yeah thats a great article, very witty. i get wherehe's comming from. i was selling a beatup geo tracker a few months back. i was selling it for $600. it ran and drove and only had 78k but alot of rust, was what you would expect for $600. heck actually pretty much anything that is driveable you can get over a grand for but i wanted a quick sale.

i get all these clowns comming to look at it telling me they are going to have to cut the rust off, do all this bondo, do all this work on it. right in the ad i said great car for a college kid, someone needing to get to work, for $600 it should get you around for a year, just drive it into the ground.

i get guys comming acting like they wanna do some pimp my ride stuff to do. im like look man its a beater, you drive it as is it should last 6 months at the least maybe a year and be happy you got to drive a car for a year for $600 which is pretty darn good.

if you want that removed you better get around to it soon as they may not do it if you wait around

I don't get it, I must live in a different world or something. I send most of my items as USPS 1st class packages anywhere in the USA for $1.65 to $3.65 and the packages arrive in 2 business days 95% of the time. If I need to go up to Priority mail due to weight issues then $8 seems to be the most I've ever paid.

most of my packages go first class but despite ebay claiming first class is 2-5 days the post office i believe actually quotes it can take up to 6-10 days. some regions of the country stuff arrives in a day or two, others its over a week. if i send priority i send priority flat rate envelope which is about $5. express is supposed to be overnight though sometimes its 2 day. if you go to the post office to buy it its like $18.95, however if your a powerseller/top rated seller you get to buy through ebay for $12. i personally almost never have packages arrive as quick as two days though you must be living in a different world than me, first class is pretty slow comming from chicago at least

So, apparently Ebay suggests that you contact a buyer about bad feedback to try to resolve it and get him to reverse it so we did. Mostly he said we didn't respond when he said he had paid and to change the amount on the customs form. He's right that we didn't respond to it but it didn't really ask for a response. Then we pointed out that it is illegal to lie on the customs forms. His response was: Your federal government doenst even work at the moment haha! Almost forgot: From my two adopted graves of two fallen US soldiers in WW2, They asked me to thank you and your goverment for closing down the cemetery...

That was just one of several messages back and forth but I found it amusing. We asked him about wanting to cheat his government by shorting them on customs fees and he said it was just faster if it's listed as under $20.00 and nothing to do with the money. Yeah, sure. I've read his feedback left for others and he's left bad feedback over customs fees before. That's actually one of the things I check when a foreigner asks to bid.  He made it very clear that he won't change the feedback. Didn't really expect him too.

lesson learned form this sitaution, always respond whether you feel it deserves a response or not. had you said hey im not going to lie on customers, plus ebay automatically prints the amount. he either says okay, or he says he wants to cancel transaction. at the very least you create a papertrail and ebay will later remove feedback for you if they see the reaosn he was dissatisfied is because you would't lie on customs forms.

actually ebay has recently redone things and allowed feedback to be removed if buyer asks for things outside of what listing states or asks you to break policies. if you have communication through ebay system between you to this is a pretty clear case where you should get feedback removed.

Yeah maybe it matters if your logged into ebay or not. All I can tell you is this was regarding a $11,000 item and I was speaking with ebay "high claims" department so were talking more knowledgeable people than your average sales rep you get when you call the 800 number and from what he said none of those messages through the email would be considered as proof when deciding a case. I'll have to go back and see if my correpondence were recorded in ebay messages system or not

Hey guys, learned something new about ebay that's actually quite scary and wanted to let you all know. You know how when someone sends you a message it comes in to your email as a notification. you can go directly into ebay and view messages and respond from there but you can also from within those notification emails click reply and reply to the message.

until recently i always assumed that still went through the ebay messaging system but was just a shortcut to do so instead of having to log into ebay. Turns out those messages are not on the ebay messaging system, I assume its a hidden email type deal like craigslist has. Anyhow, I was talking to an ebay rep regarding a case I'm going through and apparently they will not accept those messages sent by clicking respond from within ebay email message, they will not accept that as proof for your case.

Lesson being, if you want to keep a paper trail to back you up on ebay issues as a buyer or a seller you HAVE TO LOGIN TO EBAY!!!

I was shocked by this and almost got screwed out of a lot of money so wanted to let you guys know.