eGay

You know, I'm REALLY starting to get pissed off with eBay. Which is a shame. It's still a good place to look for stuff, and I buy a lot of things there. Face it, eBay is pretty much the only place you're gonna find half the stuff I'm into.

However if you actually want to sell stuff on there it quickly turns into a complete nightmare. Their whole attitude towards sellers is, simply put, hostile and antagonistic. It is also completely RETARDED.

We will, for the moment, ignore the whole "Sellers don't get to leave anything other than positive feedback thus rendering the entire feedback system meaningless" debacle, and go straight for my primary source of aggravation: Postage.

Now, how would you think postage and packing rates would work? Something along the lines of the seller setting a rate to cover the postage charge, packing materials, time and effort in sending it out? An amount which is then clearly and unamiguously stated on the listing so that the buyer can decide if they find it acceptable?

WRONG.

Not according to the powers that be at eBay. Who, in the interests of brevity shall henceforth be referred to as "the cunts". According to the cunts a gigantic leatherbound tome costs as much to post as a pamphlet, and all postage types cost the same, irrespective of delivery time, parcel size, weight, security, insurance or any other plainly obvious concerns. Now, even worse was the fact that they had previously set this moronic limit at the highly reasonable amount of £0.00. Thats right, in eBay land not only do boxes, envelopes and bubble wrap fall from the sky, but magical elves will pack up your stuff for you and take it to the post office, who will then deliver it for free out of the kindness of their hearts.

Clearly this is ridiculous. More ridiculous however is the justification for this. They go on about protecting buyers from unreasonable postage costs. Now, I don't know about you, but if I was looking at an item and found the postage cost to be excessive I WOULDN'T FUCKING BUY IT!!! It's pretty straightfoward. You look at the price, you look at the postage, you add them together and you see if it's a price you're willing to pay. I realize that there are a lot of frighteningly stupid people out there, but come on! If they were that thick they wouldn't be able to work the computer at all, let alone sign up to a website since that involves the ability to both read and type.

At no point does concern for sellers being able to maintain their overheads enter into the equation. If you sell an item for 99p you know how much you actually make? 67p. Which is fine until you realize you're going to paying more than that in postage. At that point it's actually costing you money to sell your stuff, not even factoring in all the time you've spent. You are actually better off taking your old CD's or whatever out the back and setting them on fire.

The thing here is that we all know the real reason for these daft restrictions on P&P. Ebay takes a percentage off the sale price, not the grand total. So they think they're missing out. Never mind that most of the transactions will be going through paypal, for which they scalp you for the full amount. So yes, people up the postage to cover the fees and make a bit more. So what? Thats up to them. If the buyers don't like the postage they won't buy. THAT'S HOW CAPITALISM WORKS. If you don't understand basic concepts like market forces then how the fuck is it that you're running a buisness? Either own up and adjust your fees or let the sellers on your site actually sell in a way that's economically sustainable for them.

Now, I should mention that they have almost learnt their lesson. After an interminable period of having to circumvent the unreasonable restrictions in various arcane fashions they've finally deigned to cut the free postage or nothing bullshit and have introduced... maximum postage rates again. They're still not enough to actually cover the costs of any postage scheme above throwing it in the river and hoping it gets there, and their still not fooling anyone as to their motivations, but it's a kind of improvement, right? Though quite why they don't get why I may not want to send stuff out by the shittest, slowest most unreliable methods after stripping me of all rights and recourse as a seller I simply don't know.

Or at least it would be if they'd actually bothered. I sat down tonight to try building some listings with this latest scheme in the vain hope I may actually be able to get somewhere with it, only to find out that they haven't actually put it up yet. Despite it being active as of today, you still can't actually list a DVD with a postage cost. So rather than spending a productive evening getting some stuff done I've gotten really pissed off and posted an overlong semicoherent rant instead.

As I said, cunts.

Screw you guys, I'm gonna go play Metroid.