How long can you keep selling on eBay?
I’d like advice from other sellers like me,
I have a basic shop on eBay, and I sell via dropshipping from suppliers with a regular VAT number. This is because I don’t have the ability to source from suppliers with products in bulk and have my own warehouse. I thought about selling on eBay thinking: the buyer purchases, eBay sends me the funds, I buy from the supplier and ship to the buyer. Okay, in December I had a high number of sales, over 200 orders, but something goes wrong, eBay blocks the incoming funds for me twice in that same month of December, and I find myself with over 8,000 euros in deliveries, (of which eBay earns 2,480 euros, I 656 euros) that I cannot front, with customers bombarding me with messages to reply to, sending over 200 messages to customers to let them know their order is arriving late, from which I receive further messages to respond to, insults from customers, who rightly feel taken for a ride, negative feedback galore, simply because the customer was unhappy, I spend entire days working on the eBay site to solve the problem and end up seeing my earnings from all that work. In the meantime I wait for eBay to unblock my funds and I call support to explain the situation, I explain everything and they tell me I must first ship and prove that the orders are delivered and then they will unblock the money, but I don’t have 80000 euros to front. In conclusion, I find myself having to refund over 200 customers, which is a huge amount of work, while in the meantime I’m bombarded with messages from customers who want explanations, so since December 1st I’ve been working on the eBay site like crazy, and in the end I find myself with no profit at all. But I worked.... Is all this fair? Is it worth tearing yourself apart to create a shop on eBay, or do you end up spending days working, but in the end see no profit? Has anyone had a similar case? How did you solve it?
