March 2, 2009

Newest eBay Scammers

The scam may not be as serious as the title suggests, but it irks me just the same. Actually it’s not new either, but I’m just now figuring it out.

Apparently last year eBay banned the sale of digital products on the site. Really I don’t blame them, because I always questioned if some of those “resell right” ebooks weren’t ripped off from others. Which is why when I purchased them (and yes, I’ll admit that I was a bit of a resell right junkie there for awhile), I’d edit them myself before reselling and only use things such as recipes which have little to no copyright protection.

Now I didn’t know this, even though I both buy and sell on eBay. It’s been awhile since I’ve sold anything though, so maybe that’s why it slipped past me. So when I was shopping for a few more recipe ebooks on eBay the other day and saw “CD”, I thought “hey cool, that would keep things a little more organized and I could go between both our computers, plus there might be a little something extra to it”. Little did I know the “CD” part was to slip past the eBay guidelines and the seller never did intend to send a CD. Only when I left negative feedback did he offer it (which would have been exactly what what could have been downloaded), and harassed me to reverse the negative (I had I don’t know how many phone calls and emails sent my way, all of which I ignored).

This might not seem like a big deal, but it ticked me off. It was unethical to me. Would I have cared if it wasn’t a CD? Probably not, but then again I probably wouldn’t have bought it. Am I little disappointed in eBay’s decision? Slightly, yes, but really it’s not THAT big of a deal. I understand why they did it, and it cleared up some junk on the site. There’s still the option of letting them run “classifieds” to point to a site that sells resell right ebooks, so what’s the problem? Had I seen one that I liked, I may have bought from them. But apparently this is too much work for some of them that use to sell ebooks.

I think what bothers me the most is the sneaky way these people are trying to get around the rules. The seller tried to tell me he would “lose sales if people had to wait for a CD”, yet here I was one that didn’t CARE if I had to wait. Well I guess you’ll lose more sales now with the negative on your account, eh?

You almost feel bad for those who lost a stream of income by eBay yanking those sales, but you know what? I’ve been there. Only it wasn’t eBay, it was Google and rankings on affiliate pages, and I didn’t use any sneaky tactics to keep my income. I use to have a real good set up that was my cash cow until Google decided pages with nothing but affiliate products was junk. Those who were buying apparently didn’t think so, but that was my opinion. I could have come back with some sneaky tactics like black hat SEO, but I didn’t. I like to sleep at night, and guess I get the short end of the stick sometimes because I play by the rules.

My dad’s strong work ethics are hammered into my brain as well – you got to work for what you want in life, and no one gets a free ride. Or shouldn’t get a free ride, anyway. Not to say building a residual income is a bad thing, but you really should have to put a little effort into it. Case in point, Idea Queen. It makes a nice steady income, but I’ve put a LOT of work into that site. A LOT. The site was built in 2005, and has been added on to for the past 3+ years. Sure I’ve let it sit for several months at a time before, but as mentioned before I’ve put a LOT of hours into building, editing, and adding to that site. In fact, I just added several new pages the other day. Plus the blog has been published to at least several times a month (if not daily) for the past year and a half. Have I earned the money received from that site? You betcha.