How DUMB are eBay? Opened new eBay shop with them today. Business seller, existing account, former powerseller, 100% feedback. Come to bulk upload listings with Turbo Lister. 'You can only list ten items warning message' WHAT!!! Use online link to increase number. 'You can now upload twenty five items'. All my listings are multi variation options, which means I cannot even upload one single solitary item.

Contact online customer services. "You are charging me for a shop I cannot use". Unsurprisingly they cannot do anything and I have to ring eBay office hours Monday to Friday who may or may not be able to increase that limit. If they can't, I shall be taking them to the small claims court for misrepresenting a product. What sort of dumb ass puts restrictions of the number of items someone can sell in a shop (or even list). when they profit by at least 10 percent for every item sold. Am sure the world has gone absolutely mad. No wonder we are still in a recession everywhere. <rant over>...


Just thought I would bring this to the attention of anyone considering setting up an eBay shop, as none of these restrictions are mentioned when signing up for the shop.

Apart from Amazon and Ebid, suggestions for alternative selling venues with decent levels of foot traffic would be appreciated.

Will, why are you bothering with the likes of Ebay at all, in my experience based on the products i make and sell

Ebay customers are expecting cheap, pay cheap and waste loads of time asking stupid questions.

Where as my SCCP shop seldom gets stupid questions, customers are expecting better and pay more.

I tried Etsy, to my surprise , more stupid questions BUT lots of better quality orders.

I don't know what you are selling, but surely your own hosted shop and some serious marketing, end result might be less sales, but with no charges more profit

Just my thoughts, personally i have hardly listed a dam thing on Ebay for some time unless i have a few SILVER rejects to get rid off , sell them at 1/2 price on Ebay, and listed very clearly as 925 SILVER, guess what i get complaints that they were not 9ct gold when they arrive, Ebay dumb, Ebay customers dumber

Having said all of that, i do list a handful of mainly 9ct gold items in November, with a casual contact me via 2enquire@delorea.........uk for my full range , that pays dividends every time

Suggestion CC should set up its own online STORE HUB for all of us SCC & SCCP sellers

Hi Viv. I currently use SCCP on one of my sites and Opencart on the other site which has more complex needs. Like yourself I design and sell all of my own products.

I haven't traded full time on eBay for over two years now, as before they introduced product options on all the listings, I used to waste endless time chasing people up asking what size or colour they wanted etc even though in big red bold type it stated on the listing that their order could not be commenced till I had the required information.

My own shortfall is probably is on the 'serious marketing' aspect, but eBay seems to still attract a lot of foot traffic that would be virtually impossible to match on an individual web site, albeit that much of their visitors seem to want something for nothing.

Ebay seem to be on a self destructive route at the moment and looking at their forums, this listing restriction has also been applied to many exisiting shop owners who have suddenly had limits introduced on the number of items they can list. This has been applied to reputable, long standing shop owners.

I have this overriding feeling that I am not going to get any joy out of eBay when I phone them tomorrow, but I will pursue them through the small claims court for the refund of the shop subscription should that prove to be the case.

Hope this post serves as a cautionary tale for others reading it.

There was a period when i used to sell my handmade silver signet rings on ebay, but i got fed up with being on page 10 because another seller listed 100's of identical products with a minor change in the description to evade the rules

silver 14 x 12mm oval signet ring z
silver 14 x 12mm oval signet ring b
silver 14 x 12mm oval signet ring ?
silver 14 x 12mm oval signet ring zunique
silver 14 x 12mm oval signet ring grey

They were all the same, and had drop down option for sizes

on one occasion he listed about 500 in a day

so i listed one every day on a 1 day listing, at half his price, and he reported me to ebay

Have a look at etsy , it works much better once you get the hang of it

Oh and my website on average gets about 200 to 300 unique visitors per day, probably after they have looked at the rubbish on ebay first

I am currently looking at Etsy Viv, as well as a couple of other venues. I guess I should also go exploring social networks to generate more foot traffic through my own sites.

Doing some more digging on the eBay seller forums, I no longer think it is a viable option for reputable sellers anymore. One seller on there lost their powerseller status as someone left them a negative for non arrival, without contacting the seller first. Really got beyond a joke for merchants.

Think I am going to do a few hours research on site promotion....

Will simple question, how does your website rank in google , because i am convinced if you have good page ranking , disgruntled Ebay customers will find your website and order direct.

I have the advantage of only selling basically 2 product types, so its easy relatively for me to get 1st page ranking.

if yours has dozens of product types obviously it is not so easy, and that is precisely why on the internet i chose to only sell my best 2 products.

Similar situation applies to most of the websites i have developed for friends, and they are all getting bookings or orders on a regular basis

Wedding cars, rather than general hire cars

Latest website for a window cleaner, is beating major companies who do all types of cleaning, so on and so forth

I would also list a few products and direct them to your website (subtly as Ebay frowns on them being just direct ads for websites), so people will come there instead of ebay. Put something in there to "subtly" nudge them to the site instead of buying there. Eventually people will just come to your site instead of ebay if they are return customers Good luck on it Will, I know Ebay can be a real pain in the butt.

Obviously that is subjective as to what people feed into the Google search terms, but on some items I am on page one, a few items are typically on page two of the results, and a few stragglers within the first ten pages. I believe Google is changing the algorithm it uses though, to make the system fairer, rather than giving preference to the heavily over optimised sites.

I chased Fleabay up this morning and they have raised my monthly selling limit from 25 to 200, but refuse to raise the number of listings I can have above 200. I explained some of my items can have up to 30 multi variation options, so with a stock quantity of just three, that means I would not be able to have more than two separate items listed as each product option gets classed as an 'item'. Totally crazy but true.


** Ebay have always been a pain in the butt Jo Ann, but they seem to be doing their best to totally alienate the sellers on there now.

And fleebay also own Paypoooooo

You do know that Google Wallet is shutting down its service for physical goods later this year I hope Viv?

https://support.google.com/checkout/sel … 0449?hl=en