Category: Tips

eBay Returns and Refunds

eBay has a liberal return policy that protects buyers from items that don’t match the description. If you purchase an item and find that it is not as described, you can return the item for a full refund including shipping costs.

If the item is below your expectations, and you find when reviewing the listing that it was not described properly, you can return it.  If the item is as described, you should return it using another option, such as “doesn’t fit”, “changed my mind” or other reason available.

But you also have the option to request a partial refund from the seller. Sellers may consider a partial refund to avoid having to issue a full refund or ship a new item.

For example, if you bought a new camera, and it arrived with some scratches, you might be willing to keep the item if it was fairly priced. The seller may be willing to offer a discount after the fact rather than have to take the item back and relist it at the lower price.

You and the seller can work together to agree on an acceptable amount for a partial refund, or you can return the item.

eBay’s policy on refund can be found here:  http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/item-not-as-described.html

 

Sunday Listings

Historically, eBay sellers like to list auctions items on Sunday afternoons so they end on Sunday afternoon the following week.  It’s a good time to have items ending, since the number of buyers online tends to be higher then.

While BIN items can be listed at any time, Sunday listings are also popular for fixed price items.

Be sure not to miss these popular listing times for scooping up deals with BINSniper and VieBuy.

Other times that get more listing action for Sundays are Thursday afternoons for 3-day and 10-day listings.  Tuesday afternoons for the less common 5 day listings.

 

Using filter exclude options in BINSniper and VieBuy

We’ve noticed that a number of users are checking ALL of the exclude filter options. Checking all of the boxes will prevent you from seeing most if not all items.

The viebuy.com filter screen has been changed to warn about this and clarify it a bit:

If you check all the boxes, you will be excluding free shipping items, returnable items, best offer items, etc.

The same is true for BINSniper.  We will update the the BINSniper screen in 3.01.

Performance Tuning for BINSniper 3

The article describes performance tuning for the eBay website for VieBuy and BINSniper 3.0 or higher.

 

How this varies from the BINSniper 2.x recommendations:

BINSniper 3.x is more efficient on the network and performs better over 3G, WiFi and satellite connections too. There are no settings that improve item delivery speed.

The following Firefox setting can be used to improve image and script loading time on fast network connection. This primary impacts load time of the eBay pages.

Enter about:config into the Firefox address bar (where you type URLs). A settings list should appear. You may receive a warning first. If you do, accept the warning screen.

Enter the following into the search box:

network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server

Warning: This setting affects all websites. Increasing this setting too much may result in excessive demands being place on servers and you being banned.  10 is a reasonable maximum.

 

Double click to adjust the setting. Increase it to 10.

 

If this setting does not exist, right click the blank area of the screen and select New->Integer. Paste the name into the preference box, click OK, and enter 10 for the value.

Increasing this setting can improve image and script loading time on eBay.  Image loading may be improved on BINSniper and VieBuy websites when many items are displayed. This setting has no effect on item delivery speed.

 

Network Pipelining

Firefox has settings to enable network pipelining that are widely recommended as cure-alls. While these may improve performance in some cases, they are not likely to improve BINSniper performance for most users. Broadband users are unlikely to see any improvements at all in any circumstances by modifying the Firefox settings. Pipelining may also introduce some security risks. See this article at sys-con for more information on these issues. We do not recommend pipelining to improve BINSniper performance.

 

Use more specific searches for better speed and ease of use

For best performance, you should make your searches as tight as possible. Very broad searches will result in the entire item list being replaced with each update. More specific searches will yield fewer results and make it easier to work with the lists. You can use the streamer mode to separate lists on the screen, one for each search.

Limiting the number of searches improves display time on your browser. But more importantly it allows you to focus only on items that you would actually buy.

For example, if you have the following searches:

ipod nano blue case
ipod shuffle blue case

You could replace these with:

ipod blue case

The nano and shuffle searches would be included, as well as other ipod models.

Or you can use the OR syntax to limit the results to nano and shuffle only:

ipod blue case (nano, shuffle)

which means:   items containing “ipod” and “blue” and “case” and either “nano” or “shuffle”

 

Pale Moon

Pale Moon is a performance optimized version of Firefox for Windows. Pale Moon is (or was) derived from Firefox code, and has some hardware restrictions. It is not supported by Mozilla. Some BINSniper users are running Pale Moon, but we cannot provide support for it. The current release does not appear to implement the necessary features of Gecko 29+ required by BINSniper. We have not tested any version for performance or compatibility.

 

 

eBay Feed Changes

Data Feeds
eBay recently migrated their data feeds to a new system and severely reduced the speed at which items are added. They appear to be batching items, so some items will be very new while other with be minutes old when they hit the feed.

According to eBay, their websites will use the same data feed source, so items should appear in BINSNiper and VieBuy at the same speed as they do on the website.

In testing we find that items may arrive around 10-12 minutes after being listed, but will appear on the website at the same time. This also means that items will tend to arrive in groups rather than singly.

In practical terms, the new changes to the eBay servers mean that you will typically see items that started 0-15 minutes ago appear in the list with the majority being either less than two minutes old or around 10 minutes old. If eBay improves this batching behavior, the items will appear earlier in your results.

 

RSS Feeds
RSS speed is not yet affected by the data feed changes. We have also observed that RSS Feeds are not complete. Many items are never delivered via RSS but then later delivered by the Data Feeds.  The RSS feeds are also now delivering some items that are 12 hours old which should not be included.

 

Updates to deal with this

VieBuy 3.0 addresses these issues and filters out outdated items.

BINSniper 2.X is unaffected by the RSS issues, since it doesn’t use RSS, but is experiencing delays due to the data feed changes. BINSniper 3.0 now under final development will use our new data feed technology and should correct these issues and bring order to the galaxy.

 

The Future

eBay has made at least one public statement indicating that the they plan to do away with RSS feeds entirely. This may not end up being the case, since many webmaster tools such as WordPress plugins depend on the RSS feeds. But if RSS is eliminated, VieBuy will continue to deliver the data feed. Since everyone would then be on the same data source, timeliness should not be impacted.

 

Update  June 2015

Our stats indicate that RSS is no longer delivering items early.  We’ve stopped delivering RSS items to VieBuy and BINSniper 3+.  This allows faster processing of the data feeds.

 

 

eBay Fashion – Buy and Resell on eBay with BINSniper

eMarketer, who post data and insights on ecommerce, recently released an analysis of ecommerce in 2011 and projections for 2012. In the article, they project 20% growth in the fashion category in 2012, making it the fastest growing category.

That makes clothing lots a great buy/resell opportunity.   Use our BINSniper add-on for Firefox or the VieBuy.com website to find the best deals as they are listed.

Here’s an example:
Item: Lot of 100 set Alpaca Wool Sweater+hat+gl​oves+socks, andean designs high quality

Price: $1400 with free shipping from Peru, seller Detuei

Elsewhere on eBay, single priced alpaca sweaters range from $35-$150, Hat+scarf sets for $20+.

Breaking apart this lot and selling it as single items/set will yield more profit. When broken down, this lot could be sold as singles – 100 sweaters and 100 gloves/hat/mittens sets. Breaking it down further (separating the hats and scarves) would probably not add additional profit, but would add more work.  Potential income from resale is $5500-17000 or $4000-16000 profit!

The more you are able to spend, the better the deals get. Smaller lots are available too. It’s also possible to resell single items for a profit, such as premium designer items.

 

See some live clothing lot listings: