eBay, Kiss My Little Account Goodbye

I’ve finally had it with eBay.

The straw that broke everything was a transaction I had a couple of months ago. As I do on occasion, I was looking at listings for ebooks, seeing what kinds of rules were being broken (I know, I’ve written before about my 12 year old self yelling “you can’t do that, it against the rules”).

And as usual, I found that a good number of people were offering items for $.01 or $.99 with free shipping, with “CD” as part of the title. So, one of them being an ebook I didn’t have, I bought the $.99 item. I carefully looked through the listing to be sure there wasn’t the “if you really want the CD, you’ll have to pay this much more” that seems to be okay with eBay, and there wasn’t.

I got the email telling me that I could download the item, which I did. Then I emailed the seller and asked when my CD would be mailed. The response I got was an angry, what-are-you-nuts tirade about how it was impossible to sell and mail a real CD for $.99, so they refunded the money, and leave me alone. I did point out that she was in violation of eBay policy, but didn’t get a response to that.

And of course, I made my way through the nonsense that is “contact us” at eBay, and I reported the transaction. And waited. And waited some more. After a couple of weeks, I resubmitted by complaint, and waited some more. I did finally get an email a few days ago saying they’d had some problems, knew I had communicated, and would I please resubmit. I’ve done that now, but I really have no real hope that anything will be done. I really don’t think they give a fig about small sellers.

The incredibly frustrating thing is that there are many of us who totally revamped our businesses, invested in supplies to comply with the new rules, and are now being tossed aside by eBay. Granted what I paid in fees for my sales and my store aren’t even a blip on eBay’s radar, but, at least in my budget, every little bit adds to pot.  Apparently, eBay is doing so well with the big guys, they don’t need me anymore. So, bye-bye.

Now I need to design a new header. Another learning opportunity, because I cannot for the life of me remember how I did this one.

I have started work on developing a lot of little tiny, very specific, niche blogs. Some offer Clickbank products for sale, some are just meant to be authority sites with adsense.  I’m making a few cents with the adsense, and I’ve sold a couple of ebooks. Nothing that sends me to the world of the uber-rich, but the potential is definitely there. It is a numbers game – the more sites I have, the more the potential for sales/adsense revenue.

My biggest challenge is to find those tiny specific niches, and I’ve just joined a great new program that is helping with that. It’s called Niche Horde, and it is very very cool! (The link is an affiliate link. If you like what you see and buy the product, I get a commission. It’s how the internet world works. If you think that’s wrong, simply type nichehorde.com into your browser.)

Anyway, it’s a network of users who have a bit of code on their computers that goes out and gathers information about what folks are looking for on the web. I have no idea how it works, but it does, and that means that I get this incredible amount of information and suggestions about niches. If niche marketing is even remotely interesting to you, you really should take a look Niche Horde. The only problem is that it’s easy to spend hours with the program looking at stuff. Interesting for sure, but the setting up of the niche sites is what I should be doing!

Okay, enough of this. I need to get back to the doing rather than the talking about. Be well.