Unscrupulous eBay seller practices are costing consumers. In-store promotions are scaling back to prevent sellers from ripping off the stores. Whether you sell on eBay, buy on eBay, or even if you don’t use eBay at all, this affects every customer that makes purchases in any way, shape, or form.

Have you ever found a great deal in a store and thought to yourself, “I could sell this on eBay and make some money off of it”? It is completely legal to purchase an item at a sale or clearance price and then resell it on eBay. The store makes money at the price point they chose and therefore they don’t lose anything. Then you could potentially make money selling it for more than you bought it for. But what happens if you can’t get a buyer, if your auction doesn’t get any bids?

A good seller will relist the item, change some of the keywords to improve search results, take better pictures of the item, and maybe even lower the starting price. Then if they still can’t sell it they do the honorable thing and accept their financial loss from investing in this item. What does an unscrupulous seller do? They return the item to the store.

The Reseller Return War

“So what? People make returns all the time. It’s no big deal.” It’s not that simple. A store return policy exists to encourage customers to feel comfortable buying products and be assured that they can return the item if it is defective or sometimes simply because the customer changes their mind. Their business plans expect some profit losses caused by returns. What is happening is that resellers are taking advantage of the return policies of stores. They will find a good deal, buy multiples of the item, and if they can’t sell all of the items they return them.

Why Does this Hurt Businesses?

Overstock: After customers buy items, the store then does inventory. Based on the sales volume they decide how much to restock. Say a customer buys 10 items and the store decides to restock 10 items. Then that customer comes back 2 weeks later returning 8 of those items. The store now has an overstock of the item and will be unlikely to recoup their costs.

Charge Backs: Every time a customer uses a credit or debit card to make a purchase the store is charged a fee (usually 3% of the transaction) by the credit card company. When a customer makes a return, the customer gets the full amount of the transaction price back but the store then loses out on that 3%, plus they are often charged a “charge back” fee in order to refund the amount to the customer.

How Does This Hurt You?

When stores have an increase of losses they make up for it by increasing prices. This means finding a good deal is harder to come by. Furthermore, return policies get stricter and promotions limit the quantity available per customer.

eBay Sellers
It’s not that selling on eBay hurts stores. It’s that unscrupulous practices of eBay sellers hurt stores. In fact, there are a number of other ways that immoral sellers are hurting stores as explained on PaidOpps.com.

What Do You Think?

Do you think that unscrupulous eBay sellers are hurting your in-store shopping experience? Are they making clearance season less of a bargain? What do you think we can do as customers to help prevent these practices?

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(Original photo by Gene Wilburn, used under Creative Commons license.)