How to Dispute Unfair Ratings on eBay.

So you’ve done everything you can to keep your buyers happy - but still someone’s left you negative feedback! You don’t think it’s fair, either because you fixed the buyer’s problem, or they never gave you a fair chance to fix it. What can you do?

Tell the buyer that you don’t think that feedback was fair, and give them a list of the things you’ll do in exchange for them withdrawing it. You can offer refunds, replacements, or even to ‘compensate them for their time’ (that means bribe them), depending on how desperate you are. If they agree, you can go through the mutual withdrawal process detailed below.

Leave a comment under the negative feedback explaining what happened - this at least minimises the damage it will do to your reputation if anyone looks at it. Remember that you can more-or-less write whatever you want, as there is no facility for the buyer to respond to your response - and anything you write will show up on their ‘Feedback Left for Others’ page! If you’re a little devious, you can make them look very bad.

However much you’re not supposed to do it, you really shouldn’t let a buyer leave you negative feedback without leaving them a negative in return. Be polite and factual, saying something like "buyer did not give me a fair opportunity to fix their complaint" (note that this is one of the reasons why you should always leave feedback second, or not at all). This might not be the ‘nicest’ way to do business on eBay, but it’s the only realistic way to protect your flawless reputation.

Don’t be worried: retaliatory feedback is not against eBay’s rules, however much it should be. Anyway, you’re not just doing this for revenge - it’s essential for the next step.

Since the buyer probably won’t want a negative response or feedback comment on their record, you can do a simple "I’ll take away my negative if you take away yours" deal. This is called mutual feedback withdrawal, and the process can be started at this page: http://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MFWRequest.

This will cause eBay’s system to send an email to your buyer, asking them if they agree to withdraw their feedback in exchange for you withdrawing yours. You should get them to agree before you press the button, though, because you can only use it once per transaction.

You and the buyer can take your feedback dispute to SquareTrade, where you can both give your side and they will cancel feedback that they feel is unfair - they are far more responsive than eBay. Be aware that this costs about $20, but it has the advantage that if the buyer doesn’t respond to the process then their feedback will be removed automatically.

Of course, at some point you might find yourself with an even worse buyer than one that just leaves negative feedback - they might refuse to pay, or harass your other buyers. Our next email will tell you how to get in touch with eBay's ‘Safe Harbor’ team, and what they can do for you.

SafeHarbor are the eBay police department. If a buyer does something they're not supposed to, then it's SafeHarbor you should be reporting it to.

This is the most common rule buyers break -- it's all too easy for them to just change their minds and try to get out of the auction. eBay, however, regard every auction as a contract. They will punish the buyer for you if they don't go through with their end of the deal, by giving them a ‘strike’ against their account. A buyer who doesn’t consistently doesn’t pay for items they win will probably get banned.

To report a non-paying buyer, you need to file an ‘Unpaid Item’ dispute, which you can do here: http://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?CreateDispute. All you need is the item number. Once you do this, eBay will send the buyer a reminder that they must pay for the item they won, wait a while, and then take action against them. You must wait 7 days before you can file a dispute.

This isn't that helpful to you, of course, since in most cases you still won't get paid for the item or have anyone to post it to: it is a rare buyer who responds to eBay's threats and pays up just to avoid a little warning from eBay. You will, however, at least get a refund of your final value fee and be able to relist the item for free - and you can send a second chance offer to someone else if you want.

If someone ends up with a grudge against you, then you might find that they start emailing your bidders and telling them that you’re a scammer, they should cancel they bid, they shouldn’t deal with you, and so on. You might even find that you have unscrupulous competitors who will try this tactic to get buyers to bid on their auctions instead!

SafeHarbor will investigate this for you - the procedure to report it is to click ‘Help’ on the toolbar, then ‘Contact us’ from the menu. This can be a bit of a maze: you need to choose ‘Report problems with other eBay members’, then ‘Problems with buyers’, then finally ‘User is emailing buyers to warn them about seller or item’. This will then let you send SafeHarbor an email.

You might find that someone tries to intimidate you into giving them something using the threat of negative feedback - in its crudest form, this could be as simple as "Pay me $20 or I’ll leave you a negative comment".

To report this to SafeHarbor, you should also use ‘Contact Us’, making sure you attach all the emails you have that prove the extortion happened.

You know, if it’s not one thing, it’s another. Maybe you’re not be having all that many problems with the buyers you do get, but you seem to be having a problem with items that just don’t sell. Never fear: the next email will give you some hints on what could be going wrong.

Top 10 Reasons Why eBay Auctions Fail.

Are you finding that auction after auction fails to attract any bidders or buyers? It happens to the best of us sometimes - take a good look at these things to see if any of them could be making your bidders avoid you.

The starting price was too high: People don’t want to have to make a high bid before anyone else has - you should always start your auctions low and let the bidders bid them up.

The fixed price is too high: If you’re just selling with Buy it Now, then of course your items won’t sell if they’re too expensive. Try reducing the price a little each time the item fails to sell.

No picture: Most buyers are reluctant to bid on something without a picture, and that goes even more for high-value items. Think of it from the buyer’s point-of-view: would you want to bid on an item when you’ve no idea what it looks like?

You had a reserve: Reserve prices scare away buyers like you wouldn’t believe, not to mention costing a percentage of your final sale price. Avoid them like the plague.

Bad spelling and grammar: If your titles are spelled wrongly, then no-one will find your auctions. If your descriptions are incoherent, then no-one will know what you’re talking about. Always run your text through a spelling and grammar checker before you put it up on eBay.

Too much for shipping: You might be expecting people to pay more for shipping than they’re prepared to. Give them a few cheaper options that will take longer, or use cheaper materials.

Negative feedback: If you got negative feedback on your last transaction, expect things to be slow for a while. Try selling cheap things for a while to get your account back in good standing.

Nasty terms: Don’t write things all over your auction like "I will only accept returns in PERFECT condition" or "Serious bidders only, no timewasters!!" This is entirely unnecessary and just makes you look difficult to deal with.

No PayPal: Many buyers simply avoid any seller who doesn’t accept PayPal as a payment method - they can’t be bothered with the hassle of anything else. Even if you don’t like PayPal, you should accept it if you want to business on eBay.

The items were bad. You will have to accept that there are some items no-one wants - perhaps they were hyped to begin with, but now people had heard that they’re useless and stopped buying. Before you come to this conclusion, though, check everything else you can, and check if anyone else is managing to sell it. If you’re sure, try to return the items, and buy in some new stock.

When selling on eBay is so much trouble, you might start to wonder: should I just go and sell my stuff somewhere else? In the next email, we’ll take a look at the various alternatives to eBay that have sprung up over the years.

Should You Run Auctions on Other Sites Besides eBay?

eBay doesn’t have very many competitors, and the ones that there are remain small by comparison - that’s part of what makes eBay so powerful for niche items. If you’re selling more common things, though, you might like to list auctions on other sites besides eBay, to increase your potential customer base and avoid some of the occupational hazards of relying on eBay for all your business. But which ones are worth bothering with?

Yahoo Auctions wins in one big way: selling there is free. There are no listing fees or final value fees. What’s more, Yahoo is still one of the biggest sites around, and gets plenty of traffic to its auction site. The site benefits from Yahoo’s experience in providing good, categorised searching, and the site is easy to use all round.

The rub, though, is that dodgy buyers and sellers are even more rampant on Yahoo than they are on eBay, and that’s saying something. Sellers on Yahoo Auctions can expect to run into far more non-paying buyers than they would on eBay. Also, the site is plastered with text ads, which get in the way, and the design in general leaves a lot to be desired - but then, so does eBay’s.

uBid’s model is to offer more security for less flexibility. They pre-screen everything: sellers must be registered businesses and buyers must pre-register a credit card. It takes some of the ‘Wild West’ feeling out of selling - but it also takes away most of the fun.

On eBay, you have complete control over what you’re doing, while selling on uBid feels like you’re just a faceless supplier for a big company. Searching for anything vaguely non-mainstream will come back with no results, to the point that it will quickly get frustrating for your buyers. If you’re just selling common consumer goods for the money, though, then by all means do it at uBid.

Amazon Auctions is an underused auction site. The design is quite bad, and searches don’t turn up many results. The payment system is the same one people use to buy things from Amazon itself, though, which seems more secure that PayPal.

You might be more interested in becoming an Amazon Marketplace seller, which means that you can list your items on their main pages for people to see when they click the ‘Used & New from…’ link. This can be a good way to make a few sales, as you can simply keep your inventory updated at your Buy it Now prices and someone will occasionally buy something. You don’t even have to write a description or upload any pictures. This is probably a better thing to be using than Amazon Auctions.

To sum up, registering your items at a few other auction sites could get you a few extra sales - but compared to eBay, they’re all very unimpressive, and have nowhere near as many users.

If you’re trying to think of ways to expand your business, then there might be a shock in store for you with what I’m going to tell you next. Did you know that your eBay income is taxable? But stay calm - the next email will explain everything.

Is Your eBay Income Taxable?

The income you get from selling items on eBay is just like the income you get from any other business: it is taxable, at least in theory. In practice, many get away without declaring profits from their eBay sales just because they’re hard for the government to track. If you want to be strictly within the law and legit, though, you should be paying tax.

If you make money from it, then it’s income - and if it’s income, then it’s taxable. There is a question of scale involved, though, where the more you’ve sold, the more important it is to declare your eBay income. If you don’t, you risk getting yourself into all sorts of trouble.

There are some rules for deciding whether your income counts as taxable or not. If you depend on the income you get from eBay, spend a lot of time on it, or just act as if you are running a business, then you need to file a Schedule C tax form and pay tax as a business.

The ‘income’ you make from eBay is how much profit you make. Remember that you can subtract absolutely all of your costs from this income, like this.

Sale price - cost of item - eBay fees - PayPal fees - cost of postage - cost of packing materials = income.

For example, let’s say you sell CDs for $10 each, including shipping. You pay $5 for the CDs at wholesale. That’s $10 - $5 (cost) - 25c (insertion fee) - 52c (final value fee) - 30c (PayPal fixed fee) - 29c (PayPal percentage fee) - 37c (stamp) - 50c (packaging) = $2.77 income.

For reference, eBay’s final value fee on a $10 item is 5.25%, while PayPal’s cut is 30c + 2.9% for most sellers. These numbers will vary depending on the value of what you sell and the kind of account you have.

When you work this out at the end of the year, you can calculate your overall price for all sales, and then work out how much of that you actually received, remembering to adjust for non-paying buyers. Then just subtract what you spent on shipping and packing. There’s no real need to do tax calculations on a transaction-by-transaction basis, although it is advisable to keep a printed record of everything you buy and sell.

However, there could be a few advantages to paying tax on your eBay sales - you might be able to make it back through deducting tax on your business expenses. All of the costs in the sum above that aren’t profit are business expenses and so tax-deductable. You may also be able to deduct the cost of any computer equipment you buy, as well as ink and paper for your printer. You could even try something a little unusual, like deducting the cost of renting your home office from yourself.

Whatever you do, though, don’t just rely on the information in this email. If you want advice about tax issues, you should really go to an accountant.

Another way to make back the money you spend on tax, of course, is to simply make more profit on each item to begin with. Our next email will show you how to get more bidders with the power of pictures.

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