you have to catch a Shacharis at 1:00 PM, but for weekly Shabbos prayers? Personally, I have nothing against not being able to hear anything and getting pushed around by smelly foreigners, but I understand that some people might not be so into this sort of thing. The obvious solution is to pray in another synagogue, but until now I never did this, because there isn't really any place where my friends are or where I'd feel comfortable. Maybe in four or five years my friends will start Beis Shmuel Tes Zayin, but until then, what's there to do?

This week I went to a new Shul that just opened a little while ago. Based in Darchai Menachem, which itself is based in the NCFJE building (you know, those people who run Camp Emunah-Bnos Yaakov Yehuda), MyShul (website here) is a welcoming place where you can hear what's the Chazzan and Torah reading, and don't get pushed around. One of the kids even gave a Dvar Torah, which I thought was really cute. Unlike 770, I could actually hear what he was saying. Of course, I was Davening during the speech, but you can't expect me to change everything I do in one week, right?

Strange ways

I saw a couple of very strange things this Shabbos. The first came as I was walking to 770, that bastion of messianic insanity, and coming up towards me was a woman wearing a tichel. This in itself is not so normal, but it's also not exactly blog material. As she came closer I noticed that she had something in her hand, and she was licking it. No, it wasn't a shiatsu, it was an ice cream bar!

Later on, while walking home from some Shabbos visiting with the dear wife, we encountered what seemed at first to be a normal site: Israeli guy, pointy shoes and tight suit, wearing a kippah, smoking a cigarette- hold on there one moment, smoking a cigarette? On the holy Shabbat day? While wearing a kippah? The mind boggles!

The first incident did not perturb me so much, because I've seen this woman before, and I believe she could be charitably classified under the "Crown Heights Crazies" label. The second case though? I'm just not sure. What in the world was this guy thinking?