Mikescoins1, Hard Times

Just a follow up. I can confirm Mike's story that on Monday they began counting paypal performance. I just spoke with my TSAM and they confirmed it.

I do free shipping on all of my auctions and ship same day and my DSR ratings are 4.8 across the board.

You can never please everybody. You give free shipping and people still give you 3's and 4's. If free shipping gets you a 4.8 then somebody who charges reasonable shipping is going to be in that 4.6 range.

I wasn't ticked off about my experience about Mike, it's just the quality of the coins were less than I expected.

The point I was making is that everytime I speak to somebody, they think my job is easy. They think I spend 1 hour taping up boxes, 15 minutes responding to emails, I drive to the post office and then my job is done and I can party all night.

Absolutely untrue. ebay wants sellers to give incredible deals while at the same time providing Amazon level customer service.

There was a time when you could receive a payment and sit on it for 5 days and ship the item and your buyer would be happy. Those days are over. Places like Amazon that ship the same day have raised the bar so high that if people don't receive the item in two or three days they start emailing you and filing disputes through paypal.

This is a pretty good read for a Saturday morning. I think Halfabust pretty much hit the nail on the head with his assessment.

If you can't handle the volume that you are selling, change it. If you can't take individual pictures of each coin for sale, hire someone who can. This is not a hard thing to comprehend. My thoughts are exactly the same as Susan's as well. You will greatly increase your profit margin by selling with some credibility. The excuse that other folks are doing the same thing, and sometimes worse, is the worst argument you can make. At what point does that mean that it's ok for anyone to do it? I don't understand that mindset. I think stock photos and the way things are being done is because people DON'T what to do the work required to be a good ebay seller. Nobody is saying it is easy. You are not going to convince anyone here that you are a reputable seller until you change things. There's no point in trying to argue your point about ebay this, and Paypal that. The reason you are even running into problem is most likely the seller's own doing. It is usually easy to spot a good seller that had bad luck with one or two buyers that were just "difficult". Toolhaus states otherwise in this case. The amount of negatives and neutrals are very bad, regardless of the amount of sales.

As a side note, I think you can already tell that this is not your typical coin forum. Nobody was yelled at and sworn at like other forums. We are a family here, and we enjoy good discussions. Nobody will get "attacked" here per se, but be ready to back up all statements when trying to explain things to us. The current feedback cannot be ignored, nor can the current listings. Nothing will change until the seller does in my opinion.

I'm trying to be objective with everyone's comments here and trying to learn a little.

The problems that were being discussed with regard to my business seemed to have centered around the use of stock photos and misrepresentation of the coins we sell. However, the "item as described" DSR on ebay is actually one of our best areas. It seems that the vast majority of our buyers don't feel that they were mislead by the photos. In fact, when we did an analysis of the reasons behind the negative comments, only 10% of them were legitimately because of the item not being as described. That means that 99.8% of our customers did not complain about the items not being as described.

So when we break down the numbers, about 30% of the problems were legitimatly because of shipping delays. Some were due to postal errors or items getting lost. Many were plainly our fault, mostly because of the volume we do and orders slipping through the cracks and because of mismangement of inventory.

Out of the remaining 60% of the negatives, (about 150 comments) we had the one guy who complained about not getting free shipping accounting for 20 of them. We had 4 negs from someone who made a return who didn't understand why they were getting an email from ebay cancelling the transaction, because the email ebay sends isn't very clear. We had 3 people claim non-receipt for packages we not only had delivery confirmation for but we had their signatures on file. 10 were international transactions where the buyer either complained about having to pay taxes or the package got stuck in customs. 2 were shipping delays when the buyer sent a check with no item number, no item description, and we had to return the checks to the buyers because we couldn't apply them anywhere. 11 were people claiming non-receipt for items that were sitting at their post office at the time that they left the comment. And 15 of them were retaliations for unpaid buyer strikes for unpaid items.

We can make all the excuses in the world and we can control a lot of the problems. But quite a few of them are either bad buyers, malicious buyers, uneducated buyers, buyers who don't know how the system works, and ebay and Paypal errors. Until any of you run a business that does 25,000 transactions a year I don't want to hear you comment on the things we need to do to make our feedback better or our customers better satisfied.

To answer the "hire somebody", I have 2 family employees and 1 non-family employee. The family employees handle some customer service and actual order fulfillment, so no one outside of me or my family touches thec coins.

As for the $1 for 1 Ike promotion, it was generally easy to handle those orders because they were all the same, and those buyer came back and bought a lot of coins from me from my website and from our mail order form, so it was a "loss leader" that added to a lot of saless.

We are phasing out international shipping on ebay. Not withstanding the one time we got burned bad by the guy in New Zealand, with the new ebay standards we are asking for trouble if we accept it. Our worst DSR is shipping time, and international transactions almost always take 2 weeks or more to complete. We can't afford the potential risk anymore. We do have plenty of international buyers on our website and they are happy and honest.

Since you're comfortable that your own 'analysis' of the situation is the only valid one, there's no reason to discuss this any further.

I'm going to jump in here real quick with an opinion.
You take it for what it is worth, and know that I haven't
got any "vendetta" or anything against you. I am watching
the thread from a more neutral place.

The only thing that bothers me about your ways is the
stock photos. If I was a jury looking in at this and
reading your customer remarks here, ebay FB, and elsewhere,
you would be 'convicted' on this subject. You have to
put pictures of coins you are selling!

I think you are using a convenient cop out by throwing out
the "dollar for dollar" sale coins and using them as an
example of why you don't photo each coin. Use some common
sense! The 'one for one' coins, rolls, melt silver (that
is clearly auctioned as such), and other similar coins
need not be photographed individually.

On the other side of the coin, no pun intended, anything
you list as "uncirculated", for example, should have an
individual picture and should be uncirculated!

To have so much feedback calling your grading into question
is not just a fluke in my mind. Therefore you are either
doing it on purpose, or you don't know what you are doing...
Either way, you deserve the reputation you get, and should
not act surprised of the reputation you get.

Sorry so long for a 'neutral' comment.
My .02
Dave