World biggest Internet based auction eBay has finally started to realize what impact some of their policies have. Recently vice president of eBay has made and announcement that the company is changing policies to remove negative feedback left by customers for sellers because they would not mark item as a gift in order to avoid customs fees.

eBay will be removing feedback if listings meet Customs Requirements and seller gets negative feedback that talks about customs delays or customs fees. To qualify sellers must advise customers that customs fees and taxes are not included in price nor in shipping fee and those fees are buyers responsibility.

eBay also announced that it is going to include two competing online payment services Moneybookers and PayMate.

The feedback policy was on the list of most biggest frustrations for eBay sellers. Let’s see what else we have on that list so eBay could start working on it.

  • CEO John Donahoe – many have commented negatively regarding him. The significant drop in eBay stock is associated with Mr. Donahoe being in the office. There is even a petition online to get john Donahoe resigned.
  • eBay deal with buy.com – many small businesses just can not compete with huge corporation list buy.com
  • Lack of communication and customer service.
  • Payment policy practically eliminated any other option than PayPal. Many look at this is as unfair and just because the company also owns PayPal.
  • High listing fees.
  • Unwarranted Account Suspensions – they are a lot of complains that accounts were disabled simply because it looked like there was a security concern without any justification.
  • Glitches and lack of innovation.

So if you have a eBay business what do you think about the changes? Do you feel like it is going to help you a lot or not?

via Ecommerce Journal

As you already know we own part of retail business. it is growing slowly, but steadily. This is my first experience with specifics of retail business. One of such specifics is dealing with returns and unsatisfied customers.

Lately we had a customer who wanted to return merchandise way after period of time allowed by our return policy. Initially we got defensive since it is really against our return policy and because that particular merchandise was supposed to be returned to manufacturer within short time frame. So we could not just resell it on eBay or something. So we did not issue RMA number to the customer. So she just mailed it anyway and threatened to dispute the charge with PayPal. Then in over one month after she mailed she contacted us again. But we did receive it. My guess is that it was shipped to address of distribution company.

This time I have decided to do some research and find out what other retail business veterans do in such case. So I have interviewed handful of SCORE experts and posted my questions to several forums and I can summarize all answers to basically two:

  1. Customer is always right. The company should accept charge backs as another cost of doing business.
  2. That the company have full rights to refuse refund if it is stated so in its policy or if there was no policy then State Law applies, which in our state is 20 days refund.

So what do you do in situations like this?

Carbon Copy ScamI have had 365 to freedom dot com in my Google reader for some reason, and couple of days ago Walt over there posted his monthly earnings report.

What caught my eye is that for second month he is making almost $2000 from “Carbon Copy” program. Wow, I thought. It is some nice earnings, but why didn’t I see anybody else making money with them.

So I googled the term and everything I could find so far is either their affiliates or scam reports that blame Carbon Copy for being very expensive and the they stole their system from some other system. So they give URLs to other scam reports which ended up being landing page for different MLM.

So where can we get the truth about them?

It would be really nice to here from somebody reputable in making money online field, somebody from top of http://www.45n5.com/top100/ list, like problogger.net/ , shoemoney.com/ or johnchow.com/ . Those guys earned their credibility and would review the program honestly, I hope.

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