eBay negative eBay positive

The arrogance of eBay is breathtaking. When they set up their Australian tax heaven they did so with some support from the ACCC. So when they cooked up their new paypal scheme their Australian lawyers must have thought this was going to be a repeat performance. Everybody knows that forcing sellers into the paypal system is against any fair minded trade practice. It's also against section 47 of the Australian Trade Practices Act of 1974. eBay used their tired old excuse of "we're not really Australian, we just pretend to be, so the Australian laws don't apply to us" Amazingly, the ACCC has finally come up with a draft ruling against eBay

"The ACCC considers that the notified conduct has, or is likely to have, the effect of substantially lessening competition in the market in which PayPal operates. The ACCC also considers that the notified conduct is likely to result in reduced choice for consumers, higher transactions costs and reduced innovation in online payment systems. Therefore, the ACCC concludes that the substantial anti-competitive detriments outweigh any public benefits resulting from the notified conduct. Accordingly, the ACCC proposes to issue a notice to revoke notification N93365 lodged by eBay International A.G. on 11 April 2008."

eBay's request to bend the Trade Practices Act was denied by the ACCC. A public hearing was ordered and I think the odds of eBay winning the next round are pretty slim. The writing is on the wall, one down, plenty more to go..... keep the bastards honest.

no more negative feedback from sellers.....

Sellers no doubt have reason to be pissed off once more. However, as a buyer I have argued for years that a feedback system that allows retaliatory feedback from sellers is absolutely useless because it intimidates buyers into not leaving negative feedback at all. Most of us have swallowed some pretty amazing cases of misrepresentation and not uttered a word of disapproval. It will be interesting to see whether the new system will encourage buyers to tell the seller what they really think about the heap of junk he/she jus sold as a prefect lot.....

I doubt that it will change much. eBay simply can't provide a fair market place. It's a cyber construct to make money for eBay shareholders. In the real world , in real auctions, buyers and sellers share the cost with a buyers premium and a sellers commission and the auctioneer is governed by the auctioneer's act and the fair trading act that make him responsible for the way goods are sold. eBay has done away with all that and ironically, it worked because it attracted untold millions of sellers who loved the idea of becoming wheelers and dealers overnight and in absolute anonymity. For the privilege of not going through the hoops and the red tape, the taxes, fees and levies every registered business has to endure they still are willing to cop whatever eBay throws at them! And eBay thrives in the black hole of cyberspace, with zero responsibility, no consumer protection, misrepresentation and outright fraud some of its sellers heap upon their buyers. eBay's solution: now you can tell the seller what a bastard he is and he can't do anything about it. Make you feel better?

One more kick in the seller's guts

We must be the biggest bunch of suckers under the sun! eBay Australia - a Swiss registered entity run by the Yanks and operating in murky, tax free cyberspace, seems to use Australia as their testing ground for how much more there is to be milked out of the average eBay seller. And what a splendid herd of milkers we make! Remember? They did away with reserves, they hid the id of bidders so that nobody can find a buyer outside eBay, they increased fees time and again and in their latest sting, they force sellers to exclusively use their own payment system called paypal. For an extra fee, of course. This is like Westpac insisting that only their own cheques can be deposited in any of their branches. I find it absolutely amazing that eBay even considered this step. Maybe we simply let them get away with blue murder for too long. No company trading in Australia should be allowed to operate outside the Fair Trading Act. eBay still does..

You can easily fix it ... don't use eBay to sell. Have a garage sale, go to the flea market, advertise in the local paper, build your own web site, have an auction, find another internet auction like and most importantly, sell your eBay shares ASAP... a company that has so little regard for its paying customers simply won't survive. All it takes is one successful competitor and millions of frustrated sellers will put the boot in..... you can put money on it.

Who said the old tool dog was too negative...... This is how you can

make eBay work for you without paying fees.

I've been buying and selling on eBay for over 10 years and I've seen them grow from a geek site into a mega business venture that has killed more Antique shops and other small businesses then the depression.. eBay works because it allows everybody to become a dealer without putting them through all the hoops registered businesses have to jump through. Some sellers have turned their little backyard operations into big businesses of their own but eBay still feeds off the millions of small time sellers and hopes to lure them into bigger and better things by offering them an eBay shop and become an eBay business. All of them pay large fees and commissions for the privilege and they have absolutely no control over their fate once they have signed up. eBay makes the rules, the sucker sellers pay, basta!

Fair enough, eBay doesn't twist your arm to join them as a seller but if you do you should think twice about becoming too good at it. If your business becomes hooked on eBay as your one and only selling tool you could find yourself up the creek with no paddle and nobody to call for help. My advice to any seller is simple: Don't let eBay profit from your hard work and success, don't open an eBay store, don't sell on eBay,

build your own web site and use eBay as a cheap marketing tool - then sell from your own site and buy on eBay, it's free!!

eBay rules and policies are there to enhance the eBay bottom line. Once you strip away their friendly-neighbourhood-community-spiel you'll find that they are simply another hard nosed multi-national with their eyes firmly on the bottom line. If you have ever tried to sort out even the simplest of problems you'd find that they have made it all but impossible for you to be heard. Each and every action and inaction on their part has only eBay's interest in mind. Their customer service is possibly the worst on earth, their help line is a joke and their listings policies are a disgrace - but don't let me get too carried away, I really am not here to keep the bastards honest, I'm just telling you how I used eBay to direct traffic to my web site.

Advertising your site on eBay is against listing policies. Never mind that they bombard you with their own paid third party advertising every time you get on their site, they even use tracking cookies to monitor your every move!! You are supposed to read their ads but don't you dare putting your own on the page you paid for. If they catch you they'll throw your listing out. Big deal! You can always try again, and again, until you get it right.

The fact that eBay relies on computer power and has all but done away with service of the human kind is a pain in the backside if you need to talk to somebody with a voice but a blessing if you want to slip in a free ad or two. It's you against a dumb machine. You will win. You'll get your link on there , one way or other.

In 1997 I built my first web site with Microsoft FrontPage. That was the easy part. Now I needed traffic. In my next eBay listing I typed: please visit my web site or similar. That would trigger the machine into a warning, it's against eBay listing policy .... you know the drill.

Visit, web site www. etc. would all trigger the warning but pictures wouldn't It's not against eBay policy to include as many pictures as you like. JPEG or GIF form of visit my web site .. in your pictures won't offend the machine. That got me a trickle of visitors but I needed more.

I needed a proper link to click on and that could only be achieved by using an html code. If you use a program like FrontPage or Publisher or others you can simply copy and paste the code version of your design into your eBay listing. I used a relatively small picture logo that said for more tools click here and this would bring up my web site This was - and I guess still is- against eBay listing policy but except in one instance *), my eBay listings were never thrown out and I never saw another warning, again. If you need a legal justification for this, there is plenty of room in the eBay rules, policies and assorted small print and crap . Just make your link an integral part of your listing, shipping and payment policies. Take eBay's lead on this, by visiting this page you agree to my rules... and so on.

If you build up two or three eBay seller ids you'll get a lot of advertising space and room to manoeuvre should one of them turn bad. The links produced a remarkable increase in visitor numbers and best of all, it ultimately freed me of selling on eBay. My own site is much cheaper to operate and it produces much better results. My wife still lists stuff on eBay Australia, I even let her have some tools but that's her own business. She obviously doesn't read my blog. That doesn't really hurt my feelings but some of her miserable eBay results do.

Sceptics might point out that eBay has millions of visitors against my 300 per day. It's a myth eBay loves to spread around. List your old Stanley 4 on eBay and millions of visitors will fight over it! You'll be lucky if 50 people will actually look at it during 7 days of listing and once the eBay and paypal fees are paid you'll probably come to the inevitable conclusion that you could have done a lot better yourself. I did.

*) That was an intervention of the human kind, one of the eBay goons I was in contact with got offended when I started questioning eBay's miserable treatment of GST sellers and asked for an ATO ruling on it - he cancelled all my listings. I haven't been back every since.

According to a report in the Australian Financial Review, eBay Australia has 5 million Australian users that turned over an estimated one billion dollars since the new tax system came into force. eBay charges a listing fee plus a commission called final value fee on all sales. eBay claims it makes no profit in Australia and does not have to pay taxes. Please give this some thought... ...... with a quarter of the Australian population on their books they still can't make a profit! Every lolly seller could do better! Or maybe he would only look better because he couldn't dig a giant tax hole to fly his loot right through cyberspace into a Swiss bank. Are they just minimising taxes?

eBay has no qualms in making their sellers pay! Australian GST registered sellers are forced to include GST in their eBay prices. So what about eBay fees? eBay takes a commission on the final value which means that we actually pay commission on the GST as well!! Commission for a multinational that pays no tax in Australia on a tax we pay to the Australian Government- that must be the ultimate con!!! And to make it worse, because eBay avoids paying GST on the commission, sellers are denied their input credits.

Don't think for one minute that we're talking peanuts. I was amazed to learn how much top sellers pay in eBay fees! I don't want to disclose any individuals but they range from $ 100,000 to several hundred thousand per annum. EACH!!! You read correctly, f e e s not turnover! You need a very big calculator to work out how much that is for all the GST registered sellers amongst the 5 million Australian eBay users. 1/11th of that should have been allowed as input credits for the registered sellers. They missed out and so did all of us through lost taxes.

The purchase of a second-hand car between an Australian seller and buyer clearly is a GST supply. If mum and dad sell their old Holden it's not. If a registered business sells the same car it is. If the supply is taxable the commission on the supply is taxable, too. Yet eBay argues that somehow they are disconnected from it all because they channel their commission through a Swiss company. Try to sell the same car through an Australian car yard or advertise it in an Australian newspaper. They all pay GST and income tax for the very same transaction.

Does anybody outside the corporate arrogance of eBay Inc really think it's ok for a cyberspace invader to sign up 5 million Australians, take their money and blast off without paying a cent of taxes? Does anybody truly believe that this is anything but tax evasion and an insult to every registered Australian business that pays GST and income tax for an identical transaction?

eBay's digital tax evasion with the help of a Swiss go-between has already been outlawed in Europe. In European countries eBay had to include value added tax with their commission way back in 2003. In Australia they can continue to operate the same old tax scheme with the full blessing of the ATO. Sad but true.

My request for a tax ruling on the question whether withholding tax applied to eBay fees was answered with one word: No. Remember, the ATO won't rule on whether eBay should pay taxes or not but the implication was certainly there. To put it in simple terms: the ATO has gone back to the narrow interpretation of domicil in Australia as defined by 60 year old tax laws. The ATO could have shown a lot more courage by ruling with the intent of the law for any transaction connected with Australia for which an Australian company has to pay taxes - regardless of the domicil. It wouldn't have forced eBay to pay taxes, but it would have given sellers who lost their input credits a good footing for a legal challenge.

For the time being, eBay is off the hook. For the time being, every tax scheming internet entity with a domicil outside Australia can avoid paying taxes in this country. Never mind that this digital tax avoidance is illegal in most other countries, in the colonies you can still get away tax free because our law makers haven't woken up to the fact that internet trade doesn't need a domicil or, like eBay, hides their true domicil behind an Australian .com.au address. (note that in cyber parlance this actually is called a domicil ergo, eBay.com.au is an Australian domicil) No point in blaming the ATO for their lack of courage, they ruled with outdated laws our parliament has failed to bring into line with modern trade.

I think I have stressed it many times before: I have no material or moralistic interest in this. I simply was intrigued by the double standards that make a transaction taxable depending on where you register your web site. According to the ATO: the business is where the server is - even if you use an Australian domicil web address. I should have taken the hint long ago. I'm convinced that a court challenge would force eBay into Australian tax jurisdiction but if the ATO is happy to forego millions in lost GST I'm certainly not interested in doing the dirty work for them. It took the European community 5 years to reign in eBay's tax avoidance scheme. Our five years are well and truly up. We might be in for a very long wait before our lawmakers finally will ask the ATO to stop business from disappearing into tax free cyber space.

PS: in the last year or so I have been contacted by a lot of disgruntled eBay sellers, a couple of barristers in their quest to seek justice for their clients as well as the odd media person. Unlike the rest of us without a voice, some of those folks actually get to talk to real Australian eBay front men without paying for the "seminar" privilege. If you're granted the a free audience with the top dog, here is the question you should ask: "Sir, you're running the largest Australian internet company with 5 million users and you still don't make a profit. You absolutely suck at your job. How come your bosses haven't fired you a long time ago?"

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