John Simister
John voices his frustration with the big boys of selling and shipping.
‘Two big players have made my blood boil’
The online world has become a central part of classic-car activities. We order parts online, we book events, we communicate on forums and through social media, we buy cars, we bid in auctions. In short, the magic web has expanded the possibilities massively. We could hardly live without it.
And with that fact come the downsides.
The organisations in control of our online activities, particularly the transactional and delivery websites, wield huge power while making it hard to question their practices and engage in disputes. Two such big-time players have recently made my blood boil, both for the bad things they have done and for the frustration in seeking a remedy.
First, ebay. I’ve just sold four suspension-related items I didn’t need any more: a pair of dampers, a set of four more dampers, a set of springs and a compressor tool for removing a Mini’s rubber spring cones. While creating the listings, I had to enter a postage cost. You can use ebay’s own calculator, or you can find your own quote independently, which will almost certainly be significantly cheaper for the same service. I did the latter.
All the items sold for a decent price, two of them to the same buyer. Great! Except that two items, I was informed by email, were placed on ‘ebay hold’ and payment would be delayed by up to three weeks. This had never happened to me before, but was happening now in two out of the first four sales I had made since ebay stopped using Paypal to collect payment from the buyer and send it to the seller, and replaced it with its new in-house system.
Big brother
Why did it change the system? It’s all about control. One of the change’s consequences is that you no longer know the buyer’s email address, by which Paypal payments are made. And the ebay messaging system forbids you from seeking your buyers’ contact details such as email address and telephone number, which is awkward when your chosen delivery service asks for them.
Back to the ‘ebay hold’, enacted by Paypal on instructions from ebay. Paypal’s website says this
‘ebay dominates online auctions and knows it has become indispensible’
could have happened because, for example, ‘You’re a new seller on ebay’. Nope. ‘Your current performance has fallen below the minimum standard for all ebay sellers’. Nope, again – I have never had a single problem with a buyer.
Even weirder was that one buyer bought two items, but only one had its payment held. Replying to the ‘Tell us what you think!’ exhortation on the transaction statement, I pointed out that arbitrary payment holds were high-handed and unacceptable, not least because the money was mine and not ebay’s.
The problem is that ebay totally dominates online auctions, and it knows it has become indispensable. It is abusing its position and there seems to be nothing we can do about it. It would be good to talk to an ebay PR representative, but no joy there. However, ebay is not the only offender. I used Hermes to send some parts to a fellow Singer Owners’ Club member and arranged for the parcel to be collected from my house. That never happened, even though the Hermes website recorded a date and time of collection. All attempts to resolve this via the website were futile, so I took it to a Hermes shop instead and put it down to a system error.
But then a friend arranged to send a rare, bulky and valuable dashboard to Australia via Hermes, needed to complete a restoration. It didn’t arrive. Apparently, Hermes reserves the right to destroy packages that don’t conform exactly to its guidelines. This package was 10cm too long, so went not to Australia, but to a Hermes destruction centre. My friend discovered the awful truth only when his buyer wondered where the package was, and by then it was too late. That’s a delivery company neither he nor I are likely to use again.