Ten Reasons I Did Not Bid On Your eBay Listing
By Wixx, special contributing writer
I am sure that I am not the only person who did not bid on your auction because of one of these reasons. That means that you may now be relisting your item, or selling it for a lot less than what you could have. The following is a rant. A rant that contains my opinions, which may differ entirely from your opinions. You are allowed to have your own opinions. You have been warned.
#10 You have a bunch of stupid characters in your title and or listing: L@@K A+++++++ quality jibber jabber. This listing must have been placed by a nine year old. A nine year old that is not likely to actually mail me the merchandise if I win, so I am not going to bid. L@@K at me not bid on your auction.
#9 I can not tell how much you are charging for shipping: The Shipping section says “please see listing for shipping details” and the listing is barren, like a wasteland. With no mention of these elusive charges anywhere, I will have to move on. I may “ask the seller a question” but then again I may not.
#8 You do not accept Paypal: This is the year 2007. Get a Paypal account. This would have been listed higher, a lot higher like damn near #1, but I did not want to seem shallow and superficial…heh heh. The truth is I have a Paypal account to buy junk on eBay with. If I use any other means of payment, I have to have approval from the family corporation in triplicate and I am really not prepared to beg for the release of $6.50 to buy your item, when I have those funds just sitting in my Paypal account…waiting. Yeah Yeah I understand that Paypal is going to charge you 37 cents in fees, but that money order that you accept is going to charge ME and that is out of the equation. I can send you a check, and wait around until it clears but by then I could have found another listing from someone who understands that I have a Paypal account and am willing to use it.
#7 Your description is junk: You are a salesperson when you type up your description. Sell it to me. Do not give me the name of the item and hope it is what I was looking for. I have bought a few things that I was not specifically looking for because the picture and the description made me think, “wow that is cool.” If I do not know what a ‘VINTAGE 1961 HICKY MA JIGGY” is, I am not going to buy yours. There are indeed collectors out there who may bid, but you are missing out on a lot of people by not telling us what the hell this Hicky ma Jiggy is and does. Here’s an example that had the following title:
Wizards Duel figures and BGIME 13 Lord of the Rings
What the hell is that you say? Well read on…
Battle Games in Middle Earth magazine number 13 AND the figures needed to play the Wizards Duel game!! The magazine is 21 full color pages of information pertaining to the Lord of the Rings table top miniatures game. This particular issue (#13) includes 6 pages on the tactics of the game, helping you to better command your forces, a step-by-step painting guide for the horses of Rohan, and a modelling workshop demonstrating effective techniques for adding realistic details to your scenery. It also includes the rules for an exciting mini-game called Wizard’s duel.
This allows players to re-create the confrontation between Gandalf and Saruman. I have also included metal figures of both wizards and the seeing stone called the Palantir. That is the cool black crystal ball that the flaming eye of Sauron shows up in during several scenes of the movies. Not only are these figures perfect for this mini-game, but they are great to add to your armies as well. They are in very cool action poses as opposed to the other poses, where especially Saruman looks kind of bored and tired, leaning on his staff. Having access to the Palantir increases Saruman’s power in the battle game as well, so adding this mini to your collection will make your games that much more challenging. With the other poses Saruman either has the Palantir or he doesn’t. If he has it in his hand on the model, he is very powerful. If he has to be in contact with a separate model of it, he is still powerful, but his location on the board has a whole new meaning, as if you can get him to move away from the Palantir, it decreases his power. To me this is a much more realistic approach.
As for Gandalf, he looks cool with his gnarled staff extended ready to use some magic! The contents of this auction will come in a bubble mailer with heavy cardboard on both sides of the magazine. The figures, which are unpainted and unglued, will be in a bag wrapped in bubble wrap to help cushion them even further. As usual I will try to get these in the mail within
2 days of receiving the Paypal payment from the winner. Thank you for looking.
Wow. I clearly know what this listing offers and if I were on eBay looking for a gift for my Nephew who happens to really like the Lord of the Rings movies, I may be inclined to bid on this. He may not play the table top battle game, whatever that is, but the description says that the rules and the figures needed for a mini-game are included in this listing, so at least I know he can get some use from them.
Now imagine if you saw this listing:
Wizards Duel figures and BGIME 13 Lord of the Rings
2 wizards, a sphere on a stand, and a magazine. Do not bid unless you intend to pay.
??? I am still clueless, oh well I must not be in the club…I will move on. I’ll add that the last line is another of my pet peeves about eBay. I understand that you may have been burned by deadbeat bidders who did not pay, but honestly, do you think the deadbeats will see your request of “DO NOT BID UNLESS YOU INTEND TO PAY” and think, “oh man, I was going to bid and then giggle about not paying for a week until this dude gives me a non-paying strike, but he said not to!!” This request always makes me chuckle and think about including instructions for something that says 1. Open box 2. Read these directions 3. Breathe in 4. Breathe out 5. Repeat breathing for the rest of your life.
#6 You can not spell: I did a search for super cool hicky ma jiggy and got 100 listings. I looked over them all, but none were what I wanted or the price that I was willing to pay. Yet there, alone in the dark, desolate corner, was your listing, which was the hicky ma jiggy that I wanted. It was the right size, the right color and the right price. The only problem was that you listed it as a hiky ma jigy and it did not turn up on my search, nor anyone else’s. Do you wonder why your listing has 6 views and the rest of the hicky ma jiggy’s have hundreds? It’s because they can spell correctly.
#5 Busted goods: eBaying broken junk works for some people, but I really do not want to bid, wait, watch, hope, win, wait for shipping, get the item, feel the excitement of seeing it in the mailbox, bring it in, open it up…and then have to fix it. There are people out there who will bid on an electronic device that does not work because they are hoping that it is the circuit board that is bad on yours so that they can get the flux capacitor off of it, and replace theirs. I am not one of them.
#4 Item is in Australia: Sorry, but I can not bid on items where the postage to get to the US is more than the item AND I have to wait a month or longer to get it. This is really just a rant, as nothing can be done about it, but bear in mind if you are a potential buyer that there are some locations that it may be best to avoid. I know Canadians might feel this way about the entire rest of the World as their Customs charges can get pretty expensive, too. Not really anything you can do to get me to bid, I am just saying…
#3 Starting bid is way too high: It may surprise you that I do not consider this to be the number one reason to not even consider a bid, but I honestly feel that this is the 3rd most important reason. My absolute favorite is when the description itself says this super deluxe hicky ma jiggy retails for $25 — and the starting bid is $24.99 plus $6 shipping. That is just a little worse than the listings that say I am clearing out my store inventory to make room for new items. This item listed for $25 but is now OOP ( out of print) and the starting bid + shipping charges add up to be equal to or greater than $25. Ummm think about this. You had it listed in your store for $25 for so long that it is now out of print and you expect to get $25 for it now. If it were actually worth $25 it would not be in need of you ‘clearing’ it from your inventory. I honestly do not care how cool something is or how much I want or think I need it…I am on eBay to get a deal. I am not interested in bidding exactly what I can pay for your item in a store and having to wait a week to see if I won it or not.
#2 Blurry/Dark/nearly useless or the wrong picture: This is not quite as bad as no picture at all (that is so bad it gets its own listing…see below) But the picture is worth a thousand words. I have already mentioned the actual words of the description and that is usually way less than 1000. Do you want a thousand words screaming DO NOT BID ON THIS AUCTION? I didn’t think so. I see way too many listings where it says right in the description something like “These miniatures were painted by an Uber Pro painter and they rock hardcore, but my crappy camera sucks so trust me they look WAY better in person than what these Shatty pictures show. Another example of this is when the pictures are too dark, blurry or both because the lack of adequate lighting severely affects the focus, making it difficult to see the details — or even some of the item that you are looking at. A case in point:
Really cool description from above:
Same really cool description … but…
Which of these would you bid on? I would not bid on that second one unless I knew that those figures were worth $10 each and the current bid was $1 or $2. If I did not know what the figures were supposed to be, I would be lost. The description says the wizards are in cool poses, but that picture does not show that. This means again that a lot of potential bidders do not bid because they do not even know what you are selling. You can clearly see the figures on the magazine in the good photo to give you an understanding that there is indeed coverage in there about the particular figures included.
This also happens when you are looking at a listing for an authentic and fully functional Luke Sky Walker lightsaber with instructions and an old Jedi Master to train you on its use, but the photo is of the Emperor holding Darth Vader’s lightsaber. Can I truly be sure that Yoda or Obi-Wan will be in the shipment that I am bidding on if the Dark Lord of the Sith is pictured? I may just have to wait around for another listing of a real lightsaber…I could use the eBay question thing, but if the Emperor is involved, I can not truly be sure that he will not just cover the answer to my question with the shroud of the dark side…
#1 No photo: This is what I think when I see the following:
“Check out my auction. It is a Babe Ruth rookie card in great condition.”
No picture? How do you expect me to put a value on something like this without a photo??
I see an awful lot of listings for individual miniatures where they go so far as to include the manufacturers item number, but not a photo. Remember that the first photo is free so you are ripping yourself off by not including one. If I like the description of the miniature, for instance “Shadow Dragon with treasure pile UberCool minis #123,” I may go to Google image search and pull up Ubercool 123 and look for a photo. However there are Thousands of minis made by Ubercool minis, so after I check a few I get tired of all of the extra work and I stop. That leaves me no choice but to skip all of the hundreds and hundreds of listings without pics for a week or two until another cool sounding one comes along.
I completely agree about the stupid titles, bad descriptions, and not having a photo.
I am less inclined to agree re:PayPal. Depending on the value of the item, eBay fees and PayPal fees have grown to the extent that a seller cannot reasonably certain items and accept payment that gets cut into. Plus, most folks who accept PayPal exclusively build-in a bit of extra into the shipping to cover the fees. I also refuse to bid on auctions with obviously inflated, or poorly estimated, shipping charges.
Also, I would also say that I hate descriptions that leave a lot to the imagination, but I also despise those that contain too much information. For instance, I don’t need to understand the dynamics of Middle Earth to understand what a Frodo figurine is, right?
In any case, I think this is good article with many points that should become a checklist for some eBay sellers.