[thecatspajamas]

Originally Posted by glchen

I would just think of this as ebay is trying to become more like Amazon or even Walmart/Target where buyers are allowed to return items. ebay wants to position itself as one big superstore which everything buyers want rather than just a big auction house / flea market. So think of it that way.

+1

And along these same lines, I actually posted this exactly a month ago over on the non-sports side in another eBay gripe thread (amazing how often these things pop up):

Bottom line is that over the last few years, eBay has moved from looking at themselves as a platform that anyone can use to sell their stuff to seeing themselves as the overarching retailer (think Amazon without the warehousing responsibilities) and all of the individual sellers are just ants feeding merch into the machine. If you don't feed it in fast enough, you get penalized (I mean, not rewarded) for not shipping the next day. If there are any complaints about your merch, or how it was packed, or how quickly it got there, or how your tone sounded in the invoice you sent, or how you didn't promptly communicate your eternal gratitude for gracing you with an incremental bid on this poorly-described fuzzy-pictured obviously sub-par piece of merch and how dare you look at me that way and I don't like the way that your screenname makes me feel there's no way this is real and it wasn't delivered in time for my cousin's birthday didn't you know it was the day after the auction ended blazy blah blah... Any of that, and you darn well will be refunding the buyer's money including their shipping cost (because the overlords have already removed the funds from your scrip account), and you'll probably have to pay the buyer's return shipping as well or just let them keep it, and you'll still get the big red N(egative) on your account that you deserve because it's obviously the seller's fault no matter what happens. No, wait, eBay is the seller now, so you REALLY deserve what you got, and we're going to dock your pay (I mean, not reward you) at the end of the month too because you made us look bad.

Anyway, just more of the usual ranting and raving, but at the end I always duck my head down and head back up the ant hill with my next load of mid- to low-end merch. There's really no other good way to list/move a high volume of relatively low-priced material anywhere else. I don't want to take over the B/S/T boards anywhere (would be more on the baseball side at this point), and setting up my own website hasn't helped with anything sales-wise due to the lack of an advertising budget. I may hate a lot of eBay's practices and policies, but they still do a much better job of getting eyes on the items (though not as good as they used to).