So yes I get the Free Mailing thing. And with Big sellers coming in and charging low prices and high shipping fees, eBay first started charging fees on shipping too. But with that not working well they went to pushing the free shipping and of course the fixed price. However smart shoppers do what I did yesterday, I looked for car phone mount on eBay first, found the one I wanted and it was only a fixed price with free shipping. I counter checked the item on Amazon and guess what it was cheaper so I bought it off of Amazon. I apprecieate the comments, and I do know if I change my process to conform to eBay it would be better but I do not have that many combining purchases. So I like to keep my process simple. Ebay used to be a place for the small seller like myself. I have sold 6k or so in the last month, but with Amazon now pushing 3rd party sales more of the bigger sellers are going to amazon and ebay will once again be fighting for any sellers. After i wrote this I went to Amazon to review seller options there (fixed price). So with eBay pushing fixed price (which they will loose to Amazon over a period of time) and not focus on the smaller auction sellers that made eBay, us true auctioneers will leave for the next eBay. If I wanted to sell fixed price I would be on Amazon now. In addition, I now check every fixed price on eBay against Amazon or something like it. As far as this being a paypal board, for the above reason is why eBay is splitting off Paypal. I would bet that 70% plus of the Paypal transactions are eBay thats why they bought it in the first place. They milk the buyer and the seller that way. Paypal will remain a viable canidate for internet payment, I don't think that they will win against the Google payers for real world cellphone payments and Amazon is going to win for 3rd party fixed price sales. But I was pointing out a problem, within the way Ebay is programmed and the unresponsiveness of Ebay to correct or acknowledge a problem. Yes their are other solutions for my issue, and yes I guess I should just change my process to work around an obvious flaw in the Ebay system. But hey, I work for a living, this is not a big part of my income. And we are all resistant to change. So yes I can buy more insurance or drink the coolaid and do the combined shipments. But my process was designed to cover my sales, with the least amount of work. And I have had to use the insurance when even though USPS reported it delivered and customer claimed it was not. It took me 10 sales worth of profit to cover what was not covered by insurance. So I am faced with either dings to my seller performance rating or to bad feedback because I do not accomodate the occassional customer with multiple purchases.
... View more