Yeah, warning warning anger venting. I got scammed again by a buyer
on Ebay, claimed item never arrived, asked for it to be resent,
then the day after contacted Ebay and demanded a refund which they
got because Ebay are mindless droids who no longer care about
sellers who send things without tracking. Overall I'm out $20
(really $5 of actual cost but $15 of profit on top seeing as I got
the stock as a one-off for nearly nothing), which isn't the end of
the world because if I behaved differently people who'se parcels
genuinely got lost would probably start leaving negative feedback
and then I'd get fewer sales overall including of much more
valuable items. Tracking doesn't always help either when the
updates just go dead for long peroids and people see their chance
to make lots of noise and get a freebie, especially lately with the
virus stuffing up all the international services. Now Australia
Post are charging an "international surcharge" as of Monday as
well, which is specified according to the old 9-zones of countries,
replaced aready by a 5-zone system introduced at the start of this
month!
But it pisses me off that the only way to compete with Chinese
sellers is to use the cheap untracked postage services, and then
you're open to this stuff. Plus I'm only heading further down this
rabbit hole at the moment. I've given up selling some types of items
before becuase the sort of cutomers that buy them include too many
difficult/dodgy types. The more technical stuff tends to attract a
better class of customer than just a general consumer good.
Basically the aim is to avoid dealing with the average man/woman in
the street who is likely to be a nasty nutcase.
This really is a big percentage of my interaction with other
people, seeing as I don't have much else to do with them normally,
and the fact that it usually only happens when there's a problem
(which 90% of the time is that the order is lost/slow in the post)
definately affects my general attitude of trust. But on the other
hand there are those who have volunteered to pay again for an order
that was resent when they ended up getting both parcels. It's
probably a pretty small percentage seeing as the number of parcels
that I actually get "returned to sender" is at most one per year,
but such people do really exist. It's a little window into their
true nature I suppose, given that they're dealing with a stranger
who they have the power to rip off for their own benefit and will
probably never interact with again either way, whether it occours
to them or not. The fact that the vast majority of buyers don't
complain at all shows that most are really very honest, if they
weren't then I really wouldn't be able to do the untracked postage
at all. I guess the Chinese probably couldn't either seeing as
their tracking rarely says anything more than that some item left
China. Maybe honesty is what's holding the efficiency of this whole
system back? Ehh, that's probably what Ebay thinks and why they
come down hard on me, but I've tried the alternative and know that
nobody will pay the post of tracked services for a lot of stuff (of
course you could also blame Australia post for increasing parcel
postage cost well over the rate of inflation since at least the
year 2000, even though volume has been massively increasing due to
online shopping and that ought to result in better economies of
scale).
Of course as the seller I'm in the complete opposite position to
the buyer where I have to always put on the smiling face of
business and show deepest sympathy for the fact that an order sent
with the cheapest possible service to the other side of the world
didn't arrive within a couple of weeks, and the buyer didn't bother
to read the notice about international shipping delays when they
ordered. While they're blurting out impossibly mis-phrased
typo-riddled nonsense, I kindly respond summing up their question
in my answer in the hope of detecting any misunderstanding without
insulting them by suggesting that they can't use English. It's all
a whole mountain of bullshit, and it's a bullshit that society
completely embraces, because it's the natural behaviour of
business. Business is assumed to be at least a little dishonest,
and consumers are assumed to be at least a little honest.
I did set up my own online store as well, to get away from Ebay.
Hardly anyone buys the same stuff I sell on Ebay from it even
though it's cheaper and I made an effort to advertise it initially.
For all my sweet talk, nobody _really_ trusts me.
Anyway my next venture, because there aren't enough nice technical
people in Australia to make a decent living off, is used laptops. I
had a little test run at selling them and it went alright, though
Windows 10 is a steaming... you know the standard Linux-lover line.
As expected though, I got the smell of those sorts of people, the
average people, who are just going to cause that bit more trouble.
So I think I'll have to try to set up a second Ebay account for
that, where I can lump the occasional negative feedback without
hurting my existing business. Buying the laptops is the main part
to set up, I don't know where these other Ebay sellers get them,
they probably know some real live IT people I suppose, but I'm
going to have to be a bit more inventive. Actually testing and
fixing up the hardware will be the one bit I might enjoy,
everything else is going to be shit and make me even more pissed
off about humans in general. But I'm just accepting facts at this
point that the only job I'll ever find that provides a reliable
income is going to be shit. I already knew it when I first started
this phlog and said it somewhere in an intro post - basically
people are the ones who give you money, and if you don't like them
then you ain't got a hope. I ain't got a hope.
