Struggles of starting a new eBay account

Hello, I recently started a new eBay account to sell some cards to help fund my collection a little. I read that most people suggest selling low dollar items to acquire feedback and that was what I aimed to do. Last week 10 auctions ended and today I have two Item Not Received cases with the eBay standard envelope tracking showing no signs of movement. Is this a pretty common occurrence? I have 2 feedback, so I thought maybe its buyers trying to take advantage of the Standard envelope tracking but hate to think that way. What has been your experience with the Standard envelope or eBay in general? Thanks!

ESE tracking is unreliable. If it atleast scanned once then you have free insurance. If there are no scans at all, the buyer will get refunded. Just have to hope a scan occurs. Tell the buyer to be patient and that the cards are probably still on the way.

Also, don’t run auctions. List it buy it now for the lowest price on eBay and it will sell, guaranteed, eventually atleast

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The type of scanning they use is different. From what I can tell, it seems like they’re just scanned while going through the mail system. The mail carrier for example is not scanning an eBay Standard Envelope when leaving it in someone’s mailbox in the same way that they scan a regularly tracked USPS package.

A lot of times this leads to the tracking saying delivered when it has not been delivered. I’m pretty sure the delivered “scan” is just it being scanned at the distribution center nearest to you and it updating to delivered after that. Whenever someone messages me saying their ESE says delivered and they don’t have it, I tell them to wait a day or two. Every single time it has been delivered within two days of saying delivered.

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Thanks for the fast reply. So far, all the auctions I’ve started have sold thankfully. The plan was to gain some initial feedback through auctions then start listing items as buy it now so buyers can feel more comfortable. It does suck that the ESE tracking is so unreliable I was really excited to try it out. I had a decently sized TCGPlayer account years ago and I’m pretty familiar with PWE being shipped with claims of it not arriving so was hoping the ESE would solve that issue for me.

If you’re looking to farm feedback, I would recommend buying cheap items that you want. You’re much more likely to get feedback from a seller than from a buyer.

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I still sometimes find sellers won’t leave feedback after you buy an item even if you leave them feedback. I have no idea why but it does get a bit frustrating

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This is odd, i always leave feedback as a buyer and thought it was the common habit, i would go crazy if there was a huge list of stuff every time ebay reminds me of the purchases where i should leave feedback :grimacing:

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Yep, it’s the right thing to do, but most buyers can’t be bothered. I’d be curious what the average feedback rate is.

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I would say that I DON’T receive feedback for 75% of stuff I sell!

I think it’s down to the fact that a buyer doesn’t have to and there is no consequence for ignoring the feedback system. At the end of the day, it takes about 30secs but the physical action of doing it has to be done intentionally and I guess most people either just don’t think.

Maybe you could even go down the avenue of declining decency and manners in society in general. Not saying that all of these buyers are BAD people by any meana whatsoever, but you do have to consciously go out of your way to leave feedback (even if it IS just a few clicks out of your way) and that would obviously require doing something for decency’s sake, something I personally witness less and less of in the current world.

Didn’t mean to go into a deep socio-psychological analysis of ebay feedback but there it is if anybody fancies some entertainment at my expense lol

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It can be annoying if I buy 50 cards from a larger seller, I have to go through each item individually for feedback. I wish I could give feedback one time for the whole transaction.

Since I’m usually pressed for time, I give feedback to smaller shops and E4 members where it matters, but will sometimes skip over larger sellers especially if my order was large. It simply takes too long. If it was one card then I do it.

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Tracking for eBay standard is horrible, I am convinced many customers know this and take advantage of the situation and this is going to end up with eBay getting rid of it.

Here is a link to open a claim if the buyer says the package never showed up. www.pip-claim.com

As for feedback, I find sending the buyer a bit of a personalized message helps a lot! Something like: Hey thank you for your purchase! I hope you enjoy your new (insert card). If you were completely satisfied with your transaction, could you please leave 5 star feedback when you have a free minute. Thanks!

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Yeah, that’s indeed annoying, best i’ve got is to copy paste the same text feedback and just speed tap through everything else, still takes some time but lucklly i rarely do such purchases from ebay so when it happens it’s manageable

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Hey! standard envelope is a great service and has vastly improved over the last year or so. I do think however information about the service and the advertising of it to buyers, seller, and even USPS employees was handled very very poorly. It is still hit or miss if your local post office has ever even heard about it! I have shipped about 6500 cards via standard envelope this year personally and have roughly 10 or so that legitimately have gone missing. The biggest issue I run into is buyers do not know the tracking does not work the same way as we are usually expecting. Standard envelope orders only scan at your post office, hub locations, and the buyers local post office. Once there, eBay considers that delivered. That’s where people freak out! haha I get usually a dozen or so messages a week asking “WHERE MY CARD” 99/100 times it shows up the next day to the buyers house, I simply just reassure them that that is the likely case and normally don’t hear back. If a case is opened on you and the tracking says delivered, as a seller you’re in the clear. eBay will side with you 100% of the time. If the package stops moving you’re also covered by eBay’s insurance as mentioned above!

As far as feedback, my account has automated feedback when a buyer pays, I don’t think its worth fussing over if someone doesn’t give you feedback, it comes in time. Just focus on being the best seller you can be and over deliver on your buyers expectations.

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I do the same automated feedback when buyer pays and have noticed that my feedback comes in waves after orders arrive.

The irony being that the buyer has to leave 50 individual feedback comments but the seller will only receive +1 positive for the whole lot since it was a single, combined transaction. I don’t understand that because it’s a contradiction in my mind - if it’s only worth a single transaction to the seller’s feedback score, then surely the buyer should be able to leave one feedback to cover the whole thing.

Another quirk I have found is that setting up auto feedback for selling stuff resulted in the same feedback comment being auto-posted for my PURCHASES too :roll_eyes: What a fantastic little glitch.

The whole site is full of these small, random bugs but complaining about it on the Community site or feeding it back to ebay is like p*ssing into the wind. For such a huge company raking in millions (billions?), surely we should expect them to be on it and investing time/money into a completely stable platform without a collection of amateurish technical gremlins. It isn’t like it’s a new start-up website that is finding its feet.

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