July 2007

My kids had better be this cute. I often put URLs in my phone if I see them on a sign while driving past.

This one was nice and rewarding.

Nearly everyone on the internet is an eBay user. It’s right up there with Hotmail and Yahoo in terms of membership popularity. I love using eBay, and ahve bought three items in the past few days to back it up. If you’re careful, you’ll be fine. I always buy my mobiles through eBay, for example.

 However, there’s some times where no matter how careful you are, you can get screwed.

Nearly all sellers wait for the buyer to leave feedback first, which puts the buyer into a very difficult position.

There’s been several times where I have been desperate to leave highly negative feedback but I can’t, as the seller hasn’t left feedback for me. I don’t want to have them lower my all important feedback rating.

There’s a pretty obvious solution to all this, and I wonder why eBay isn’t doing it.

 That’s to force the seller to always leave feedback first. With the exception of pick-up-at-location sales, they have no real reason not to. That is unless you consider ‘holding the buyer hostage’ to be a reason.

Overall eBay is a great idea, but I don’t like eBay as a company. If you have ever managed to get through to their customer service, you will wonder why you  ever bothered. It doesn’t help at all. Their ethos doesn’t smell good, as they constantly use their advertising to promote goods that don’t even exist (iPods less than $100? Yeh right…). But as long as the deals are there, so am I.

Aussies there is an alternative - www.graysonline.com.au has some AWESOME deals. Like my workmate, who picked up a $1500 projector for $140. Nice.

Well the day after having my first customer order his 10th shirt, I receive another email:

A big mistake. Another customer’s shirt was maent to be long sleeved, but arrived short. That’s just complacency on my part and the first mistake made. Not happy, Jan.

He’ll get a free replacement in addition to keeping his short sleeve variety.