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Dumbest negative feedback ever?
Although I generally think that my selling experiences are fairly unnoteworthy, I received a negative feedback this week that has caused me to vacillate between laughter and frustration, and I thought some here might get a kick out of it. So, I bought a bunch of the Clone Trooper Battlepacks
#7913 last year during a 50% off clearance event and have been reselling a lot of them recently. A few weeks ago, I sold one that apparently had a price sticker with the marked-down price on it. Upon receiving that set and seeing that sticker, the buyer promptly fired off a negative feedback because I had "ripped him off" by charging him more for the set than I had paid for it. Has anyone seen or received a negative feedback that was left for a reason dumber than that?
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You could try reasoning with him and asking him to revise the feedback, giving him the laundry list of what you had to do to provide him with a retired thing - i.e. invest, store, protect, list, ship, etc. It's worth a shot.
The comment said "Do not buy from this man, he tricks you out of your money" The woman got suspended from Ebay and the comment was removed...
I do not know how much clearer that I could make the listing that these were instructions only... This is the exact listing...
http://www.ebay.com/itm/271287761478
The woman was from right here in the United States
What can I say?
That is why I never make it personal or get into it. If someone has a complaint, I offer to take it back, or do a partial refund with offer of return for full refund, or whatever...
Just not worth my brain cells to fight.
I recently received back a Dino HQ, was sold new/sealed, when it came back, clearly most of it had been built, it was back in zip lock bags, the buyer did put a note in one of them noting which part was missing.
A single small part that LEGO would have replaced was missing, fair enough (or the kid lost it under the table, whatever.
I'll replace the part and sell it as used, but that is an expensive hit, and I really can't charge a fee, after all, I guess a part *was* missing (I have to take the customer at their word).
Just the cost of doing business. :)
BTW, anyone want a Dino HQ set just missing a simple part on the cheap? :)
PM me.
If people weren't making profits, there would be a lot less on ebay and fewer people would go there. It would be a disaster.
If anyone is going to take such feedback seriously they are just as dumb and not worth your bother, so i wouldn't be worried, it's annoying that it brings your percentage down but if people have negatives I generally read them first and 90% of the time it's from fools such as in your case.
Ebay sided with me, but there was a lot of arguing.
If you've got a fair amount of feedback and rating all ready, chalk it down to selling on ebay, some people are stupid.. And nobody is going to worry about a 99.8% feedback rating.
At uni a mate and me used to sell CD's on ebay, we'd charge a couple of quid more than you could buy them online, then order them one online. We had to close the operation down to the negative feedback based on that we'd ordered the CDs from an online retailer, people were not happy
Resell all you want, but it seems a bit silly to then cry if someone was angry when they realised the markup you were making through the fact you left the price on the box yourself.
Either keep the naive naive by making sure you remove stickers, or accept that they're going to get angry when they find out the markup you're charging. After all, are you saying you've never felt angry towards a store when you bought something only to find another store a short way away sold it for less? Or bought a Lego set at discount only to find it even more discounted elsewhere? It's the same feeling that this person will have had in finding out they just paid way over the odds for something.
So I wouldn't call the feedback dumb, I think you just have to accept it comes with the territory with regards to reselling. Some of the other posts in this thread highlight examples where feedback genuinely is dumb.
It may well be frustrating but it's something you'll have to get used to if you want to resell for profit. You're going to have customers from varying backgrounds - those who know what they're buying and how the price compares, those who are so rich they just couldn't care either way, through to those who are buying it as a present for their grandkid or whatever and are naive as to the price and get annoyed if they find out the amount it was in store relative to how much they paid.
But regardless, that's a different topic, you're generalising and it's arrogant. If someone close to you told you they wanted some antique lamp or something you're not well versed in the prices of for their birthday and you bought it for them not knowing the true value of said item because you didn't know what search terms to use to find a reasonable valuation are you honestly telling me you wouldn't be ticked off if you paid £100 and found a £10 price tag stuck on the bottom of it when it arrived?
Whilst you may be able to find the price for every Lego set going and have a reasonable understanding of the value of sets and what they are and aren't discounted to and when you can't assume everyone is an expert in the price of everything. Are there stupid people in the world? Sure, all too many of them, but you can't assume people are at fault simply because they're not as well versed in a topic as you, the buyer might have a doctorate in particle physics for all you know, but be completely naive to the fair price of Lego until he gets an unfortunate education in it through a realisation of how much he overpaid by.
I'm sure I could find a topic in which I know a lot more than you in and then belittle you for being "deluded", "ignorant" and "at fault" for not knowing the answer to questions I pose on said topic, but it's stupid to expect everyone to be an expert in everything, and it's stupid to not expect people to get angry about profiteering, different people will have different opinions on what constitutes profiteering, and if you're making a profit then you have to expect that you will face that depending on how much profit you're making and how good a job you do of managing expectations. If you're sending the item with the original price tag you paid on it then you've utterly failed at managing expectations and should expect some kind of comeback.
Ask yourself this, how well do you think a shop would do and how happy do you think the customers would be if they also stuck the wholesale price that they paid against the price they want you to pay? I can't imagine any of the customers being too happy about shopping there when they realise the margins. You need to at least maintain the illusion that you're not marking things up too much if nothing else. I expect most people would frequent the store that wasn't transparent about it's wholesale prices instead.
I'd advise the original poster to simply chalk this one up as a lesson in exactly that, not worry too much about it, move on, and consider the lesson in managing customer expectations learnt and accept that there was more he could've done to manage the customer's expectations - i.e. remove the price tag. If instead he just writes it off as a stupid customer and ignores the lessons then he isn't going to be in business long.
LFT gets it, sometimes the customer really is genuinely stupid, but either way they're still the customer and you still have to make things painless for them and ensure you manage their expectations well if you want to build a reputation as a good person to buy from. It's not as if in this situation there was nothing Pacific493 could've done before shipping the product to achieve that.
As for the price sticker, I admit it should be removed, but if that can be done safely. I'd rather get a set with a price sticker than damaged because of it being removed. Which is yet another reason for customers to complain.
Don't misinterpret my post there as "if you don't know something, you're dumb". It's how you come to terms with that what I'm debating.
Though I agree with you about the price sticker, not a great idea leaving to on.
If you buy items purely with the intention of selling them, regardless whether you make a profit or not, and regardless whether you make use of the item in the interim, you are engaged in a trade and must register as self-employed and, depending on your turnover (or potential turnover), possibly with the VAT office also. This applies whether you ultimately make a profit or not. I'd wager a good number of UK sellers on Bricklink, and resellers here on Brickset, haven't registered as self-employed or otherwise set up a Ltd Company.
The OP is perfectly entitled to feel aggrieved in my opinion. If I bought something 5 years ago and is in now out of production and in high demand, I'd feel a little annoyed that someone was complaining about me making a small profit. It's a seller's market with Lego at the moment.
What if I got a Lego set for free? Would someone get mad if they found out I got it free and was mad they had to pay money for the set?
There have been many times where I bought an item and I found it cheaper at another store. If the discount was worth my time, I would just return the item I bought.
I know there are people that don't have a clue, but I think most people realize that there's a markup on most everthing they buy.
In many ways I think its possibly equally dumb to assume, if you are applying massive mark ups, that some people won't be unhappy - surely thats just a risk of the business you're in. In the old days of profiteering people would risk being beat up or gaining a bad reputation within your community - now you risk getting a negative feedback so it doesn't sound to bad to me. Whilst its true that they paid the price they paid and 'should' have known what to expect when it arrived it doesn't mean its not reasonable to be disappointed when it arrived, its entirely reasonable to feel that the sticker was a smack in the face. Any disapointment will result in a possible bad feedback, the same applies to every product and every retailer out there.
Would I or anyone else here leave negative feedback? No because we know what ebay is, we know what LEGO can be bought for, its RRP and mostly what its worth now. But its not a good idea to assume that everyone sees things like we do. The OP has received feedback, possibly unfair but there you go. I suspect the best attitude is to, as Xefan said, learn from it and never leave a 'sale' sticker on a box again. Equally the buyer should have learnt from this to.
As an aside, would a price sticker (and im thinking of those big ones you sometimes get especially with reductions) be enough to mean an item wasn't as described on ebay? If you used a stock image of a pristine box or if you were selling 10, used a photo of one without but some of your stock had them on? If you claimed MISB would that make a difference?
Has anybody ever heard any customer in a Brand Store give an employee some really silly feedback, I mean like really trivial things that wouldn't effect anything? It's probably a very common thing to hear though, so I'm sure employees get used to it.
FWIW I have no idea what the going price for a Ford Model T is, I have no idea whether $825 would be insanely cheap, or insanely expensive. I don't keep track of what supply and demand has done to the price of that particular product which proves the point precisely that you can't expect everyone to know the value of everything. Right, but most people don't want to see that markup, because it would annoy them all the same. You may think that's stupid, you may think that's irrational, but it's also unavoidable human nature, so as a seller you have to deal with it. Not doing so and then complaining it resulted in negative feedback is easily as naive as someone not realising that a lot of eBayers are out to milk you for every last drop of profit that they can.
If you buy something for personal use but stick it in a cupboard and forget about it, you're perfectly entitled to sell it at a profit at some point in the future. Only if the item is valued at over £6,000 does tax come into it, and even then you'll be able to offset your Capital Gains allowance against the profit you make before you pay tax.
Making a few quid by selling part of your personal Lego collection does not put you into the "running a business" bracket. If, however, the OP is buying Lego purely to sell at a profit at a later date, then yes they are a business and should register as such.
If you buy to sell then you're a business. If you buy to collect, and later sell some or all of your collection, you're not.
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/guidance/selling/badges.htm
It's the first indicator they list. They even provide a number of really easy to understand examples that highlight how important the profit motive is to their determination:
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/guidance/selling/examples.htm Let me guess, HMRC don't know about UK tax laws either? only you do? Are you still missing the rather fundamental part of this thread which I already pointed to once that we're talking about reselling? Stop muddying the waters with irrelevance.
Now if you bought 50 of them, and decided to sell after three months, then HMRC would view that in a different light even if you claimed they were in your collection.
@CCC is right, that list of nine isn't actually what HMRC go on, its in addition to their main criteria, which are:
One thing I have never understood for lego is the part about expected length of life. Does a lego set have an expected useful life of less than 50 years? The individual bricks don't, but as a set, they probably do as parts are expected to get lost.
There is also a complication if you sell off items that you have shown at an exhibition and taken payment for doing the exhibition (rather than expenses) - as it can be classed as a business asset then.
Is there really any doubt that resellers:
a) Sell with the intention of making a profit?
b) Buy the goods that they're reselling, for resale?
The HMRC site is rather explicit about the rest of it. There's nothing on the HMRC site about that list being in addition, in fact, it explicitly states that those are the indicators used by the courts and some or all of them may determine if someone is trading as a business. The criteria you quoted is just a list of examples that is comprised of those criteria, obviously reselling would fall under the first one because the profit motive box is ticked amongst others.
http://community.ebay.com/t5/Seller-Central/Has-Another-Purge-Begun-at-Ebay/td-p/17761811
There was also a very good Q&A session on the GSP program yesterday as well:
http://community.ebay.com/t5/Weekly-Chat-with-eBay-Staff/Weekly-Chat-with-the-eBay-Global-Shipping-Team-October-9-2013/m-p/17769331#M595
It is worth reading the entire thread just to get to the end when the ebay reps finally confess they have been auto-enrolling sellers into GSP without their permission after dodging the question for a very long time. Good times at ebay :)
You may just be talking about resellers, but the topic has clearly widened. Where did it start to widen ...