EBAY

I've been complaining for some time that a lot of the products that 
I used to sell on Ebay (few of which anyone wants to buy from my 
own website) aren't selling anymore. Mainly electronic components, 
so I'm not really sure if this is people not using Ebay or maybe 
nobody except me still wants to build electronics with components 
that won't talk to smartphones, via pre-assembled modules (I had a 
go at making modules too, but I just don't really get it).

Ebay themselves have also become increasingly annoying over the 
years in a whole host of ways, which I don't have time to detail. 
But now with that rare 1980s mechanical keyboard I was talking 
about in the last post, they've reached a new level of active 
obstruction.

As I mentioned before, just as I was thinking of giving up on 
selling it, someone from Brazil showed an interest and wanted some 
quotes for sending it to them. The buyer's preferred option of 
couriers either refused or provided ridiculously expensive quotes 
(which is typical for pick-up from my location - they'll deliver 
parcels to me (eventually), but somehow I live in a location that's 
too remote for them to pick up from) so in the end I sent a message 
stating the Standard and Express costs to send by post, and noted 
that I'd updated the postage rates to Brazil on Ebay so they could 
go ahead and order through the Ebay listing page.

After sending that, right away Ebay sent me a message saying my 
keyboard listing had been taken down for voilation of their policy 
against "Offering to buy or sell outside of eBay". The page had an 
"appeal" link, so of course I sent them a message pointing out that 
I'd only been discussing postage options, never shared details for 
conducting the transaction off-Ebay, and in the last message had 
explicitly asked the buyer to purchase through Ebay, which they now 
can't do because the listing has been taken down!

Four days later, no response. I wrote a follow-up message, but the 
appeal button is now greyed out, so I couldn't submit it. I tried 
following "support" links to get another route for submitting my 
complaint, but that just took me to one of those useless AI 
chatbots which won't listen to more than 255 characters of text at 
a time.

So I created a new listing for the keyboard, in a different 
category and with a slightly different title to try and avoid an 
automatic take-down. But that failed, they took it down 
immediately, citing again their "Offering to buy or sell outside of 
eBay policy". If I changed it enough that it _really_ looked 
different, I'd be at risk of the buyer making a claim that the item 
received doesn't match the description and Ebay giving them an 
automatic refund.

In over a decade of Ebay selling, I've discussed postage options 
with buyers frequently there, with no issues like this. Obviously 
this time all the dollar amounts were taken blindly as evidence of 
me quoting prices if I sold the item directly off-Ebay, but any 
idiot could see I was quoting for postage/couriers not the item 
itself. In the current context it's pretty clear that what's 
changed is Ebay have now replaced their staff with something even 
worse than idiots: one of the resource-guzzling insane 
approximations of minds that are AI. While no human would be 
foolish enough to write a program to blindly kill any deal being 
discussed on an online marketplace using dollar signs, this 
super-intelligence has happily concucted its own inscrutable secret 
rules that probably boil down to exactly that.

Now I have the ridiculous situation where Ebay has acted to make 
sure that I _can't_ sell the keyboard through them, and after five 
days it looks like they won't back down on it either. In the face 
of that I did finally suggest yesterday that the buyer could look 
up my website and use the contact details there to arrange the 
transaction directly. But they haven't, presumably scared away now 
at this point, which is fair enough.

So it seems I will be keeping that, now packaged-up, keyboard for 
myself after all, since I'm now litterally blocked from selling it 
to anyone on Ebay, if anyone else will actually show interest 
before the keyswitch contacts corrode in storage and make it 
unreliable again. I was already frustrated by how much time I'd put 
into fixing it, plus recently repackaging it with more padding for 
international postage, and now Ebay cost me more time with 
pointless discussions/appeals and trying to recreate the listing. 
For nothing.

Trying to make money by myself in the modern world is increasingly 
making a career in getting blood from stones look attractive.

 - The Free Thinker