Creative Compulsion

I haven’t posted much because I’ve been working on getting a new site going. It’s finally live!!

I’ve had great luck with the items I currently have, mostly collectibles and some home decor items. What I’ve found is that they tend to be quite seasonal in nature. For the last few months I’ve been toying with the idea of adding in a completely different line that would be more stable and consistent, more of a commodity-type. I’ve experimented with body jewelry and while I’ve sold almost all of the inventory I purchased, the mark-ups are (obviously) so thin you really have to sell a lot to make it worth the time. In the past several months, I began introducing pet supplies to my eBay store, Cutting Edge Gifts. I began selling things from store inventory immediately without even running auctions so, after lots of thought and more research, have decided to make that a permanent part of my offerings.

Visit my new “labor of love” at KT Pet Supply. Named after my beloved Golden Retriever, Katie, my childhood best friend

I’ve never been an eBay basher nor a cheerleader. I use them and so far it’s worked for me. End of story. NOW I’m getting pissed.

My frustration started a few days ago. When I attempted to send some store listings to core I was greeted with this message:

These listings cannot be edited, because of following restrictions:
Item #1100XXXXXXXX - XXXXXXX

* The Item Specifics of the above item have been updated. You may want to review the listing before relisting or remove it from the list of items to be relisted.

Please do one of the following:
* To edit different listings, click the Back button.

Uh, wrong. First of all, I’m not trying to edit anything and second, I haven’t changed any item specifics. I popped on the eBay Technical Issues forum and sure enough, its a “known” issue. Yesterday, Ina Steiner wrote about it in this article on AuctionBytes. eBay seems to be well aware of the issue and as of today has done nothing to resolve it.

Second, feedback appears to broken now. A few days ago, I read a post on one of the eBay boards that people were having trouble leaving feedback. Up until this point I hadn’t had any problems, but today, I went to leave feedback and was greeted with an error message telling me I had already left feedback for the item. Uh no. Wrong again.

I really didn’t freak out last summer over the raising of store fees. I adjusted my pricing to accommodate the higher fees and it really hasn’t affected me too much. What DOES piss me off is the higher fees in relation to the value of the service. Store items don’t appear in normal search so store owners have to rely on core items to draw traffic to the store. Not a big deal, but it IS a big deal when you can’t send items to core without going through several additional steps. Time is money eBay, and you’re wasting mine.

The feedback isn’t as huge a concern for me. I don’t sell on eBay for feedback, I sell to make money. I really don’t care if I receive it or not. HowEVER, its only a matter of time before I get a 10 feedback numpty that sends me a dozen emails a day asking “Where is my feedback, where is my feedback, where is my feedback?”. Guarantee it. Again, annoying and a complete waste of time.

eBay - you need to start providing more VALUE for the amount you charge! It seems like my eBay bill continues to go up each month while the usability of the site goes down and the glitches steadily rise in number. What the hell am I paying for?

Time to go work on MY websites….

Due to state regulations (most notably in New Hampshire), eBay is in the process of making changes not only to advertising, but also to their current user agreement. They will be removing the term “auction” and no longer referring to themselves as an auction company or auction site. This is in order to avoid legal issues with the current New Hampshire law that requires auction sellers to hold a current state auctioneer’s license.

One of the speakers, Clougherty said, was an attorney representing eBay. Clougherty told the ED & A committee: “According to this attorney, eBay is in the process of changing their agreements with all of their 212,000,000 registered users. eBay will no longer advertise themselves as an auction or auction company and will discontinue the use of the word “auction” from their online and paper advertising.

… by Kathy Greer at AuctionBytes

Personally, I think the whole thing is ridiculous. You simply can’t equate running a live auction with running a 7 day online auction. They’re entirely 2 different beasts. It will be interesting to see if other online auction venues follow suit once these changes are made.

Read the whole Auctionbytes article here.

I really don’t know. Love this song though. For you, hot.

How to save a life - The Fray

Step one you say we need to talk
He walks you say sit down it’s just a talk
He smiles politely back at you
You stare politely right on through
Some sort of window to your right
As he goes left and you stay right
Between the lines of fear and blame
And you begin to wonder why you came

Read the rest of this entry »

Just when you thought I was going to let you get bored this week… time to switch again!

Good header for this week. ‘Nuff said.