Dear eBay Seller: Why I Didn't Buy Your Item

ShimmaPuff

Sentient IMBUSILE
Oct 12, 2006
9,733
16
NOTE: This is a particularly pissed-off rant I posted elsewhere some time ago, and does not relate specifically to handbags, but in case it might contain, cleverly hidden in the overblown snarkvent, some useful tips for sellers, here it is:

It looked like something I wanted. For all my talk of a Moratorium, I nevertheless and quite plainly continue in active shopping mode. I still have a few essential items I need, and yours really looked like it might be just what I was looking for.

You will be interested to note that my feedback record is not only 100% positive, it is absolutely rife with glowing comments. I invariably pay instantly, within seconds of purchase, or at least as close to seconds as is permitted by my dial-up connection, my Authentic Museum Quality Computer.

But you rejected me, O eBay Seller. You told me you didn't want my money. Oh, no, you didn't send me an email, or put up a sign saying No Shimmapuffs Need Click Buy It Now.

You didn't have to. Your listing itself rejected me.

By the time all your 9 different floral backgrounds, consisting of raw scans roughly the size of Texas, each hosted on its own obscure free server about the speed of a slow walk from Ulan Bator to Utah got through loading, along with your 1.3 MB of embedded midi version of Total Eclipse of the Heart, and of course, that terrific little horizontal scroll of twelve of your other items, each represented by its own ginormous raw scan squeezed down into a sized-by-listing-program-code thumbnail of wacky height-width proportion, not to mention the 7 different advertising banners for which I am sure you hope one day to receive a full $.033 per click-through, which statistics indicate you are virtually guaranteed to receive after only your twelve millionth visitor - after all that stuff loaded up, unfortunately there was no more space left in my cache for the picture of the item in which I was interested, not to mention the fact that a half hour had passed, during which time I was obliged to view and purchase the merchandise offered by people who simply don't have your good taste in listing decoration, nor your discriminating discernment to automatically weed out people like me who do not have DSL or fancy computers, possibly because we spend too much money buying things on eBay. Way to teach us a lesson!

So yes, it is possible that your item would have been something that I was so anxious to have that I might have sent you an email asking you to change it to a Buy It Now for me for 50% above your starting bid price, which starting bid price, it is worth noting, has failed for 3 successive auction cycles to net one single taker, a fact I happen to be privy to because I placed it on my watch list a month ago, and it is only now, with that relative's birthday looming ever closer, and my having failed to locate a more suitable gift elsewhere, that I now turn to you, or perhaps it is something for myself - one of those few remaining items that I hoped to take care of in some multi-item purchase from an online retailer, but they didn't have the color and size and your listing gave promise of both.

Or maybe the picture, such as it was, did finally load, but you failed to give me the measurements of the garment, or tell me exactly what it is made of, perhaps you happen to have such a cooperatively elastic body that whether "L" means a bust measurement of 32 or 48 is a matter of supreme indifference to you, you blithely just click "Buy" secure in the knowledge that your size is "L," and all garments so marked, regardless of manufacturer or country of origin will fit you perfectly.

You have done your duty regarding size information, after all. You have told me it is size "L."

And there would certainly be no need to mention whether it is made of boiled wool or cotton batiste, now would there? That blurry little picture should tell my aging eyes and Wal-Mart monitor all we need to know. After all, I can see that the garment has exactly two sleeves! (Or would those be legs? You can see I am excactly the kind of over-picky customer you neither need nor want). Whether that darkness represents brown, navy, black, or eggplant is extraneous information not really needed for purchase. PayPal is not going to ask me to describe the color in order to pay for it, why should you make any attempt to do so in order to sell it?

If my monitor, not to mention my vision, is of such poor quality that I require actual verbiage from you regarding hue or composition, then I am hardly the sort of customer you would seek, especially now that I have outed myself as someone with a limited appreciation of those huge raw scans of the adorable giant sweet peas with which your every listing must be adorned!

Oh, and while I'm on the subject, that invitation to download software if I want to see a picture of the item larger than a postage stamp was especially helpful. After waiting the 28 minutes for your listing to load, there is nothing more welcome than the opportunity to spend another hour or so downloading (on my dial-up) a new program to my computer and installing it. Your thoughtfulness defies description, as I'm sure, does your item, which would account for your wise decision not to attempt to describe it.

So give yourself a pat on the back, Dear eBay Seller! Your shrewd business acumen has saved you once again from the pain of parting with your merchandise, as well as the indignity of being obliged to receive the money of a market segment you so clearly disdain.

Thankfully, that disagreeable task has fallen to the less particular merchant whose listing consisted of the plain, as-is eBay listing template, unadorned save for a clear photo of the item, accompanied by the sort of tiresome details of length and width, color and fabric content with which a Power Seller like yourself could not be bothered.
 
LOL!! Good post. I still use the plain Ebay template. I have been tempted to use the free or the less expensive auction managers off Ebay site, but.......I know as a buyer, it takes forever for the pics to load, and I have broadband. I lose interest when I have to wait for pics to load. Never that problem with the Ebay pics.
Thanks........good post. :smile:
 
shimmapuff, your posts are just amazing and delightful and so very, very well written. outside of the purse blog, do you write for a living?
 
Thank you, shanam! I see a lot of very good writers on here, and throughout the internets, and I am sure that anybody with money to offer can easily contact any of millions of people who can write anything they got that needs writin'**

My own email address is available in my profile, it's pretty easy: [email protected] in case there are any lurkers out there who would like to make me a generous offer! :biggrin:

**Props to Miss Harper Lee ;)
 
You want to know bad? I ran across a listing that was--get this--literally 99 pages long! No kidding, I counted! They put an obscene number of LARGE photos in there, and they kept repeating themselves in the text. It was a hoot to look over that silly listing.
 
And some of the worst offenders are people in China selling very tempting items at very tempting prices, until you let all their huge images load and discover that they charge outrageous shipping fees!

This is especially annoying if you are likely to be looking for an inexpensive string of old carved jade beads for Cousin Mina who always admires yours, and which you can obtain, from very nice people who charge reasonable shipping, but they have become buried in the huge flood of the other people!