Posts by Jon Winter 10 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Apr 2007
Dear eBay,
That's it. With your latest swathe of fee increases you have made it completely uneconomical for me to sell on eBay. Listing a buy it now item for 99p costs 40p in fees, plus 9.9% selling fee, plus a 28p fee to Paypal. So eBay/Paypal get 78% of the sale price in fees and I get 22%. Then you remove the option to make my items visible internationally so I have fewer customers. Mind you, with me making absolutely nothing any more selling an item, perhaps you have done me a favour getting rid of half my customers so I don't waste my time posting things where I no longer make a profit at all. Every few months, eBay changes its fees or conditions or feedback system to make things worse for sellers and I consider leaving. This time there is absolutely no reason for me to continue to use eBay any more. Well done, you finally drove me away. And I just made it to 2000 feedback. Cheers, Jon
Same story here in Manchester. O2 manager sent all the iPhone upgraders packing (after queueing in the rain of course) as they had "not been sent any upgrade SIMs". The new customers were busy filling out paper forms but nobody had managed to get a phone by 8.30 when I left and the crowd of 30 or so people had dwindled to 10. I called customer services who can't apparently sell them online or over the phone as they have run out and don't have a mechanism to order at all at this point, "please try an O2 store". However the operator did tell me there was no such thing as an upgrade SIM and I should have been able to put my existing iPhone SIM right in. So either O2 are liars, incompetent, or my preferred option: both. Gah! A small comfort to me was a mate who was waiting in a Carphone Whorehouse tells me that nobody was getting any 3G loving there either due to similarly titsup systems...
I can confirm this, I just reached the end of my 12 month Sky HD contract and stopped paying the £10 a month HD tax. I still receive BBD HD and Channel 4 HD no problems at all. Why anyone would want to pay £10 for the rest of the crappy HD channels Sky pump out, I have no idea. I don't think I ever found a single HD broadcast on Sky One 'HD'...the endless repeats of the Simpsons were barely SD quality. Looking forward to the Freesat and Freeview HD offerings so I can avoid paying the Evil Empire for the privilege of being able to record in HD next....
I looked at getting Orange 3G recently, and was surprised when they told me that while I could use my phone for completely unlimited *browsing*, I could only *download* 30 Mb / month. I asked what the difference between browsing and downloading was, and they couldn't tell me. Riiiiight.
So instead I got an iPhone on O2. Proper unlimited, yay. (Or maybe O2 are just less open about their fair use level)...
I'm amazed that you tried the Apple TV and gave it such a bad rating. Those "pre-loaded" movie trailers you were watching were being streamed live from the web by the way. I've ripped my entire DVD collection into mp4.h264 and the quality is generally pretty damn good on my 720p telly. Transcoding DIVXs is pretty easy and gave me similarly good results. I liked the AppleTV that much that I got another one for the kitchen. And I don't bother with syncing content as the wireless streaming works flawlessly.
eBay also specifically prohibit services like Google Checkout from being used threatening sellers with suspension or account cancellation. Which is a shame, since Google Checkout is free for sellers right now, while Paypal fees are absolutely scandalous, even before you add the eBay listing AND finalising fee. For items I sell at £2 each, at least 50p of each sale goes straight to the unholy eBay/Paypal alliance. Daylight robbery. And now my UK auctions are invisible to the US too... J
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