Are you truly that paranoid that you think Ebay is only allowing bidders from the East coast to bid on your larger items in order to gain a few dollars more per sale? Sorry but that is ludicrous even you yourself stated everything you sold and shipped minus one item cost less then $100.00 to ship if so the max Ebay could make on this would be $10.00 per sale. If a buyer close to you was willing to bid $200.00 more then a guy on the east coast they would make more on the $200.00 higher bid then they would on the $100.00 shipping fee
Regards Snow
Ebay charges fees on the entire sale, shipping cost is part of the total sale. I have a map that shows all shipping zones using my zip code as the reference point. Each zone is placed on a map to show exactly how the zones work. Zone 2 is nearly non existent, zone 3 has a wide coverage, 4 and 5 take up a majority of places. Yet I had 3 times as many large items sold to zone 6, 7 & 8 than all other zones combined.
There's also another point that needs to be factored in, how many sales had issues. Since I box everything according to standards set by carriers, the longer the trip, the more likely the chance of a problem, you would think. But the reality is I had more "bad" buyers who made false claims (in total regardless of numbers shipped), so I made it into a ratio by dividing the number of packages by the number of false issues (claims of damage or not working that were returned and found to work just fine or had no damages) the ratio of course was 3 times more bad buyers were being shown my items. Since eBay knows who is a bad buyer simply by looking at the numbers they know your chances of a bad sale will rise sharply and they can use that to create a problem for sellers.
If you have 3 cases where you challenge the buyer due to your proof if them lying, eBay will never listen to proof and will quickly have you paying 14% fees and limit your sales regardless of how your store is set up since it runs by a yearly contract. After a long while I finally had the limit removed and fees went down for 2 weeks before eBay pulled some bs on me with a sale that pay pal had sided with me! Even though eBay had nothing to do with the ruling and couldn't change it, they still acted as if I collected another strike against me and once again raised my fees and restricted my sales! It took the help of pay pal to listen in on my phone conversation with eBay while I talked about what they did was wrong and how they had no say in the matter. After hours and hours of hearing their lies and transfers to different departments, finally during the wait I asked the pay pal rep if they had a good idea of what they were doing to me and my account. When the last eBay rep started in with their lies, the pay pal rep spoke up and let them know they monitored the last 3 hours that I was in contact with eBay and listened to all the lies and run around.
That was when I decided that eBay was not a good place for a small seller to try and make sales. This was back in 2010, eBay was doing a sweep to clear out all the small sellers now that they had big box stores selling there. They couldn't just close out accounts for no reason so they made sure to use other methods to get us to simy stop using it. Those bad buyers came in handy, the long shipping sales turned my sales into no profit or big losses if there was a problem. In the end it worked and they shed a huge number of small sellers at that time through inconvenience and lies, siding with bad buyers was the key to getting rid of us. The reason we needed to go was obvious, it was those small sellers that were constantly in need of attention to resolve issues with their sales. If anything went wrong we called eBay to get it resolved properly. The realized that we were costing them tons with tying up their phone lines and reps needed. The big box sellers were given a different set of rules to work with that diminished the need for constant contact when they had a bad buyer. They could simply charge for a missing part or any other issue as they saw it.
Here's what I did to try and reduce the bad buyers returns, I would make a video recording showing the local news on tv with the date and time showing constantly, I would then show the item working and in perfect condition viewed from all sides. I went through all functions then panned back to the news to show the date and time to prove it was done just prior to me bixing it up. I then burned a copy to a disc (and uploaded the file to a Google drive account that was open for all to see) and included it with the item. I also limited the time to report shipping damages to 48 hours. I stated any damages were to be reported directly to the carriers and the items need to be inspected by then as an effort to reduce false insurance claims (insurance fraud).
Even with this posted I may add and the recording sent along eBay did nothing to support my proof and had no interest in anything I was doing to safeguard against this type of activity. They continued to play e blame on me and finally I quit paying their fees, and they left my account going until I was 2 months behind in payment. They ripped me off around $3000 and I was only able to recoup $1300 which is an inflated amount since they were overcharging me on my fees to begin with.
I have the map on my comp showing the shipping steering taktics they pulled. They never sent me any collections or followed up after they banned me from their site that's based on fraud and deceit. They had accomplished what they wanted at that time by removing me and thousands of other sma sellers from their site and could show they had a reason for doing it in case there was any backlash from their actions. I can't comment on how things are now but when I sold there it was a losing battle with bad buyers misusing their platform while they hid behind eBay with eBay siding 100% with them.
