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How's this for an insane selling limit?
 

Before they shut down my account i had selling limit of 24,500 items and $7.5 million on an account that was 4 years old.

If this is accurate, what on earth did you do to get shut down?

An account like that takes a lot of hard work.

What happened?

We really do not do bull dust around here.

:spy:

low DSR's they said...
 

I actually manufacture the stuff I sold on eBay and each of my item had up to 400 variations at average selling price of $200, and they counted each variation toward the limit.

So a listing for "red tricycle" would be 400/$80,000 toward the limit.

My mistake was that the items take 2 weeks to manufacture, and I had 10 days handling time, and some of the crazy buyers would put 1 star DSR's if it shipped on the 11th day. In hindsight i should have had 15 day handling period.

Supposedly they restricted my account for low DSR's, but since my DSR's had been was low for 10 months before they restricted the account, I have a sneaking suspicion that it's really because they made me refund a customer before I received the merchandise in return and I complained to eBay....

And I wasn't being being an ahole or anything. All I did was ask what should I have done to make the outcome different....and they just restricted me and the rep told me they made a business decision to not do business with me anymore.

They specialise in slapping sellers in the face with this poor attitude.

Surprised your Account Manager did not help more.

:shocked:

The crazy thing is after the dispute
 

that led to my restriction they initially lowered my selling limit to 22,000 items/ $6.5 mil and then restricted my account a few days later.

Your mistake is that you pre-sold merchandise that you did not actually have. If you would have kept inventory on hand and shipped within normal time frame, you would still be up and running. I'm not defending Ebay, but what you did is bad business. You deserved to get shut down.

That's ridiculous. Ever heard of custom made or made to order merchandise? Cause that's what he was selling and it's perfectly fine to do so.

It may be fine to do so, but not on ebay. Wrong place for that type of business

Never did he say his merchandise was custom made or made to order. He just said that he had 400 variations. That would be a lot of inventory to keep on hand but if you want happy customers that is what you do. Essentially what he is doing is creating a better cash flow situation at the cost of customer service. Not ever gonna fly on Ebay.

Ebays first question is do you have this merchandise in your hands

Read this again.....

He deserved to be shut down??? You can't be serious dude...

He did not deserve to get shut down but he had to know buyers are silly and never read the whole thing or care.
The business model was at best a stretch handling time most people do not even look or understand that.

He should have pre made the most popular sellers to be able to offset some of the slower ones and definitely should have spread the risk out among many many accounts.

But the limit is a great accomplishment in itself

eBay is very difficult to sell custom made products, a website would be more flexible for that specific product.

@tom, have you ever looked into a website?

I'm very serious. Are you okay with buying something that does not exist yet (exception being custom made but what he is talking about does not qualify). What he is doing is taking your money first to keep overhead down, rather then just learning the flow of his product sales. This puts too much risk on the part of the buyer and none on the seller. In a good business the seller takes equal parts or more of the risk. This is the classic give me your money then I'll obtain the product that you paid me for.

The proper way to run a business like this would be like Nike. At any given time they have up to 400 variations of shirts, sneakers, shorts, etc. But when you go on niketown.com and buy the shirt, they don't manufacture it once they get your money. They already have physical inventory. When they run out, it will say "out of stock." until they make more. They don't just take your money and then manufacture more. It takes a lot of cash up front but it is the only way to keep customers happy.

It said right in the listing that the item is custom made
 

and 99.99% of the people were good about it, and if anyone told after paying that they didn't realize that the item wouldn't ship right away, I always refunded them promptly.

As for keeping things in stock, people who ask this i assume never had to manufacture anything on a large scale.

I carry 8000 items in my catalog (I sell to B&M stores 99% custom made), at maybe $150 wholesale list price. Just to have 1 color, 1 size of each item in stock would be over a million dollars. Just to have the two most popular colors and four sizes in stock would be $10 mil. To have 10% of possible variations in color and sizes in stock would be $50 mil....you get the idea.

If I had that kind of money, I wouldn't be here.

Not having inventory in stock was never an issue
 

Because it said if flashing neon green letters in the listing that the item was made from scratch on the top of the descriptions.

That was my market niche actually. Since I'm manufacturing things here in US and rest of my competition was importing it from China. I could come up with something in two weeks as opposed to my competition who had to wait 2-3 months. I was actually manufacturing and drop shipping for other sellers on eBay and Amazon before I got into it myself.

yes, I am working toward that also, but it's f'ing expensive to generate web traffic....I was at the point where some serious coin was starting to roll in from eBay so I was about to get a website professionally done.

What exactly is the purpose of this thread?

As a former owner of a small manufacturing business for me I would need to have the actual completed product on my shelf before listing it.

I would not want to deal with idiot buyers who do not follow your instructions or read the information in the listing.

I would have listed a large group of the variation and would have them sitting and done before I listed them.

But that is how I would have handled it.

Selling manufactured specialty items is fine and a nice niche product can make you some money but it has to be in your hands and ready to ship or problems will come after you.

The only thing I dont get is why not give yourself a few extra days in the listing instead of a 10day shipping window?

That sucks though.

The real problem here is that OP treated EB/PP like he treated his B&M stores. As mentioned previously in this thread, EB/PP operate on a completely different and extremely absurd schedule and there is no way you can compare it to B&M.

Like any other discussion of high limit accounts getting closed by eB...would like to see OP try and fight it for restoration...or discuss steps in the appeal trying

If you have such a big turnover it must be gutting to have ebay treat you like this.
I would advise you to consider opening your own website and just use ebay to pull customers to your website.

One of these days ebay are going to annoy some big fish who will start his own online sales website that will give ebay fierce competition.

That happens all the time...the fish dont last though due to lack of traffic and hard to maintain interest :(

Amazon exists but a different type of beast

Been the hope of thousands for years to topple ebay.

Alternative is to use them yourself and avoid their traps.

Welcome to STEALTH

:cheer:

I don't want to topple eBay
 

generally since i started in 2003 it's improved a lot for sellers of legit items except the absurd DSR garbage and making feedback a 1 way street

STEALTH helps you learn the workarounds if used correctly.

:juggle:

yes, I wish I had found you guys in 2001
 

I'm 100% sure that my original eBay account would be a massive profit center for me if eBay hadn't banned me. That was kinda my fault because I had an employee stealing outgoing packages which wasn't discovered for a while.

What you think, and what ebay thinks differs.

You, as the seller, were entirely LIABLE for your operations to work within the rules of ebay.

Blunt and simple fact.

Sucks you had a bad employee.

Sucks MORE you had nothing in place to detect that.

Successful business takes no prisoners.

ebay showed you that.

:peace:

Somewhat am in disagreement there :( gotten much worse for sellers - especially with the constant upward movement of pp