eBay frustration
Jun. 22nd, 2003 01:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elbalesI've sold a few items on eBay by now. It's a nice way to get rid of stuff I don't want any more. It's been fairly smooth sailing until this one girl from Canada bid on a CD. She's the first buyer I've had who couldn't deal with my methods of selling. So today I was staring at her feedback page, trying to understand what's going on in her head, and I randomly decided to take a look at her LJ page. On which, I discovered, she has been complaining about me, saying I'm totally disorganized and she's thinking about giving me negative feedback. This has me steaming. I try really hard to make my eBay customers happy, and she's the first person who's ever had a single complaint about me.
So the details go like this...
The auction closed, and I sent her my usual form letter saying, "Hi, you won my auction, please let me know your address and how you want to ship your item." This is where the trouble started.
Keep in mind that eBay is a very small part of what I spend my time doing. I don't have enough stuff to sell to make it worth spending lots of time on assembling shipping plans. I'm not sure if this girl understands I am not a store. She complained because I had no shipping or insurance rates all set for her to choose from. Well, no, I don't. I get shipping quotes as I go because I don't know until the end of the auction exactly where I'll be shipping to (duh!). And I don't own a postal scale because I am not running a business: I am holding a long-ass, drawn-out garage sale that includes service with a smile, and everybody else I've dealt with so far has loved it.
In her LJ post, she claims I asked her to do the research on shipping rates.
My response: Um, no; I asked her what she *wanted*. You know: "What do you want? Tell me and I'll see if I can get it for you." This is not a complex question. She wouldn't answer it; she just told me it was my job to get the information for her.
Then she claims she's been doing business with people in the US for years "and no shipping has ever been over 6 bucks, TOPS."
My response: Well, sure. If they were sending Airmail Letter Post, which you can't insure (and she said she wanted insurance); or Global Priority Mail, which has two flavors available for $6 or under--and which you can't insure; or even Economy Letter Post, which takes 4-6 weeks to Airmail's 4-6 days AND costs more. (God I love the US Postal Service. Run by insane people.) So I don't know what she was buying, but either she had no insurance on it, or the shipping cost more than $6, or there's some secret postage club that I wasn't invited to join. UPS? No idea. If she wanted to use UPS, I'd have cheerfully come up with rates. The options I can use to send her CD either cost more than her quoted $6 or don't come with insurance. End of story. I really wish I could fix it for her, but I don't run the USPS.
At the point in the e-mail exchanges where she wouldn't answer my question, I kind of bit her head off. I feel a little bad about that. I just couldn't understand where her head was. See, in general, a given buyer will respond to my initial query by sending his or her address and telling me what sort of shipping options to use. The few international customers I've had have asked up-front questions ("What's the cheapest" is a good one for people who don't know the US postal service) and given straightforward answers to my questions. This girl wasn't giving me straightforward answers. That makes it harder to do the job she was telling me all about as though I didn't know anything about it.
Now, I'll come right out and admit that I did ask one question that I should have known the answer to (and in fact, I realized soon after, "DUH, I didn't need to ask her that!" Oops). That one I'll give her. I'm not an asshole; I can admit I've screwed up and made a silly mistake. (In fact, I apologized to her for that cranky e-mail.) But geez. Give me a starting point, for heaven's sake. I can't come up with shipping costs without input from the buyer!
So finally I just took a deep breath and said, "Okay, her communication style is different from mine. Fine. Let's move on." Meanwhile, she's on her LJ page talking to God and everybody about how lame I am. Thanks. I guess I can be grateful she didn't use my name.
The next problem came up over PayPal credit card practices. I had an e-mail exchange several weeks ago with a very nice guy from the Netherlands who really really really wanted to bid on one of my items, but because I wasn't taking PayPal credit card payments, he couldn't find a way to pay me. I kept thinking of him every time I relisted the item, and finally I threw up my hands and decided, Hey, I guess the fees aren't that high; I'll try taking credit card payments and see how it goes. I've been accepting credit for maybe a week at the date of this writing; when I queried Canada girl, I'd been taking credit cards for like two days. I'm totally new at this. People make mistakes when they try new things. That's how it goes.
Well, I thought I'd managed to dig up every bit of fine print that eBay had to offer about accepting credit, but oh joy, I missed one. Which resulted in my having to re-invoice Canada girl to correct a mistake I'd made out of ignorance. Now mind you, she hadn't paid yet, so while I know it looked bad, it had little impact on her life, so I'm going to say that one was a break-even on the Am I An Idiot scale. So now I'm gritting my teeth and wishing I'd never decided to take credit cards, because it's costing me for every damn transaction, raising my blood pressure, *and* leading me to mistakes that make me look bad (for good reason; it was a dumb mistake. But I'm human so I'll just forgive myself. How big of me!).
It keeps getting better. I do not know what the postal clerk who helped me was smoking, but she gave me totally incorrect information about one shipping option. (All the info I mentioned above, I learned dealing with Ms. Canada's transaction.) So I invoiced based on that information--which was flat-out, just plain wrong. The customer paid me. It was all good; I was going to be able to send the item and get the whole stupid transaction over with. Or so I thought. When I went back to my own local branch (*not* the one where I got the incorrect info), and they told me the option I'd been told I could use wasn't actually available, I stood there at the counter and just wanted to scream or cry or something. I am not a postal clerk. I do not do this stuff all day. I go ask questions of postal clerks because they are supposed to know what they're doing. I can't be expected to pass on good data to people if someone hands me bad data. And dammit, I *want* to do well for my customers. I *want* to make this a nice experience for them. It was so frustrating to have this screwed-up transaction made even more screwed up because someone in the USPS gave me bad info.
At this point I had to issue this poor girl in Canada a refund (with abject apologies) and then get correct rates out of a postal clerk who has shown by example (he's helped me with most of my eBay items) that he *does* know what he's doing. So I very carefully wrote down my customer's various options, and I went home and very carefully composed a message saying: "Here are three postage rate options for you. Which one would you like? Once you tell me which one you want, I can re-invoice you." I did not at any point in this letter use the word "total." I used the word "rates."
And the next day... I found she had paid me. For just the postage.
What the hell. How much more clear can I be than "Tell me what you want and I can re-invoice you"?
I've had to issue her another refund. This one, I'm sorry, is not on me. If someone sends you business e-mail, it's really a good idea to read it all the way through with brain fully engaged.
Gaaah. I have this odd break in my feelings about this person: she's been getting on my nerves pretty badly (my guess: basic personality conflict), but at the same time I feel bad that her transaction has been such a mess. At base I know that she's just another human being living her life and trying to do the best she can, the same way I am. I just hope she cuts me the same slack when Feedback time rolls around. *sigh*
Anyway, I can't really blame her for thinking I'm totally disorganized. She doesn't know me from Adam *or* Eve. Her only contact with me has been over this transaction. Which has been a blinking disaster from start to finish, and I'm just really pissed and frustrated to think that it'll be my first negative or neutral. Maybe I'll e-mail her this link so she can see how it looks from my side of the computer screen: a slightly flaky customer who won't answer basic questions, a postal clerk who doesn't know what she's doing, and an overstressed seller who is trying a new payment method and finding it harder than it looked from the outside and therefore making mistakes.
So the details go like this...
The auction closed, and I sent her my usual form letter saying, "Hi, you won my auction, please let me know your address and how you want to ship your item." This is where the trouble started.
Keep in mind that eBay is a very small part of what I spend my time doing. I don't have enough stuff to sell to make it worth spending lots of time on assembling shipping plans. I'm not sure if this girl understands I am not a store. She complained because I had no shipping or insurance rates all set for her to choose from. Well, no, I don't. I get shipping quotes as I go because I don't know until the end of the auction exactly where I'll be shipping to (duh!). And I don't own a postal scale because I am not running a business: I am holding a long-ass, drawn-out garage sale that includes service with a smile, and everybody else I've dealt with so far has loved it.
In her LJ post, she claims I asked her to do the research on shipping rates.
My response: Um, no; I asked her what she *wanted*. You know: "What do you want? Tell me and I'll see if I can get it for you." This is not a complex question. She wouldn't answer it; she just told me it was my job to get the information for her.
Then she claims she's been doing business with people in the US for years "and no shipping has ever been over 6 bucks, TOPS."
My response: Well, sure. If they were sending Airmail Letter Post, which you can't insure (and she said she wanted insurance); or Global Priority Mail, which has two flavors available for $6 or under--and which you can't insure; or even Economy Letter Post, which takes 4-6 weeks to Airmail's 4-6 days AND costs more. (God I love the US Postal Service. Run by insane people.) So I don't know what she was buying, but either she had no insurance on it, or the shipping cost more than $6, or there's some secret postage club that I wasn't invited to join. UPS? No idea. If she wanted to use UPS, I'd have cheerfully come up with rates. The options I can use to send her CD either cost more than her quoted $6 or don't come with insurance. End of story. I really wish I could fix it for her, but I don't run the USPS.
At the point in the e-mail exchanges where she wouldn't answer my question, I kind of bit her head off. I feel a little bad about that. I just couldn't understand where her head was. See, in general, a given buyer will respond to my initial query by sending his or her address and telling me what sort of shipping options to use. The few international customers I've had have asked up-front questions ("What's the cheapest" is a good one for people who don't know the US postal service) and given straightforward answers to my questions. This girl wasn't giving me straightforward answers. That makes it harder to do the job she was telling me all about as though I didn't know anything about it.
Now, I'll come right out and admit that I did ask one question that I should have known the answer to (and in fact, I realized soon after, "DUH, I didn't need to ask her that!" Oops). That one I'll give her. I'm not an asshole; I can admit I've screwed up and made a silly mistake. (In fact, I apologized to her for that cranky e-mail.) But geez. Give me a starting point, for heaven's sake. I can't come up with shipping costs without input from the buyer!
So finally I just took a deep breath and said, "Okay, her communication style is different from mine. Fine. Let's move on." Meanwhile, she's on her LJ page talking to God and everybody about how lame I am. Thanks. I guess I can be grateful she didn't use my name.
The next problem came up over PayPal credit card practices. I had an e-mail exchange several weeks ago with a very nice guy from the Netherlands who really really really wanted to bid on one of my items, but because I wasn't taking PayPal credit card payments, he couldn't find a way to pay me. I kept thinking of him every time I relisted the item, and finally I threw up my hands and decided, Hey, I guess the fees aren't that high; I'll try taking credit card payments and see how it goes. I've been accepting credit for maybe a week at the date of this writing; when I queried Canada girl, I'd been taking credit cards for like two days. I'm totally new at this. People make mistakes when they try new things. That's how it goes.
Well, I thought I'd managed to dig up every bit of fine print that eBay had to offer about accepting credit, but oh joy, I missed one. Which resulted in my having to re-invoice Canada girl to correct a mistake I'd made out of ignorance. Now mind you, she hadn't paid yet, so while I know it looked bad, it had little impact on her life, so I'm going to say that one was a break-even on the Am I An Idiot scale. So now I'm gritting my teeth and wishing I'd never decided to take credit cards, because it's costing me for every damn transaction, raising my blood pressure, *and* leading me to mistakes that make me look bad (for good reason; it was a dumb mistake. But I'm human so I'll just forgive myself. How big of me!).
It keeps getting better. I do not know what the postal clerk who helped me was smoking, but she gave me totally incorrect information about one shipping option. (All the info I mentioned above, I learned dealing with Ms. Canada's transaction.) So I invoiced based on that information--which was flat-out, just plain wrong. The customer paid me. It was all good; I was going to be able to send the item and get the whole stupid transaction over with. Or so I thought. When I went back to my own local branch (*not* the one where I got the incorrect info), and they told me the option I'd been told I could use wasn't actually available, I stood there at the counter and just wanted to scream or cry or something. I am not a postal clerk. I do not do this stuff all day. I go ask questions of postal clerks because they are supposed to know what they're doing. I can't be expected to pass on good data to people if someone hands me bad data. And dammit, I *want* to do well for my customers. I *want* to make this a nice experience for them. It was so frustrating to have this screwed-up transaction made even more screwed up because someone in the USPS gave me bad info.
At this point I had to issue this poor girl in Canada a refund (with abject apologies) and then get correct rates out of a postal clerk who has shown by example (he's helped me with most of my eBay items) that he *does* know what he's doing. So I very carefully wrote down my customer's various options, and I went home and very carefully composed a message saying: "Here are three postage rate options for you. Which one would you like? Once you tell me which one you want, I can re-invoice you." I did not at any point in this letter use the word "total." I used the word "rates."
And the next day... I found she had paid me. For just the postage.
What the hell. How much more clear can I be than "Tell me what you want and I can re-invoice you"?
I've had to issue her another refund. This one, I'm sorry, is not on me. If someone sends you business e-mail, it's really a good idea to read it all the way through with brain fully engaged.
Gaaah. I have this odd break in my feelings about this person: she's been getting on my nerves pretty badly (my guess: basic personality conflict), but at the same time I feel bad that her transaction has been such a mess. At base I know that she's just another human being living her life and trying to do the best she can, the same way I am. I just hope she cuts me the same slack when Feedback time rolls around. *sigh*
Anyway, I can't really blame her for thinking I'm totally disorganized. She doesn't know me from Adam *or* Eve. Her only contact with me has been over this transaction. Which has been a blinking disaster from start to finish, and I'm just really pissed and frustrated to think that it'll be my first negative or neutral. Maybe I'll e-mail her this link so she can see how it looks from my side of the computer screen: a slightly flaky customer who won't answer basic questions, a postal clerk who doesn't know what she's doing, and an overstressed seller who is trying a new payment method and finding it harder than it looked from the outside and therefore making mistakes.
Oh, and for an encore...
Date: 2003-06-22 09:29 pm (UTC)