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Table of Contents
Customer Service Notes (venting in frustration) Travel Notes by Richard SeltzerIt’s frustrating that all the graphics editing packages are designed for graphic artists and speak a language that only they understand.
I’d like software that for photos of people would let me select how many years or how many pounds to take off. Then I could send out Christmas cards with photos of my wife and I that look younger than the photos of our children
And once the digital photo editing problem has been solved, they should move on to real-world editing so I could take years and pounds off for real. I bet that program would sell pretty well
A couple of weeks ago, it went blank. From the owner’s manual, I guessed that the problem was the bulb. The manual (which I should have read before buying the TV, but of course you only get the manual when you open up the box at home) indicated that the bulb is usually the first thing to go, and that it is easy to replace. So I called customer service, and after two hours of waiting and then after being shunted to another number and another number, I finally was able to speak to a human being who tried to step me through the process of removing the old bulb to inspect it and see if it looked broken. But the detailed directions I was given were in error. The service person insisted that the screw should come off. But in fact it only loosens, after which you have to yank the plastic cover off. Since I was unable to get the bulb out following her directions, she said I had no choice but to call a local Panasonic service company, and they should come out, and for no charge (because it was under warranty) take out the old bulb, and if necessary, replace it. So I called the only company they had listed that was within 10 miles of my home in Boston. After another long wait, the person there informed me that the soonest they could schedule a visit was in SIX WEEKS. She also told me that the technician could not bring along a new bulb because they are “very expensive”. If it turned out that I needed a new bulb, they would then order a new bulb from Panasonic, and I’d have to schedule another appointment for about six weeks from then. In other words, I could expect to be without a TV for three months.
So, since the bulb was covered by warranty, I called Panasonic again, and waited on hold forever again, to try to order the replacement bulb, so I would have one handy when the technician took out the old bulb. This time I found out that the bulb costs $300 and typically needs to be replaced once a year. NB — this is not a picture tube or anything fancy. It is a bit fancier than a light bulb you put in a lamp — but not by much. So basically, by buying their television I was signing up to pay them $300 about once a year for as long as I own the TV…
Because the bulb is so expensive, I needed to fax them a copy of the original sales receipt (by some miracle, I was able to dig that out), together with the serial number (conveniently located in the middle in the back of the unit in very small type — in other words in a position that is inaccessible on a very bulky and heavy unit), and a laundry list of other information. Then I would have to give them my credit card information so they could charge me $300 if for any reason they deemed that I didn’t qualify for the warranty. Then they would send me a replacement bulb; and I would have to send back the old bulb in the exact same packaging, or otherwise I’d be charged the $300. A very cumbersome and unfriendly process for an event that is likely to happen many thousands of times, given the fragility of that part.
While talking to that person no the phone, I continued to fiddle with the plastic casing, and accidentally discovered that it would indeed come off even though the screw did not (and could not possible, by design) come off. The old bulb had shattered completely on the inside.
So I faxed them what they needed. And the new bulb arrived just two days later. And it was easy to slide back in place.
If they had told me up front that the bulb cost $300 and that it would need to be replaced once a year, I would have taken that information into account when comparing their set with similar units from other companies. Since they concealed that information, I feel cheated.
Then my “customer service” experience with them was far more complicated and frustrating than need be. If this part fails so often, they should have a quick and simple process to get replacements (and the people who field the calls should be familiar with the equipment they are talking about). A customer problem could and should be an opportunity to learn more about customer experiences and expectations, and an opportunity to bend over backwards and delight the customer. If your problem is solved quickly and well, you can wind up being very happy and become extremely loyal to the manufacturer who treated you so well. Instead, Panasonic treated customer service as a cost and an annoyance; and basically showed no concern whatsoever for the customer.
Having experienced Panasonic’s “customer service,” I would certainly never buy another product of any kind from that company. And I would strongly advise others to avoid them as well.
I went to their site http://www.upromise.com/ and got the same impression. I signed up. I gave them credit card information, believing that purchases made with that card would add a little to my fund. I gave them frequent buyer card numbers for stores in my area that they listed as participants — Roche Brothers, Shaws, and CVS.
I went back to their site a couple weeks and hundreds of dollars of purchases later. Nothing in my account. It occurred to me how stupid it was of them not to update these accounts very frequently. Even if they were only putting in pennies a day, many members would come back again and again to see the progress, and the Web traffic could generate ad revenue for them.
I went back after a month — still nothing.
I went back after six weeks — two cents: literally $.02.
Two weeks later — the same two cents. But by then I had spent about $2000 at the designated stores and using the credit card I had registered.
I sent repeated queries to their “customer service”. Then I sent them repeated angry emails.
Eventually, someone called me and explained that no, I don’t get credit for purchases with that card or purchases at that store. I only get credit for particular products bought there and with that card — somewhere buried at their site is a list of such products. And none of those products is of the least interest to me.
I immediately cancelled my account.
They are probably working within the limits of the law. But to me, and I’m sure to many others, their marketing is extremely misleading. And their actual value proposition is pathetic.
I just wish there were a company that was offering what upromise seemed to offer — the equivalent of frequent flier miles for building a child’s college fund.
Unfortunately, that great computer from Dell came with McAfee preinstalled.
What a nightmare!
In the setup process, I made sure not to include the McAfee Spamkiller or FireWall. Dad didn’t want or need either of those.
He was more interested in email than the Web. And he was soon using email every day, until the various time-bombs that McAfee has built-in began to explode.
First there were the McAfee popup ads and “reminders” that littered the screen and confused him.
Then email wouldn’t work at all. Outlook Express couldn’t access the mail server. I tried everything I couid think of. Then I called the cable ISP, thinking the problem must be with them (though Web surfing worked fine). the tech there immediately asked if I was using McAfee. Apparently lots of people have had this problem. The Spamkiller in McAfee periodically changes the settings in Outlook Express to point to a non-existent number-designated mail server. Why? Why? Why? Yes, indeed, that is what had happened on my Dad’s computer, even though Spamkiller wasn’t turned on. I made the change. Two days later, email didn’t work again. Once again the settings in Outlook Express had been changed. I changed them back again. And I tried contacting McAfee. The 800 phone number they provided on-screen, as part of the software, that you should call to renew was “no longer in service”. And of course, their web site provided no way to talk to a human being, and I couldn’t even find a way to send them an email
The next day, the same thing happened — no email service. Over and over again. Finally, the initial subscription period for McAfee ended, and this nonsense stopped.
But popup ad/reminders for McAfee continued and continued…
Of course, I could uninstall McAfee and install something else instead. But the experience was simply too frustrating. Dad has decided he doesn’t really need a computer. It’s not worth the hassle.
And I’ll certainly never do business with McAfee again, and never buy
a computer with McAfee pre-installed.
We dialled the number and heard a strange repeated tone. We weren’t sure what the tone meant. It was different from anything we had ever heard on a phone in the US. It could have meant that the phone was ringing or that the line was busy. No one picked up. We tried again and again and kept getting the same tone. Eventually, we gave up on that phone, and tried another. That time the call went through fine. Apparently, the tone on the first one had meant “out of order”. Maybe foreign language classes and pocket language guides should include “tones” as well as words.
Soon we arrived at the hotel and checked in. Then we ran into our second totally unexpected challenge — the front door of the hotel. It wouldn’t open, and the desk clerk was on break. Fortunately, another guest helped. It turned out that you needed to push what looked like a light switch on the wall to the right of the door.
So we walked across the street to the apartment building where friends of ours live. We had the security code that we needed to type in for a bell to ring in their apartment. But when he entered that number, nothing seemed to happen. Eventually, we figured out that after entering the code, we needed to push a “bell” button — which which wasn’t labelled “bel” in any language, but rather with a symbol which wasn’t easy to notice of decipher in the semi-dark hallway.
So our friends buzzed us in and we walked through the door to the hall leading to the elevator. But the hallway was dark — too dark to see where the elevator was. We found that in hotels and apartment buildings lights typically are typically off until you push a light switch (which is rather hard to find in the dark, especially if you have never been there before) and then shut off automatically after about 30 seconds. Once our night vision kicked in we were okay, and we soon got used to where the light switches were likely to be.
Once in the elevator, I remembered from French classes over 40 years ago that the French call the ground floor the “rez de chaussee” and the second floor is the “first floor”. The buttons were labelled “0, 1, 2, 3. So we needed to push 2 to go to the third floor.
Back in 1963, Kennedy was president of the US, DeGaulle was president of France, and churchill was till alive.
That was just 18 years after the en dof World War II.
There were no personal computers, no cell phones, no video games.
Television was black and white only; and there were only three TV networks, which meant a maximum of three channels in the biggest cities (jsut VHF, no UHF, much less cable. Where I lived (Plymouth, NH), we could only receive one channel, from Poland Spring, Maine; which seemed to run the Lawrence Welk Show over and over and over.
There was no videotape. There were no audio cassettes.
For music, we bought 33 rpm and 45 rpm recoreds.
There was no Internet, not even a precursor to it.
Gasoline cost about 40 cents a gallon.
Yale cost about $3000/yaer (tuition, room, and board).
You could buy a new American-made car for less than $2000.
A comic book cost 10 cents.
Ted Williams still played for the Red Sox. Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra still played for the Yankees.
The Viet Nam War had not yet started.
This section of Paris is about two miles south of the historical and tourist center of the city. ”Chinatown” did not exist 43 years ago. It grew rapidly after the Viet Name War, with refugees from Viet Nam and Cambodiea (the former French Indochina).
Some days we walked to the center of town (the Seine at Notre-Dame Cathedral and the Sorbonne at Boulevard Saint-Michel). But when we didn’t have the time or energy for the walk, buses were very convenient.
The walk took us up “Rue des Gobelins”. I kept looking for gargoyles or other indications of gobelins. It turned out that the reference was to a medieval/renaissance tapestry business that had flourished there. (Shortly after I returned home, I saw a reference to it in Will Durant’s “Life of Greece”, comparing the artistry of Gobelin tapestries to the crafts of ancient Greece.)
ATMs in Paris work with American debit cards and give you cash in euros. But many ATMs are out of order. It could take a while to find one that works. And they charge very high rates for the currency conversion — it’s no bargain over the dubious currency-exchange shops that are plentiful throughout the city.
We saw no parking meters, so I quickly jumped to the conclusion that parking was free downtown. No way. Each block has an automated payment station. You park wherever you can and then go to the payment station and insert an identification/debit/payment card. The machine won’t take cash. (I have no idea how foreigners are supposed to know what to do, and how they could possibly pay even if they did figure out the procedure).
The Louvre is always closed on Tuesdays. But the guide book to the museums of Paris, published by the tourist bureau, doesn’t tell you that. And the people at the information booth in the Louvre itself did not tell us that even when asked about hours.
The first casino opened there in late 1970s. There are about a dozen of them now (three with “Trump” in the name). Each is a monstrous, gaudy building, with hotel rooms as well as gambling, and designed, apparently, on the model of casinos in Las Vegas. Each has everything you might need, including lots of restaurants and entertainment and shopping. Once you walk in the door, the objective is clearly to keep you there, to make you forget the boardwalk and the ocean outside. And interconnecting walkways let you go from one casino to another without ever glimpsing the “real world”.
Miscellaneous thoughts — It finally dawned on me that “trump” is a great name for a casino owner. And also, seeing hundreds all the local residents/summer visitors fishing from the piers and the boardwalk at all hours of the day, I couldn’t help but think of the similarity of fishing and gambling — both fueled by random reinforcement, people returning again and again, even though they lose far more often than they win. And, also, unfortunately, I saw that home building in Atlantic City is another form of gambling.
It’s a city built on sand. And it looks like none of the city is any higher than ten feet above sea level. Everywhere you see the scars of old storms — the wreckage of once huge and affluent piers, and water damage on the boardwalk and buildings here and there. But there are no signs of any significant measures taken to protect against future storms.
The shoreline is now cluttered with expensive housing developments — ticky-tacky nearly identical boxes packed so tightly together that none of them have yards any bigger than the typical balcony. And many more are under construction — on lots where previous houses were destroyed by storms.
My wife and son and I visited the Atlantic City Museum on our last day there, hoping to see some photos of the major storms that have hit here and the damage they caused. There were no such photos. But the woman at the information desk confirmed that the danger seems great and nothing has been done to protect against the next Katrina-strength hurricane. And she added that she saw how fast those casino towers were built, and suspects that the construction isn’t strong enough to withstand a major storm. Her greatest fear is that those towers will topple…
Very recent novels that I’d recommend very highly –
The Dream of Scipio by Iain Pears
The Book of Illusions by Auster
Atonement by Ian McEwan
The Number 1 Ladies’s Detectie Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro
Arthur and George by Julian Barnes
Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres
The Cave by Jose Saramago
Blindness by Jose Saramago
The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl
The Diagnosis by Alan Lightman
Novels from 10-30 years ago that I’d still recommend very highly–
The Goldbug Variations by Richard Powers
All the Pretty Horses (and other books in that series) by Cormac McCarthy
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Marquez
Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban
The World According to Garp by John Irving
Snow Crash by Neal Stepehnson
Non-fiction –
The Art of Travel by Alain Botton (you have/borrowed this one)
The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
Mortal Lessons by Richard Selzer
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
Because of the continuing conflicts in the Middle East, I recently sent out a series of book-length Library of Congress studies focusing on the countries that have been most in the news: Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, and Iran.
And as a followup, over the last few weeks, I sent out the first two volumes of “Wars of the Jews” by Josephus.
Before that, prompted by the success of Pirates of the Caribbean II, I sent out a couple of pirate books — The Life, Adventures, and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton by Daniel Defoe, and The Book of Pirates by Howard Pyle.
Before that, in time for France’s Bastille Day celebration, I sent out The Adventures of Gerard and Exploits of Brigadier Gerard two collections of stories about the Napoleonnic Wars by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (author of the Sherlock Holmes stories), volume 1 of The French Revolution by Thomas Carlyle, and A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
For the Fourth of July, I sent The Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, Burke’s Speech on Conciliation with America, The Life of General Francis Marion (The “Swamp Fox”) by Mason Weems, and four chapters from The Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution by Mercy Otis Warren (Chapt 9 — which covers the writing and signing of the Declaration of Independence, Chapter 21 — the Battle of Yorktown (as you’ve never seen it described before), and Chapters 30 and 31 — the conclusion
I’m a fan of Mercy Otis Warren. Her history, written shortly after the Revolution, wasn’t published until about 1805 and was never widely circulated. The only printed copies you can find in libraries today are in the old Black Forest script, which is very hard to read and impossible to scan. I typed the whole thing in (over 1000 pages) and posted it on my Web site a few years ago and now include it in my American Revolution, US History, and Non-Fiction I also typed in and posted her plays and other related writings.
Please let me know if you’d like me to add you to the distribution list.
Their home page is crisp and clean and search oriented, as it always has been and always should be. (Unlike AltaVista, they didn’t get suckered into trying to turn their site into a general-purpose “portal”). But if you click on the link for “More” you’ll see more. And if you then click on “Even More”, you’ll see a lot more. But still you won’t see everything they have to offer, or even the most interesting of all (to a writer/publisher like me).
Do a Google search for “Google base” or go directly to http://base.google.com/
There you will find a massive experiment. Google is basically offering to not just index you content, but to host it — even product and service offerings — for free. And through a related service, Google Checkout, they’ll make it easy for customers to buy from you online. And you can link from your content/product listings to your main site or store site, all for free, and (one would hope and expect) with good ranking in the Google search engine.
I’m just beginning to explore the posibilities for my own business — first with my products (book collections on CD and DVD) and then I’ll try articles and book chapters of mine.
Despite it’s potential, this service is not yet ready for prime time (which is probably why they aren’t waving flags to attract more users). I guess you’d say the project is in “beta” mode — it works and works well, but it’s not “user-friendly” yet for the publisher.
Let’s look at the product side, since that’s all I’ve experimented with so far. You can list individual items by typing them in, following a very restrictive form. But having done so (which can take a long time), the listing is only good for 30 days. so you’ll need to come back to relist it, which isn’t too bad if they have saved what you entered, but several times my listings were “lost”. And I went through a couple weeks of battling automated “disapprovals”. Some of my CDs contain books the titles of which happen to have words that Google’s automated sniffers deemed inappropriate (like the G.A. Henty historical novel about the fight for independence in the Netherlands “By Pike and Dyke” or the 17th Century play “Tis a Pity She’s a Whore”). The automated sniffer also concluded that I was selling copyrighted material, which is not the case — these books are public domain. It took lots of email exchanges with the Google Base service people (who were very helpful, though probably overwhelmed by questions, because so much about this service is very scantily described on the Web site) to finally get a half dozen items listed. And being listed in Google Base meant they were immediately findable through Froogle, Google’s shopping search engine.
As an alternative, if you have lots of products, you can use their “bulk upload” option. At first, that was totally out of my league. They required that you submit information in formats I had never heard of and couldn’t possibly produce. Then they added the possibility of creating a file in Excel and saving it as “tab delimited text”. Well, I’m not a fan of Excel, but I do have the software; so I gave it a try. At the very least that would mean that my listings would be lost — I’d always have the info on my system for resubmission. Also, I soon discovered, when you bulk upload you can link to have visitors directed straight to the relevant store page instead of to a listing page at Google Base from which they could go to your store page. The less steps a customer has to go through the better. And bulk upload also made it easy to include an image with each listing.
On the negative side, Google Base is designed as a database, which you populate with structured information, unlike the typical AltaVista-style search engine which creates an index out of unstructured information, and makes it possible to find the needle in the haystack without disturbing the haystack. The database approach involves organizing every piece of hay and every piece of any other kind of thing in the stack, and then allowing searches. But this is free. And it is a potentially massive effort. (Once this goes totally live [out of beta] it could quickly grow to be far larger than the entire Internet was back when AltaVista was designed). So I should quibble over what is probably an irrelevant philosophical issue.
The database approach does, however, put a lot of work in the hands of the publisher submitting information, especially since folks like me (without exceptional technical knowledge) have to use Excel, which is laden with quirks.
So what do I have to complain about? Little things that can be very annoying. I submit a bulk upload. In it I have made a mistake — either I misunderstood the scany directions (that the column with “expiration date” has to be in the format 2006-10-12) or maybe I just made a foolish blunder. Within an hour of when up do the bulk upload, the upload page lets me know there is a mistake and gives me clues as to what is wrong. I immediately fix the mistake and upload again, only to be informed that I can only upload once an hour; so I have to wait before submitting the correction, then wait again for confirm that I did it right that time. And sometimes the automated checking passes my upload and I get an email a couple days later from a human being telling me that there was another kind of mistake. Fortunately, the people who send those emails are very helpful and clear. So wading through quick sand I make progress (at the cost of lots of time).
And at first many of those “mistakes” were automatically generated by Excel. If I enter a date in the format Google requires — e.g., 2006-10-12 — Excel automatically changes that to 10/12/2006. To keep the format unchanged, I have to put a single quotation mark in front of it — ‘2006-10-12. But then if I try to copy and paste that info (if it needs to be repeated over and over) Excel sometimes (apparently randomly) adds an extra single quotation mark, which also screw up Google Base. Also when I copy and paste descriptions and tables of contents from my store pages to the appropriate columns of Excel, Excel sometimes (not always and in a way that is not immediately evident) changes the format of that cell to “wrap”, which screws up the files when it is saves as tab-delimited text and hence for Google submission. Likewise, when I enter an ISBN number (the standard book indentification numbers used by publishers), which typically begins with a zero, I need to put a single quote before the zero or Excel automatically deletes the zero.
Images also posed a problem for me. And I still don’t know how the ordinary publisher would do that. Apparently, you need to provide a link to the image on the Web. A very helpful Google Base support person pointed out to me that my store pages at Yahoo already have images and that if you click on the image displayed with the description there, you get to a Web page that consists of just the image. Linking to that URL does the trick.
Then I recently made the mistake of by my copy and paste method including equal sites in a product description cell. Much to my surprise and confusion, that meant that the version saved as tab-delimited text was truncated at that cell. It took me a long time to figure out that the equal signs were causing the problem (thanks to my son Tim for figuring that one out). Once I eliminated the equal signs , all was well.
It has taken me maybe about 80 hours to sort all this out and get to the point that I can now upload new files with few errors and other slowdowns. I have only uploaded about half my products so far, but those I have are very easy to find in Froogle, and the search page links go straight to my store pages. I have not gotten any orders directly from Google (through their Google Checkout service), but I am getting significantly more traffic to my store pages, resulting in some new business.
Once it is easier to make submissions, and once this service is more closely integrated with Google Search, it could grow very rapidly and become an essential element of any online business. You could publish on the Web without having a Web site. And you could run the equivalent of an online store without having to pay for or design a store Web site and without even having a merchant credit card account.
I wish the folks at Google well. This is an amazing service. I hope they keep it free (or very inexpensive). And if you have an online business, you should start experimenting to see how this service could increase your traffic and boost your sales.
I’d like to share some of my experiences and insights. But please keep in mind that the tips I deal with here relate to a business that manufactures its own products or has a limitless supply. The approach would be different for selling collectibles and items that you have only one or a few of or that you have to buy from another vendor.
First, Ebay added Ebay Express. From my perspective, that is a service devoted to products that you can put in the mail within 24 hours. If you include a fast turnaround time in your listing, your items should turn up in Express in addition to the standard listing, at no extra cost to you. (Check Ebay for details). I was delighted through searches to discover that nearly all my items show up in that new format. Here’s what I find when doing an Ebay Express search for items for sale by me http://search.express.ebay.com/merchant/richardseltzer
Next, I discovered that I had been wasting many hours per week unnecessarily. Yes, I have an Ebay store, which for about $49 per month lets me have all my items “permanently” listed, with listing fees of a few cents each per month. But store items don’t normally get included in Ebay search results (WHY???). That means to be found, and for people to find my store auctions through the cross-promotion that comes free with the store, I need to also run open auctions for some, if not all of my items. Open auctions last a maximum of 7 days. So when an auction ended because the time ran out or because of a sale, I went through the tedious processing of relisting it by hand (about five minutes per item when response time is good). But by signing up for Sales Manager Pro (for a small monthly fee), I am now able to set automated relisting rules for each of my items. I choose to relist all of them whether they sell or not. At first I chose to relist the slower selling ones at various delay times — a day later or three or five or seven days later. Then I realized (duh!) that Ebay added an extra fee for “scheduled” relistings. So I set all my items with immediate relisting and distinguished among fast selling and slow selling items, by having my best sellers as 1 day auctions and the others as 3 day, 5 day, or 7 day, at no extra cost.
The 7 day saves me a lot on listing fees, but, at first I thought that limited how many copies of a given item I could sell, because at best I’d only sell one every 7 days. Then it dawned on me (duh! again) that Ebay lets you end an auction at any time, with the highest bidder at that point being the winner. It’s rare that people bid up the price of my items. So in many cases, when I see that there are bids in the “selling” section of “My Ebay”, I cut those auctions short, record the sales, and relist immediately.
Great. But with one Ebay glitch — when you end an auction that has automatic listing, the automatic listing fails. You have to relist the item manually and then go back through Sales Manager Pro to once again assign automation rules.
By the way, Selling Manager Pro also lets me set up to automatically provide positive feedback to the people who buy from me (that too is a major time saver; it’s also good for customer relations, since in the past, I often forgot that important step).
At various times, I stumbled on other new Ebay features — second chance offers (if there were several bids on the same item, when the auction ends, you can send messages to the “losers” offering them the same item at the last price they bid; that brings additional sales without any additional listing cost), and “accept offers” which means you can put a relatively high price on items for sale in your store and consider offers to buy at a lower price.
Then a few months ago, Ebay made an offer to Ebay store owners for free phone consultation. I signed up right away. And soon had a very helpful conversation with a knowledgeable support person. That way I learned that now my cross-promotion listings could include 12 items, that I could choose to have my items appear at international Ebay sites, that I should improve the names of my store categories (more informative names with “keywords” that potential customers might be looking for), that I could opt to change the basic format of all my listings so links to my store categories would appear near the top,
On the negative side, Ebay recently did away with its keyword advertising program, which had been the best way to drive traffic to an Ebay store. And they raised the fees they charge for listing and relisting at your Ebay store. That’s bizarre. You’d think they’d go out of their way to help their store owners make more sales. But they are doing the opposite — making it harder and harder for Ebay shoppers to find store items; making it less and less profitable to run such a store at all. The free phone consultation was great; but these new changes are terrible.
And one suggestion for Ebay (if you happen to know someone who works there — they have ignored my emails) — they should make it easy for sellers to make special time-limited and rule-limited offers, such as “two for the price of one”.
Feedback welcome. It’s not easy trying to figure out how to sell repeatedly and profitably at Ebay.
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