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Technology

How Ebay eats your vendor’s lunch

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Okay, it doesn’t have much to do with editing. It does have to do with buying stuff someone has already edited, because it’s nice to learn about hidden costs. In the past, I have posted about the myth/dodge of free shipping. There is no such thing, of course; the only question is whether it’s buried in the item cost (and will therefore be charged to you for multiple items) or made visible (and therefore can be combined for multiple items).

Want to know what Ebay costs your seller? All right. Let’s imagine selling a book, since I both sell and love books. Fees have gone up recently, for no better reason than Ebay’s basic greed. The basic fees are:

  • $0.35 (listing fee; usually avoided as sellers get some fee-free listings each month, and pays to list the item for roughly thirty days)
  • $0.30 (basic selling fee)
  • 14.55% final value fee; that is, of the final selling price plus any sales tax plus shipping charges (rate varies by category; books are high).

So, here we go. Assume you sold a book with 5% sales tax (which Ebay collects and remits as required; as seller, you learn of it but don’t have to mess with it). You sold it for $6.97 and charged $3.87 for media mail shipping. Begin then with $10.84:

Add 5% for the sales tax; it’s now $11.38, of which $7.32 reflects the item and $4.06 the shipping (this distinction will come into play later). Of course, you will not receive that tax money; we just had to do this for an accurate dissection, so begin by deducting $0.54 for the sales tax. Deduct $0.65 for the listing fee and basic selling fee. Then multiply $11.38 by the final value fee, 14.55%, to get $1.66. Ebay charged me $2.31 in fees on $10.84 in sales revenue.

We have to pay to ship it, naturally. While the media mail rate in Notice 123 (postal rates) says that’ll be $2.89, most shippers use a reseller (often Ebay itself). I use one called PirateShip. It doesn’t drop my rate below the $2.89, so I assume they get a very thin discount and just charge me the Notice 123 rate. Maybe other shippers get it a little cheaper; don’t know. Most shippers try to cheat and use media mail for non-qualifying stuff; I don’t.

We also have to pack it. This is a normal paperback book and can fit in a standard plastic bubble mailer, but I had better put it in a zip-lock bag in case someone spills their coffee or beer on it after someone else stabs a hole in the packing. The bag and mailer cost me $0.24, and only because I buy the mailers in bulk. I also calculate that the label sticker costs $0.04, so supplies total $0.28.

I walk away with $5.36: $10.84, minus $0.65 for listing and basic selling fees, $1.66 for final value fees, $2.89 for shipping and $0.28 for shipping supplies. Not so bad? Not so great. Ebay ate over 20% of my gross. Ah, but looking back, did you observe the disparity between my freight charges and the actual postage? Caught me! Or not. I charged $3.87 for freight. Shipping cost me $2.89; supplies $0.28 on the cheap; Ebay stuck me for 14.55% of $4.06 (remember, they tacked on sales tax, calculated my fee, then remitted the tax–they so suck), so that’s $0.59 of the final value fees related to shipping. My math gives me a net profit on shipping of $0.11. And that’s only by attributing the listing fee and basic selling fee purely to the basic item, not the shipping. Start prorating those, and shipping just became a money-loser.

If the five minutes it takes me to pack the book and buy the postage aren’t worth eleven goddamn cents, then I must really, really suck at both. Hope I didn’t pay more than $5.25 for the book, or I sold at a loss.

You may think it’s incredibly petty to worry about all these “small costs.” No, no, no, no. That’s what everyone who collects those fees hopes you will do. All fees and all costs matter, down to the least one. I am not sure whether my packing tape adds up to a penny per parcel, but I probably should be considering that. The path to unprofitable business is paved with little bits of disregarded cost evidence. Believe me, the people to whom you pay those costs do not disregard their resulting revenues. Try it sometime. “Dear Ebay. Since your final value fees on my shipping are not even enough to buy a can of Coke from a machine, how about you just not charge me them?” Write and let me know what they say.

But what if the customer buys two books? Of course, if I were playing the free shipping shell game, I’d start making good money. Can’t combine shipping if it’s free, right? Such a deal! Ya. The more you buy with “free shipping,” the more you’re screwed. But since I don’t play that crappy little game, in most cases I can combine shipping provided it all qualifies to ship in the same way. Two books with nothing else meet that qualification.

Many buyers think they can both ride for the same price, but that’s not very common. With two small books, it’ll usually be the next pound up, so let’s say it’s just under two pounds. $3.45 according to Notice 123. It’ll also require a slightly larger mailer. So I might charge $4.57, which will put me about in the same place (just covering costs). Instead of paying $7.74, the buyer pays over $3 less. And some of them still think they’re getting hosed.

Not only that, some will even complain: “Dont know why ur not givin free shiping ur charges r a ripoff i no there not chargin u that much 2 ship my cozin works at the postal office”. Or think they are making me a fantastic offer: “Throw in free shipping and you’ve got a deal.”

Now you see why people sell the book for $0.99 (far as I’m aware, lowest price allowed) and jack the shipping way up. That’s the other form of shell game. And it’s true there are ways to trim little costs. Basic selling comes with 250 no-listing-fee listings per month; so as long as you do not get too big, you can avoid those. Ebay probably offers small savings on postage and supplies, and just as all costs are valid, so are all savings.

Anyway, you also now understand what’s really going on when you buy a book from someone. Whether it’s fair or not…you be the judge.

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Social comment, Technology

Why your Ebay vendor loathes Ebay

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After writing about why Ebay vendors come to hate some of their customers, I realized that the vendors have many more reasons to hate Ebenezer (as I like to call it) than they ever could hate their customers. The customers, even some of the more annoying ones, represent revenue. Ebay represents only costs and pains: a sort of death of a thousand little inconveniences and surcharges, never improving for the vendor, always growing worse, and always masked in intellect-insulting peppy language about how great the change is.

Simple hint: the harder Ebenezer tries to convince the vendor that the change is for the vendor’s benefit, the more certain that vendor can be that the change works to the vendor’s detriment. That Ebenezer believes it can get people happy about actions that run counter to their own interests says a great deal about their low opinion of their vendors’ brainpower. It’s much like all the times other corporations send you something announcing: “We are again your best friends! To serve you better, we are raising costs, cutting support staff, adding extra pains to your ass, and removing any actual goodness you were getting from us! Aren’t you delighted?”

Just thrilled.

Here are some reasons your Ebay vendor might hate Ebenezer a little bit more every day. Note that this list is a snapshot in time. Next month, Ebenezer will have invented some fresh hells that we cannot yet quantify. We know only that it will be bad, and that it will come. But for now:

  • Ebenezer lets people win auctions, then blow off payment with no meaningful penalty. Yes. Ever want to ruin a vendor’s day? Start new account, win highly contested auction, don’t pay. The buyer is never forced to complete a purchase. Ebenezer thus effectively allows the buyer to act in the worst of faith. Their “Will Sell” subcategory should be titled “Might Sell, If The Buyer Actually Pays.”
  • Not only that; since Ebenezer won’t let you give negative feedback to a deadbeat or jerk buyer, your only feedback remedy is not to provide any feedback at all. There is no way to say “never give this purchase any feedback and clear it from my list.” It will sit therefore the full time allowed before your feedback option expires. And at the top of your dashboard, it will nag you that you still owe feedback for that one (and however many others).
  • Ebenezer now and then hands out enormous numbers of fee-free listings, then stops handing them out for a month at a time. You see, Ebenezer wants vendors to buy store subscriptions, which will guarantee them a certain number of fee-free listings. If a listing doesn’t sell, it goes into Unsold listings, where it will vanish in two months if not relisted sooner. Of course, while it’s not listed, it cannot sell. It’s playing financial chicken with you.
  • A recent Ebenezer fresh hell (“to help you sell more”) was changing all fixed price listings to “Good Till Canceled.” They now automatically renew each month (incurring a fresh listing fee), if not canceled first. If you have freebies, this relisting will chew those up; if you don’t have them and don’t want to incur the fees, you will have to end them all yourself before they would expire. No big deal if you have a new pile of freebies; very big deal if you have used up your monthly 50 and have 200 expiring. Oh, and the first time you attempt to end a batch of listings, half the time it makes you re-log in. You just checked one hundred boxes and hit End? Tough. Go check them all again and push the button again now that you’ve re-logged in. Thank you, Ebenezer, for “helping me to sell more” in this way. Don’t help me any more, okay?
  • Ebenezer provides no way to mass relist items at a specified time. To do them in mass, the only way is to send them live immediately. Problem with that? Yes, because sometimes you would like to stagger them in groups, schedule them for specific times. And you can. One. By. Fucking. One. Hope you don’t have two hundred to do! Oh, wait…I always do.
  • Ebenezer spazzes on your shipping location restrictions when you relist a GTC listing as auction, or an auction listing as GTC. In case you did not know, if the shipper doesn’t want to mess with shipping to certain types of addresses or countries, that is coded into a given listing (you could choose to ship this item abroad, for example, but not those). Except that once you change between listing types, you can no longer see this list of shipping exclusions. Is it still there? You will have to click on the link to go in and see. It usually is, but it’s a needless and annoying step.
  • Ebenezer has a very stupid volume discount function that was evidently so bad they commented it out for about a year while they tried to fix it. Now it might work as designed, but as designed, it’s dumb. The first discount percentage must apply to two of the same item. The second must apply to three. The fourth must apply to four or more. So there is no way to dispense with two and three, and offer a discount only for four or more. This is minimally useful and no one thought it through, which seem to be the primary qualifying traits for any new Ebenezer feature.
  • Ebenezer lets sellers pay an extra selling fee to promote listings. This is generally a good method for sellers, because there’s a fair chance people will discover your other stuff after viewing the promoted listing. However, since one is invited to name one’s ad percentage, in order to get premium placement one must offer a fee percentage that is sufficiently high to exceed the highest known past fees–typically 6-9%. If you want to screw Ebenezer, when you see a promoted listing and want to buy it, make a note of it and then log out, log in, and choose the search result for that item that does not indicate a promoted listing. You might have to dig through the vendor’s listings to achieve this. While it’s true the vendor will never know you did this for him/her, should a problem come up, the fact that you did so will get you all the favorable consideration you can find from him/her–plus, you have the fun of knowing you screwed Ebenezer.
  • Ebenezer’s descriptive field. Oh, gods, how I hate their descriptive field. What it really is: simple HTML that is normally hidden. There are codes present that you can not see unless you choose to show the HTML. So if you backspace to just the wrong spot, a bunch of formatting will disappear without being apparent. Copy and paste text from certain sources? No text at all will show, nor can be made to show. It looks WYSIWYG, but it isn’t. It sounds infuriating? Oh, it is. How it is. Did you accidentally, innocently use a # (octothorpe) in your listing, for example to begin a serial number or other identifier? The entire remainder of the text is hidden–and you have no idea why unless you happen to have some understanding of HTML, or you eventually come to notice that the octothorpe (no, that’s not a “hash tag”) is the problem child.
  • Ebenezer’s stores. A store subscription amounts to paying more money for a worse outcome in return for a certain number of guaranteed listings. (Their analysis and productivity tools don’t seem to do anyone any good.) How could it be worse? I’ll tell you. The standard freebie issue is fifty per month, either auction-style with Buy It Now or fixed-price Good Till Canceled. Buy the basic store for, what is it, $9/month? It says you get 100 free listings–and you do. Not 150; 100, so it’s just fifty extras. You find that out after you pony up for the first month. Oh, and your whole 100 now do not include Buy It Now on auction items, so those basic fifty are now worse than before! There’s Ebay, always looking out for you!
  • Ebenezer constantly tacks on new little fuckeries. In the time I have been doing this, I have seen them dink away at profit margins with little stuff like higher fees for books, can’t use freebies for this or that category, the previously mentioned store ripoff, and more. It’s always something.
  • Ebenezer purports to offer the vendor help with item listings by auto-filling from the Ebay catalogue. I wouldn’t let it. “Auto-fill” may create a listing full of bullshit. The smart vendor just refuses the help and describes it without intervention from Ebenezer, because you can take this to the bank: if the description contains one fiction, and the buyer points it out, the explanation of “It’s not my fault; Ebay’s catalogue was wrong” will cut zero ice. It’s the vendor’s obligation to describe the item accurately, and the less help from Ebenezer, the better.
  • Every little extra thing costs a little hit, the death of a thousand fees. Want to add a reserve price? Fee. Claim the item fits into more than one of Ebenezer’s remarkably inadequate categories? Fee. Larger photo in gallery? Fee. Every time you turn around, it seems, there’s a little fee. Don’t think they add up? Ebenezer does.
  • As a practical matter, it is impossible to sell on Ebenezer without a Paypal account. Paypal is horrible. It’s Ebenezer’s pet payment service, and if you don’t use it, I am reliably informed that you become a preferred fraud/scam target. It’s like a shotgun wedding to a horrible spouse.
  • Ebenezer has a terrible help system. Try to use the one that’s easy to find, on the right side of the screen? That doesn’t go to anything but a list of FAQs. You have to scroll all the way down, and when you do start digging, half the time the help you find answers only questions you did not have. Last month, I actually used Ebenezer’s help to find a semi-answer as to how to do something. Once the disbelief wore off, I felt like celebrating.
  • One of the many worthwhile concepts Ebenezer has botched is Customer Questions. If the customer chooses to Ask the Seller about an item, the seller gets a message. What’s wrong with that? Sometimes you cannot clear the stupid things. There is some metric that measures your response and clears the flag, but if that is missed or somehow fails to function, and the Mark as Answered doesn’t work, the question still shows in need of a response, glowing in all its irrelevancy.
  • Ebenezer wants you to buy postage from them. On the plus side, it’s cheaper than at USPS. Problem: you’d better know your postal regulations very well. I suppose it’s great if everything you sell complies with a certain form factor or two, but for variable stuff…well, there’s a good chance your shipments will get delivered postage due. In any case, my complaint isn’t that Ebenezer offers postage. My complaint is that their process does its very best to nag you into buying theirs. By itself, it would mean little. Taken as part of the whole, it’s just one of the ten thousand cuts. If I wanted to buy the postage from them, I would do it without being pushed.
  • Another Ebenezer pushiness, far more toxic, is always in the directions of new interfaces that make everything much harder. It’s much as if there’s some buyer-hating sadist constantly tinkering with the system. Now, I’m not automatically resistant to change. Some changes are all right. But the mantra of “change is good; embrace the change” is for morons. The growth of a malignant tumor is change: is it good? Change is morally and qualitatively neutral on its face. Whether it is good depends whether it helps more or hurts more. Ebenezer’s changes tend to be badly thought out by a PHB somewhere, and more often hurt than help.
  • When someone stiffs you on Ebenezer (and they will, and Ebenezer will do nothing useful about it), the amount due shows up for two full months even when you’ve reported it as uncollectible and gotten your fees back. Yes. Even when they couldn’t pay you if they wanted to, it shows you are owed the money.
  • Now and then, when you are going through and relisting a hundred or so items one by one (because Ebenezer won’t let you select a time to relist them all at once), you find that one of your listings is now missing its photos. Since Ebenezer requires photos, that one won’t go. Hope you kept copies!
  • Ebenezer interprets trade embargos literally and eternally. Got a Persian artifact from the Sassanid era (before Ayatollahs, Islam, or even the modern boundaries of Iran)? Can’t list that; it’s Iranian! They will take it down and send you a warning. Ever think of selling an aboriginal artifact from Cuba? Gods, don’t use that word, or down it will come–never mind that it has zero connection to trafficking with the modern Cuban state. It could have been in this country for generations before Castro; they don’t care. That’s what happens when you deal with simpleminded idiots.

If there were a less odious alternative, I’d definitely consider it.

 

Human relations, Social comment, Technology

Why your Ebay vendor loathes you

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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.

Social comment, Technology

Campaigny McCampaignface

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It is not well known that I have a little sideline selling stuff, on Ebay as well as on retail consignment. In the consignments, which I market in retail establishments, the worst thing that ever happens is that the retail venue hires a cretin who does not grasp that I need to get my tags back. Those enable me to see what sold, determine whether I am making reasonable profit, and (if need be) tell the IRS what I did sell. I can live with the occasional cretinous moment.

That frustration is nothing compared to Ebay, which I have taken to calling “Ebenezer.” Don’t most of us normally assume that major changes to policies and technology that are used by millions of people happen only after various committees and managers review them, think through the potential outcomes, and schedule implementation? Don’t we assume that, on some level, these people are smarter than most of us?

I don’t. I think it’s possible that they really aren’t too bright. My experience-based belief is that the technical changes at Ebenezer are directed by a pointy-haired boss who parlayed a gentleman’s C- at a low-rated business school into a six-figure income managing Ebenezer’s “vendor experience.” I don’t think this PHB answers to anyone, ever. I think he just gets whims in his head, sends his code monkeys* a memo, expects them to work 100-hour weeks implementing his directives, then starts to cook up another memo.

In the year I’ve been doing us, the list of Ebenezer’s f-bomberies is long and monthly. Every month, every single month, it’s some fresh hell. I can live with the fact that it’s always pitched as though it’s to our advantage, when in fact it’s the opposite, because I expect that of all corporations. The key phrase is “to serve you better, we are…” That’s b-speak for “because we can screw you, we are…” What are most irritating are the petty stupidities, and those are what convince me there is no oversight here, no management. I think it’s just some PHB with a Word memo template and a deficient intellect.

Here’s an example. When you sell stuff on Ebenezer for a fixed price, there are a couple of ways you can push it. You can set up to entertain offers, and you can set auto-accept or auto-reject amounts (or choose to listen to any offer at all, which I think is smarter, because you can then counter with something rational). You can also use promoted listings. In these, you agree to pay Ebenezer an extra fee if the item sells because they shoved it in someone’s face. This, in my experience, gets rid of more stuff than does considering offers.

Now, sometime in the past, the PHB determined that it would be nice if sellers could name and track promotional campaigns. That seems reasonable, doesn’t it? What’s to complain about? It even defaulted to creating a campaign named (in my case) something like “US Campaign [date]”. Sounded so official, so markety, so businessy. It made me want to ramp up my solutioning of problems, my verbing of nouns, and my total quality management to get to the client delight level. Okay, whatever. I accepted the default name, and thereafter that was the default campaign for promoted listings. About three months later on, it decided to start a new one for me, similar rubric. Okay, fine, don’t see how this is going to hurt me.

This meant that when I was relisting, say, a hundred items, I didn’t have to make a choice on that dropdown box unless I had some reason to assign a given promotion to a given campaign. Lacking such reason, I plowed through, accepting the default. Until one day the default changed without notice.

No longer was the default campaign an existing campaign. Now the default was to begin a new campaign. If I didn’t make a dropdown choice, every single item I chose to have promoted would be assigned its own new, special, unique campaign. I would eventually run up against some limit of total campaign listings.

Now, because a PHB (in my supposition, which I admit is based mostly on outcomes and plausible explanation based on having worked for a number of PHBs) told a code monkey to change something–or, perhaps, simply failed to review a code monkey’s work–all of a sudden there was an extra step necessary. Just one more step, where there wasn’t one before. I only created three new campaigns by mistake before I realized what was happening.

I also learned that I couldn’t just reassign existing listings to a given campaign, the better to clean up the mess. The choices were greyed out. I could delete a campaign, but that would remove the promotion from any listings currently live that were using that campaign. A feature that was nothing to me, transformed into an unannounced pain in the rectum: that’s Ebenezer and its vendor experience PHB.

So I got annoyed. When I get annoyed with a corporation, which is not infrequent, I find a creative way to mock it. Even if I am the only one who gets a laugh, that’s the candle I light rather than cursing the darkness. More accurately, I light it while cussing the darkness pretty hard; fair enough. But I do light it.

I needed a campaign name that would sort to the top of the list, that I would recognize, and that would reflect my opinion of the PHB and his (in my experience, men are more likely to be PHBs) vendor experience management.

Campaigny McCampaignface was born.

Now, at least, I get a laugh every time I relist an item and choose to have Ebenezer ram it in people’s faces promote it.

 

*I get the term “code monkey” from one of my cousins, who posted a video long ago to explain what his work was like. It is not meant to disparage those who write code, but to highlight how management uses those coders’ skill sets.

Robin Hood, Social comment

Amazon losing market share

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They are. Oh, not a statistically significant market share. But they are losing a good percentage of the share that is our household, and it would surprise me if we were the only ones.

Why?

It isn’t for moral reasons. We aren’t engaging in a partial boycott. Whether we should is a worthwhile question, but it’s not like Wal-Mart, where I haven’t knowingly shopped since I borrowed bought a breast pump I knew I would return. It’s not like that chicken place with the stupid name, where I wouldn’t eat there simply because the name is too stupid, even if they hadn’t come out as homophobes.

That’s not to say that this outcome doesn’t please me. It does. Amazon needs competitors. Amazon offers numerous shopping irritants:

  • Sellers like Wal-Mart hiding behind fake names. Nothing like getting a good deal and finding out you shopped at Wal-Mart.
  • Rating system is garbage, and vendors can easily get nasty reviews removed. Vendors have nothing to lose from nasty reviews.
  • Try calling Amazon for customer service. Hell, try emailing them for it.
  • Opaque tracking system clumsy to use. Seeming delays of a week to ship while, evidently, they move stuff around their network.
  • The known truths about what a hell it is to work there.
  • Delivery vans unmarked and pretty much just throw your stuff at the porch. And that’s if your Amazon delivery guy doesn’t turn out to be your porch pirate, as happened in one case near where I live.
  • Good luck getting an Amazon shipper to combine shipping for multiple items.
  • Amazon still thinks it’s a reasonable deal to ask you to pay, what is it, $90 or so per year just so that you can get free two-day shipping on all the stuff you buy from them.
  • Worse still, Amazon nags you without cease to sign up for this.
  • Still cannot block a bad shipper. There’s one book outfit there, a horrible vendor, and they have perhaps a dozen branch operations. It’s very hard to avoid them.

Of late, I’m buying routine items increasingly on Ebay, using Amazon to help identify/select them (such as small bits of hardware; just like many people use a brick-and-mortar, then go buy the thing online). Because:

The rating system may be hugely inflated, but no seller wants a nasty feedback. In my experience, most will fall all over themselves to avoid it, provided they have evidence of dealing with a reasonable person. And if you are a complete jerk toward a seller, s/he has a different remedy toward you: s/he can prevent you from seeing their merchandise in the future. So unless you want potential vendors to go away, it is in your best interest to be reasonable.

I have several times called Ebay for customer service. Using a telephone (ask your grandparents what that was). And received it. Other good parts:

  • Tracking: either it has a tracking number, or not. If it does, you can see where it’s going. If not then not. Wow! It’s almost as if that’s the way the concept is intended to work!
  • Doesn’t use Amazon delivery, thus doesn’t lead to unmarked vans out of which people leap desperate enough to work at one of America’s workplace gulags, and who quite often look like they would just as soon turn porch pirate. And near where I live, have done so.
  • Shippers will quite often combine shipping for multiple items within reason.
  • Not everything is up for auction. Much of what’s on Ebay is fixed price. In some cases, you can make a lower offer and it will be accepted.

Today was a good example. I needed some very large manila envelopes at a reasonable price. I didn’t know what the standard size was, but Amazon was a great place to look it up. When I was serious about buying, I went to Ebay and found the same thing, about the same price. It wasn’t even a contest. I would have paid a little more to buy it anywhere but Amazon.

I bought from the platform that used real shippers, cared about my feedback, and didn’t feed a massive inventory and shipping machinery that grinds human beings to submission.

Another example, on a later day of blog post composition. My wife needed some supplies she always uses. I went to Amazon to look up what their people wanted for these supplies. When it came time to make an actual purchase, I bought on Ebay. The deal was much better.

I got a volume discount. I won’t have to deal with sketchy-looking Amazon delivery vans. Everything was better.

Do you not now see what was the point of Amazon Prime? It’s a brilliant strategy provided one is dealing with an ovine people who love the meth that is ‘free shipping.’ Get people to pay an annual fee, and they will feel compelled to shop at Amazon to take advantage of the shipping. It’s like a ‘loyalty’ card at a coffee place, except that coffee places don’t expect you to pay an annual fee and don’t propose to automatically renew you by charging your credit card unless you cancel. Amazon Prime is the worst deal going and it has the effect of roping you into acting to your disadvantage. They would not offer it, and pressure everyone constantly to sign up for it, if it were not to their profit. It is to your disadvantage.

Yes. You are advantaged by buying only what you need, and by shopping for the best value. Amazon is advantaged by you buying there even if you do not need, and by you not comparison shopping.

I never take any of those ‘loyalty’ cards because it’s obvious that their intent is to get me to shop at a given venue more consistently–and in the case of mag-strip cards, to compile a nice dossier on my shopping. The employees don’t understand why I won’t just do it to get 10% off. I explain, as patiently as is in my power, that the card’s goal is to induce me to shop there; that my goal is to shop where is most advantageous for me. Thus they have their goals and I have mine, and they are mostly opposed. I can tell by the look in their eyes that, in spite of how hard they work for what little they are paid, they never thought of that. Their eyes say what their mouths won’t: whatever, man, you should just take the discount.

I wish they would blurt that out. I might rejoin: “Has it ever occurred to you that one reason for poverty is poor attention to money management?”

The vendors have their goals and problems. The consumer does not need to own either. I don’t see the company stepping up to support my goals and they aren’t owed support for their own.

At heart, they flat do not give a damn what I think. As Amazon does not.

Somehow, I’m not supposed to adopt the same attitude.

We saw it with IBM. We saw it with M$. When a company reaches complete market dominance, it tends to stop caring what the public thinks of it.

It never quite seems to process the fact that this sword cuts both ways.

Robin Hood, Social comment

Free shipping: why it sucks for you

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I’m not kidding.

In the modern-day online economy, free shipping has almost become a baseline expectation. I am told that if I’m selling online, and I don’t offer free shipping, I might as well write off every customer under forty. That is tantamount to telling me that every customer under forty is innumerate.

I don’t believe that. But I do believe that some customers, at all ages, refuse to do the simplest arithmetic.

To be fair, free shipping is an acceptable deal–for one item, from one vendor at a time. To be clear: that makes it a wash, not an advantage.

(This, by the way, is the first in a new category of posts at The ‘Lancer: “Robin Hood.” I intend to use this category for public service articles meant to expose ripoffs and scams, and to suggest creative ways to make life worse for ripoff and scam artists. Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood was my absolute favorite book growing up, and over half a century later is still a great inspiration to me.)

The ripoff comes when you buy more than one item from the same vendor. The more you buy, the more you inflate the vendor’s profit. The better a customer you are, the more you suffer. The vendor counts upon you to be an idiot. He hopes you will think: if there’s free shipping, hell, why not stock up?

Let’s take a fairly common vintage baseball card as an example. Suppose it costs $1.50 with free shipping with Vendor Joe. With another, Vendor Jill, it costs $0.75 with $0.75 also for shipping. In the second case, if you buy multiple items, Jill may readily agree to combine your shipping costs to a degree. (Since this is Jill’s moment of victory, if Jill did not, Jill would demonstrate the intellect of a prehistoric fern.) Joe’s shipping charges can’t go below zero, so Jill is sure to be the better deal. No matter what, when you get this so-called free shipping, you are absolutely being charged for the freight; the cost is just relocated to the item’s price.

That card costs either vendor fifty cents to mail, but appearances drive this whole monte game. In essence, Jill charges you the fifty cents plus a modest handling fee. Jill appears petty and pecuniary and nickel-and-diming. For gods’ sake, her shipping costs as much as her merch! What does she think I am, independently wealthy? Joe looks as if he waves a magnanimous hand and throws in the cost of delivery, just to do you a favor, fagedaboudit, good ol’ Joe.

Same amount. Same shipping. Same economics–except that you like Joe better. He’s the free shipping person! And when you buy two cards, your brain may think that the more you buy, the more you save, but you can see from this description that it is the other way around: the more you buy, the more you overspend. Suppose you buy ten cards in that price range. Obviously, they cannot all be shipped for one $0.75 shipping charge, but they surely can be shipped for far less than $7.50. Since Jill has not been lobotomized, she knows it costs less than $7.50. Jill also gives you credit for not having been lobotomized, so she presumes you know this as well. So she charges you perhaps $4.00, which still covers her overall shipping plus a little extra: total, $11.50.

Joe can’t lower shipping costs below free, so unless he offers a volume discount, his ten cards cost you $15.00. And whatever his volume discount, it is unlikely to beat Jill’s simple and fair charge.

Fagedaboudit.

Why doesn’t everyone go to Jill for their bulk buys? Joe counts upon your negative emotional reaction to Jill’s method, which appears to be dinging you for every little thing à la carte. (You mean I have to pay for extra sauces?) Also, you have to ascertain in advance what her policy will be, and that requires icky work-like stuff like reading and asking her questions. There is also addition and subtraction in play, which is math, thus even ickier and difficult and wasn’t on the test. It’s all so hard, and you just want to be done! The five-second instant gratification cycle has passed! Joe is hosing you, but you like him better, because he doesn’t quibble over petty stuff like shipping charges. Bing, bang, done, oh, I have a text coming in.

It’s a shell game. Ever seen those? Pick which coconut half (or overturned bowl, whatever) the ball is under. You always win the first time, just like a monte game. Or a nearby shill steps up and ‘wins’ to make it look good. When there’s more on the line, there is no way you win because the target has been moved in a way your eye will not track.

For one item, free shipping is a wash. Take it for gospel that the vendor pays for and is being paid for the shipping, whatever shell the money is under. Beyond one item, with the same vendor, the equation is simple:

The more you shop, the more you’re milked.

Joe really, really, really hopes you will never figure this out.

Ah, but what if Jill screws you by only discounting shipping a little bit?

First, this would defeat our non-lobotomized premise about Jill, because Jill would be stupid not to know she’s dealing with someone who has figured out the shell game and has chosen her on the logical presumption of better value. Jill is honest enough not to use the free shipping ripoff. Second, and consequently, Jill knows that she has a volume customer who may buy significant amounts from her in the future–but not if she gouges on the shipping. Once that customer trusts her to keep freight charges within reason, she will be a preferred vendor.

Joe? Fagedaboudim. Jill rocks. Joe’s running game on his customers.

Free shipping: just another shell game to make people think they got a bargain when in fact it’s a wash for one item, and a ripoff for more than one.