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We all get them!! Most of the time I can step back and know that it is just business and it will happen. But then there are times that you just want to scream!!

Today is one of those times. I offer 30 days to return the items. I ask that the buy pay return shipping. I do this because in most cases the return is due to the buyer not really looking at the pics or the measurements. For instance, the pants do not fit - all measurements are listed and pictured. So why should it cost me money for that. For the majority of buyers this seems perfectly natural. 

Then you get those buyers who are so, what is the word I am looking for, wrong. Is it the sellers fault if the buyer can not look at pics. The have the ability to zoom in on any picture, ask questions if something is not clear to them, etc. This does not give them the open offer to first write you a nasty email, second lie on the return and say the item is defective, and third leave a nasty feedback. Yes the buyer has a right to their opinion. Kindness goes a lot further than a nasty email for sure. 

My buyer in this example bought a pair of shoes. The soul had 2 areas that were not perfectly clean. Not horrible, but not clean. I typically do not clean the shoes that are low value. The upper part of the shoes were in great condition. There was only dirt on the soles. Well, you would have thought I committed a crime. So, before I could respond to the email, the buyer opened up a return. No need to respond to the buyer, because the return was approved. I do no think it would have mattered in any case. 

When the buyer opened up the return case, they listed the item as defective. That can cause more issues with eBay than any negative feedback. She checked the defective box and wrote dirty soles. I did reach out to eBay to have that corrected. Clearly they were not defective. That did not matter to eBay. 

Next thing the buyer did was leave a negative feedback. I have only had 2 in the last 12 months, so it does not affect my metrics. But again dramatic and hyped by the buyer. The shoes cost $15 and were preowned. So I should have been able to leave her feedback, but eBay only allows a seller to leave positive feedback on buyers. What is up with that!! I can not even leave her a neutral. Her return demanded a refund! Waiting to see if they come back! OK Vent done!! 

Thanks for checking in!! 

So many question?? This is only our experience and our opinion with our eBay account. Use what works for you. There is no wrong way. We only use have our personal experiences to draw from. We live in the Mid-west.

FREE SHIPPING - We tried this and it did not work for us. Here is what happened. We listed an item that was around $45. We offered free shipping. The item was sold to someone in Puerto Rico. It cost us $62 to ship it to them. The system does not let you only ship to the main US states. So our first free shipping experience was very sour. It was a bigger item and could not fit in the "if it fits, it ships" boxes. We could not afford to have that keep happening. So we stopped offering it. We do not believe it changed our sales. We price lower to accommodate the difference. 

SET PRICE SHIPPING - We do use this on all clothing items in our store, with the exception of coats and heavy jackets. We have not tried it for other items, but are looking at maybe adding this to shoes as well. We do not think this detours customers from buying any item with this kind of shipping. The price that we use is a little low for like jeans, high for super light items, but right for the majority of those items. We have done very well with this shipping strategy for these items. We have had a few instances where we forgot to apply that shipping group and still sold an item for full calculated shipping.

CALCULATED SHIPPING - This is our go to. We moved to this way early on after our experience with the big loss on shipping. We believe it actually saves some people money. We have shipped items to Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico and charged full shipping. Calculating for all instances makes us add in a higher amount that would be more expensive to people that are closer to us. Once in a while a customer will offer a lower price to accommodate the shipping a little and we are happy to do that. We always have best offer listed. We set it to about 10% off. We use this option on items over $15 in our store.

Let us know how you tackle this project!!

Add an answer to this item. 

We discovered early on that just randomly placing items on shelves and then thinking we would remember the exact location that each item was would not work long term.

First of all, there are 2 of us. So when I placed something somewhere, he did not know where to look. Same went when I was pulling items he put away. It was a struggle. When we got to about 500 items listed, we quickly realized that would not work.

The office is not as nicely organized as it should be, but the garage space is easy (most of the time) for us to navigate.  

We started out with a numbered bin system like you see in the photos. All the bins on our shelves are the same letter with a sequential number after it. That worked well for a short while. The items in the office refer to a shelf, so the electronic and the breakable items are in there and there is a small bit of searching, but not too bad.

Once we started listing items that were similar and could be stored in the same bin, it got a little confusing. Picture 20 pairs of jeans all in the same bin with about 4 different brands. We were not able to pull them and get it right every time. We don't want to ship the wrong item. What is a good system? We turned to Youtube and the awesome sellers listed there.

We found a few sellers putting a thank you card in the box. We liked that idea because we wanted to try and get repeat business.  Then we found other sellers adding stickers onto bagged clothing to help out. We combined the ideas and that really works for us. 

Most items we sell go into a plastic sealed bag to keep the item from damage or to keep multiple parts together. Then we did a thank you note in the form of a business card. Then we add a number onto the business card. So we can now quickly pull sold items and get them out the door. We found round stickers numbering from 0001 to 5000 so we are set for quite a while.  

We plan on doing a video on our system soon. Let me know what works for you.