Our society goes on and on about the customer always being right, the customer being king/queen/quing/whatever. I have heard it all my life.

It was stupid to begin with and it has gotten stupider.

The customer is not always right, and never has been. The customer is right to the extent that we can arrange him or her to be without giving away the store or rewarding/encouraging horrible behavior. The customer is not king/queen/quing/padishah/nawab/sultan/etc., is not even nobility, and needs to get over him/her/it/theirself. After a couple years of selling stuff on Ebenezer, as well as some dumbass buying mistakes of my own, I think I’m ready to present a list of common errors that many buyers make.

Wait, who says it’s an error? Why should the buyer care, if the buyer is in fact royalty and always correct? Because the seller doesn’t have to sell to you and doesn’t have to give you special treatment. If you want special treatment, you need to eliminate the aspects of your behavior that cause the vendor to wish you plagues of flamethrowing cockroaches. Such as:

• You can’t master the concept of the shopping cart and invoice request, so you just pay individually for five fixed-price items, but you still want shipping combined. And you think you should now get a discount. Why not? You’re the monarch! Dut-dudda-ding!
• Closely connected: you win multiple auction items at once, pay immediately for each in sequence, then want your shipping combined. You don’t have the intellect or savvy to wait and request a combined invoice. Nice going, Exalted One.
• You can’t understand (or don’t care) that Ebenezer charges your seller a fee, typically 10% of more, on both shipping and merchandise. You see on your parcel that stamps totaled $2.75 and you were charged $2.95 (of which the vendor actually got to keep $2.66)? Alert the BBB! Ripoff report! Lèse majesté!
• You can’t understand that the materials your shipper uses were not free. What, you mean bubble mailers costs 20-30 cents? Not Your Majesty’s problem!
• You bid up to the last minute, win, then dick around for two days before paying. Who cares about doing the businesslike thing and just paying up? You’ve got 48 damned hours, and you’re damn well going to use 47 of them! There’s important interest to be earned in two days on $3.95!
• You not only don’t pay on time; before paying, you let elapse 90 of the 96 hours Ebenezer allows to redeem an unpaid item claim. Aren’t you cute? Ha-ha, you got four more days’ worth of interest on your $3.95! Baller! Your vendor truly hates you. Your vendor should block you. In fact, your vendor should have blocked you the instant after filing the unpaid item claim.
• You don’t even pay after all six days have elapsed. You just decided screw it, you didn’t really want it. Unfortunately, Ebenezer won’t simply take the money out of your account and bill you for it, because Ebenezer does little to protect sellers. That’s why the sellers hate Ebenezer as much as they hate deadbeats.
• You don’t pay at all for five days, then send a message explaining that you are doing this so you can buy more stuff and make a big combined payment to get some benefit from Praypal. Had you asked for such consideration beforehand, your vendor would probably have said “no problem.” But you didn’t. Why should Your Majesty care about the villains, knaves, oaves, and other help? Your Majesty’s time is accountable to no one, least of all the servant class. Hmph.
• You make insulting offers. $100 or best offer? You throw out a $25 trial balloon. Why shouldn’t you? What’s the worst they can do, say “no”? That whole attitude–“It never hurts to ask, the worst they can say is ‘no'”–is part of what is wrong with business. It dignifies, even glorifies the insulting question, the lowball.
• You fail to read the listing, then blame your vendor for what you should have learned and did not. If it says there are no returns, and you ask for a return, best be polite and unentitled. If the condition is clearly/accurately described, and you complain about it and want a refund, you are why your vendor hates doing this.
• You think “free shipping” is a good thing, a benefit, obligatory for all vendors, and that those who don’t offer it are cheap, greedy bastards. You’re not only wrong, you are not doing too well in the numeracy department. Free shipping is a massive ripoff. If you buy just one item at a time, it’s a wash; the more business you do at once, the more screwed you are. Viewed another way, the better the customer, the worse a hosing is his/her/their/its reward. If that’s you, cut up your credit cards, because those scum beings saw you coming miles away.
• You confuse feedback on the item’s suitability with feedback on the vendor’s service. Who cares if it’s not the vendor’s fault that the shaving razors didn’t last long enough? It’s not like you’re harming a real person’s business.
• You don’t bother with the feedback racket, even when the vendor does everything right. Why should Your Holiness care? It’s a vendor: a peon, a peasant, a worm.

I’m not saying that the typical Ebenezer vendor is some sainted, courteous being. In fact, many do a truly suck job and deserve to be treated in all the above ways. I’ve even got a blacklist of vendors to make sure I never use again (since stupid Ebenezer won’t let buyers block a vendor). But I suspect I understand why some of them go bad, and I think some of it’s misvented frustration.

As an Ebenezer seller, you spend much avoidable time fighting with Ebenezer’s remarkably bad interface. I am convinced that Ebenezer has a Sucky Interface Creation Commission (SICC) that stays up late and works weekends just to find new ways to make the listing experience worse. They’re evil. They’re awful. They’re capricious. They’re downright stupid. If you’re a buyer and not a seller, count some blessings. It’s not right, sensible, or fair for a seller to take loathing of Ebenezer out on buyers–but I believe some do. Especially since there are enough truly deserving buyers to fan the flames.

And if you’re a buyer and not a seller, now you know some of the most irritating things some buyers do. Maybe you have done some of them. About half your vendors are so jaded they won’t give two damns how you treat them. They have experienced so much of the above listing irritation and customer abuse that they no longer care; they just churn it through. The other half, however, will go out of its way for you if it gets a little consideration.

• I have successfully returned non-returnable merchandise. (They are so unused to the words “please; I made a mistake” that the phrase takes them aback.)
• I have been given merchandise free of charge without asking for it. (In fact, it was offered and I tried to decline.)
• I have been given discounts I didn’t request. (And all it took was a little empathy.)
• I have had faulty merchandise replaced immediately. (Without being asked to send back the other.)

Those things don’t happen when you behave as an entitled schlong toward your vendor.

It’s partly your business world. It will, in part, take the shape you impose upon it. Think of yourself as sculpting.

If you sculpt it like a turd, well, that’s up to you.