This, is Useful Components. I am an electronics engineer who likes to locate difficult to find parts for your weird electronics project or repair job. I also like accurate item descriptions, good photographs, and on-time dispatch. I believe that this is reflected in my feedback ratings.
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Components "The Trouble With (i)bay" Page
Updated 16 June 2019 General Ebay News
Multi-Buy Offers
I am currently trying out the much-vaunted ebay system of
offering some discounts on multiple purchases, which has been
implemented recently
on the UK site despite being
available elsewhere for years. This system has now been
extended by the ebay programmers. Unfortunately you must
use shopping cart to get the discount advertised on the
listing. Entering the desired quantity of items and
using the 'Buy it now' will not attract the advertised
discount. I imagine that this is a general problem and
I'll be checking this out to make sure. This makes me
and other sellers look like retail fraudsters, and so while
the
recording cassette spools turn at my end(*2), the
phone
line to ebay customer support will be burning red hot
tomorrow, to see what they have to say about it. The
same old denial of problem and promising to go away and look
at it will be doled out. I will probably have to
deactivate those multi-buy discounts until someone in ebay
grows a brain cell, because it verges on misrepresentation of
pricing. A cynical person might think that this makes
ebay more money in the very short term at the medium and long
term expense of themselves, their sellers, and retail
customers using the service.
Meanwhile, please use shopping cart if buying more than one of
the same thing.
Listing Title Auto-Translation on Non English Speaking
Sites
I've noticed recently that some 'people' in ebay upper and
middle management have, in their infinite wisdom, decided to
auto-translate most listing titles shown in search results on
various non-English speaking sites, certainly France and
Germany. I can only apologise and assure valued overseas
customers that responsible ebay sellers around the world are
complaining bitterly about this stupid and useless new
system. I know that I certainly am, and I've recorded
all the telephone calls for later publication. It works
particularly badly for many technical items and is likely to
be responsible for a 50% drop in my overseas sales. I
swear, that if you have more than two brain cells and work in
the ebay global management team, you'll shortly be sacked for
being over-qualified. Meanwhile, please click through
the badly mis-translated titles in the search results, where
you will probably find what you were actually looking for in
the first instance. Anyone can Google translate what you
find there, but doing it automatically for listing titles via
some translation company that you bought for a small fortune
is for the management idiots who made a big mistake and are
trying to cover it up.
As a last resort, you can always type ebay.co.uk into your
browser and see the search results listed properly.
Hidden Restrictions and Listing Search
Downgrades / Item Suddenly Unavailable
After careful statistical analysis of two and a half years of
sales data across two ebay shops in my name, I'm fully aware
of the system that frequently hides or downgrades listings, or
causes unnaccountable payment failures followed by a message
to the customer saying that, "This item is no longer
available," despite my recently being fully VAT
registered. This is used to throttle sales below an
invisible yearly limit. That protects ebay from being
held responsible for the unpaid VAT of unregistered sellers
trading above £85K per annum in the UK, which they are
according to UK law. The fact that this illegal cap is
still in place is no-doubt due to its clandestine nature, and
ebay incompetence in general. If you have tried to pay
for an item or suddenly can't find it any more, be assured
that it is still there and is available for sale. This
applies particularly to buyers from overseas who might find
that the item is available only if they type ebay.co.uk into
their browser.
The telephone battle on this issue will continue until I send
in a paper report and then finally publish the results online,
and hopefully on the BBC. Meanwhile, the Irish telephone
support centre continue their denials, and ebay as a company
continues to try very hard to become the Nokia Smartphones of
the online marketplace.
*1 If you have an infinite number of monkeys typing at
at infinite number of computer terminals recompiling their
code infinitely quickly, at some point you will end up with
the ebay website.
*2 All calls to ebay customer support are recorded on
cassette for evidence and then dubbed to .mp3 files for future
publication. Watch this space.
) 
