WTF!?! Paypal Payments on hold

I am losing my patience with Ebay/Paypal. For the first time I have had Paypal withhold my funds and expect me to ship the product to the customer, even though my paypal account and my Ebay account are both several years old and I have 80 Positive feedbacks (100%) most of which are from items sold not items bought. According to them the funds will be released when the customer has left me a positive feedback or 3 days after the USPS tracking number shows as delivered.

I sent them an email asking why this has happened and if I can expect it to continue and received back one of the generic canned responses.

So appearently now all a customer has to do is say they didn't recieve the item / it was not listed properly etc, and Paypal will refund them the money without forcing them to return the item. To me, this makes it way to risky to sell anything of value on Ebay because they are making it so easy for someone to rip off the seller.

I am almost to the point of giving up selling on Ebay alltogether.

Auctiva, You're Fired!

Auctiva, You're Fired!

It's bad enough that Ebay + Paypal make more money on my auctions than I do, but now you've decided you want a piece of the action too. Well this is where I draw the line! Auctiva, You're Fired.

Making your own templates

Want to maintain a professional image on Ebay after firing Auctiva? Make your own templates using KompoZer.

"KompoZer is a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing. "

KompoZer is, in fact pretty easy to use. Only a minimal amount of HTML knowledge is needed to make a simple, usable template. You can also use it to adjust templates you may already have to your liking.

Oh did I mention that it is free, open source software? You can even get a portable version that will run on a thumbdrive.

Make big $$$ with Doba?

--Not likely--

Last week I went ahead and tried the Doba free trial.

According to Doba
"Doba provides a place where suppliers can list their product inventory, and you can find items to sell. These different suppliers will drop ship products right to your customers, so you never have to handle or ship products. If you're a retailer looking for products to sell we have a service package that will work for you."

Signing up
Signing up was easy, although it seems to be designed to be a little misleading. Once you click on the sign-up button you will be prompted for your email address and the password that you want to use to log into the site. To me this implied that this information would be all that would be necessary to start my free trial. Then when you click the button to sign up you will find that you also have to provide your address, phone number, and a credit card number.

The Terms
Be careful to read the terms, if you do not cancel before the 7 days is up, your credit card will be charged for a full months membership. Warning- be sure to pay attention to the end time of your trial, mine was at a odd time on the 7th day. Also they have some stuff in their disclaimer about times during a month you are allowed to cancel without being charged and other times that even if you cancel you will still be charged for the next month.

The Product
I spent the better part of the week searching through the products they offer and comparison shopping to find out what the estimated market value would be. I found that for most items, someone could run down to the local Target, Walmart, or whatever and pick up the item for a couple of bucks less than the 'wholesale price'. I did come across two items that could potentially turn a profit, however there were problems with this too. One of the products was designer sunglasses from big names like Gucci, Armani, etc... The 'wholesale price' was quite a bit cheaper than retail for these and after all the fees you might be able to make $20 a sale on ebay. The problem with this is now Ebay will not let you list more than 1 'designer' name item a month, I even contacted them and told them I would be selling authentic items and they could check out the supplier, still they would not lift the restriction for my account - so the sunglasses weren't going to be worth my time. The other item I found were boots by a certain company that would sell and have net about $30 a sell on ebay after costs. The problem here is that the manufacturer has a set price point that you can take the item (which would destroy all hope of profit), so that was a bust too.

The Good News
Although I did have to actually call them to cancel my account (this annoys me, if I can sign up online why can't I cancel online?), the customer service rep did immediately cancel my account without much trouble. I was expecting a bunch of upsell or 'special offers' to get me to stay. They simply asked why I wanted to cancel, and then canceled the account. So if you still want to check it out for yourself, there should not be any problems getting the trial canceled, just head over to the Doba Home Page and sign up.


I hope this review has been helpful

Regards,
dwbayseller

addthis Blogger tool

I spent about 3 hours trying to find one of those tools that allow visitors to submit your site to social networking sites like Digg, Reddit, Etc... I finally settled on AddThis as you can see over there on the sidebar -----> It was easy to install to blogger from their website and it even automatically added it as a widget so I didn't have to create a custom one. If anyone is looking for a tool like this I recommend trying AddThis as it was the best one I was able to find.

A Good, Free, Online Ebay (and more) Calculator

I have found a really good Ebay fee calculator by Ryan Olbe. It also calculates fees for Paypal, Amazon, Half.com, Overstock Auctions, Etsy, ePier, and Auction checkout.

It is very helpful for deciding how much to sell your item for, or to see just how much actual profit you have made from the sale.

Alibaba.com, first impressions

I was recently reading a business magazine and I came across an ad for Alibaba, and since I am still looking for that magic item that I can actually make a profit selling online I decided to check it out.

Alibaba is a place where companies that distribute goods wholesale can post ads, and people looking for such goods can find distributors. So far I am not all that impressed. The site is full of scam artist trying to steal peoples money and the folks running the site seem to do little to discourage this. This is not to say that there aren't legitimate companies selling there, but so far the majority I have come across have been scammers.

The site makes it easy to send out inquiry emails to companies in mass. I sent out several such emails and so far I have received probably 100 replies. Out of the 100 replies I believe maybe 10% are legitimate sellers, and the rest are running scams.

One good thing is that the site seems to have a decent community in place, and if you search the forums for advice or the name of a company you can cut down exponentially the chance that you will be scammed.

In short, if a seller is offering non-branded chinese goods such as generic cell phone accessories, MP4 players/generic game players, watches, jewelry, novelties, then they are probably a legitimate seller. In this case, however, a buyer will need to be sure that they understand the shipping terms and check their market prices thoroughly before buying. For example I found a buyer that offered to sell a lot of 100 generic iPhone cases for $150 shipped to my door. The only problem is that on doing further research it seems the seller is selling the cases themselves for $.90 on Ebay with free shipping to the general public. There is no way anyone could make money while trying to compete in the market with the supplier. You also have to be careful about the MP4 players and USB drives, as many are hacked to show a larger capacity than they actually have, or have decieving specs such as interchanging GB as gigabit instead of gigabyte.

On the flipside of that coin are the blatant scammers. Here are some signs that the seller is a scammer:

• They offer ridiculous prices on name brand items such as PS3, Dell, HP, Xbox, Apple iPods and laptops, etc... If the price looks too good to be true then it probably is. These big name companies DO NOT sell in bulk to miscellanous chinese distributors, they have a established distribution chain so it is unlikely that these sellers can supply these products at such low prices.
• You recieve the same photos from different sellers. This has happened to me a few times, and the really funny thing is how blatant it was. I recieved sample photos of laptops that ranged from stock photos to kitchen tables, to retail store displays.
• The seller will only accept direct transfer, Western Union, or other untrackable method of payment. This is so they can just take your money and disappear.
• They pretend to be cute Chinese girls with American names and they seem flirty, now I'm not saying anything sexist here, but seriously, ALL of the 'companies' that met the other requirments on this list did this.
• They do not have a company email address, you are contacted through MSN or Yahoo or another free email provider.
• They contact you directly instead of through Alibaba's tools, All of the sellers that I believe were legitimate contacted me through the site tools and not directly through email, where all of the scammers contacted me through email and skipped Alibaba's tools. This is of course so there would be no 'official' transcripts of your conversations which would leave less evidence for tracking them down after they take your money.

I have not found a product I like yet but I plan to keep an eye on Alibaba. If I do end up using the site I will post how the transaction went and also I will start a trusted seller list here. One big problem with Alibaba is that there is no feedback system on the sellers.

Open Office 3.0

Open Office 3.0 is a free office suite made available by SUN Microsystems. It is a fully compatible replacement for MS-Office (this means it can create and open/edit any document created with MS-Office and that any document it creates is also compatible with MS-Office.

It is being sold on Ebay for an average price of $4, sometimes selling for as much as $11. It has been clever MS-sounding names on Ebay such as Open Office 2007, or Open Office Ultimate, Student, or Home editions. If you have a decent connection speed you can download it for free.

Don't be fooled by the free price, this is actually really great software. I for one actually prefer Open Office over MS-Office especially since Office 2007 was released (the interface is terrible).

For more information on Open Office go to http://why.openoffice.org/index.html

To download Open Office for free try http://download.openoffice.org/