2014 Guide to what and what not to do on eBay

Once upon a time eBay was one of the best places to sell off your old or unwanted items to earn some extra cash, but now days after several "policy changes" and  "fee restructuring" selling on eBay is more likely to leave you with a bitter after taste, the confusing thing is the average consumer is somewhat oblivious to the changes and can't even see what has happened.

So here is the definitive guide of what you should and shouldn't do on eBay.

 First and most important step is DON'T go straight to eBay to sell the item, do your research for price on eBay certainly, but you should always at least try selling your item locally through free sites such as gumtree or local for sale pages on Facebook ,most important point here though is don't be greedy, say the item would sell for £100 on eBay, minus your eBay fee's, your PayPal fee's and your postage costs, you would actually really only be getting around £75, this is a HUGE 25% of your sale gone, this is why eBay should be a "last option" you have to accept that if you want to sell it locally your audience is much smaller, so you have to entice them to choose you, over any other seller on eBay, best way to do this is to take a hit yourself when compared to eBay prices, so if the item sells on eBay for £100, sell it locally for £80-£85 you will still be making more money than if you sold the item on eBay, and buyers will be more likely to snap the item up

its a win win situation,PLUS you don't have the "are these people going to be scum bags and say they never received the item" or some other sort of scam that you have to contend with on eBay.

eBay is rife with scammers just waiting to catch people out who post without sending recorded delivery (which means you have to pay a lot more for postage) or even people returning faulty or broken swapped item's, or even worse in some cases posting phone books back to weigh the box, fact is that eBay/PayPal will 99% of the time side with buyers scammers, no matter how blatant or cheeky the scam being pulled, so selling on eBay is a dangerous game, if you sell locally, the only thing you really have to do is double check the notes they pay with a cheap £1 note marker sorts this out though and i have never actually had a fake note, but i have heard it happens so just play it safe

Secondly DON'T sell anything that costs quite a bit more to post than the item is worth, eBay now charge the final selling fee "ON POSTAGE" (WTH i know, its ridiculous and nothing more than another cash grab from eBay to takes what little profits could be made on ebay in the first place)
here is an example so you understand how this now works
 say you sell an item on eBay and it sells for £5, and it costs £15 for postage, ebay take their 10% fee's from the whole total so
£20 - 10% = £2 fee's off the bat
then PayPal will charge your their fee's which is out of the total again, so another
£20 - 3.4% -20p= 88p
leaving you with £17.12
then your postage of £15 if this doesn't include your packaging costs for fuel costs for going to the post office, for selling a £5 item eBay and PayPal charged a whopping 57.59% in fee's
so as you can see there is much more to the "simple fee's" motto that eBay claim
at the end of the milking process you will end up with £2.12, if you had stuck the item on gumtree you could of just got your £5, possibly even more as obviously someone was happy to pay £20 to receive the item, no reason why someone locally wouldn't of happily paid £10-£15 and collected the item instead, so in this situation, your would be receiving 700% more than you would receive on eBay

eBay is a great place for price checking, say you have some old snes games, and you don't know if they are worth anything, simply pop onto eBay search for the game then select completed listing and see the ACTUAL value of the items you have, so many people just go on and search and judge by the "buy it now" listings, fact is 90% of buy it now prices are ridiculously high, look for how much the item goes for when it actually sell's not how much some random person feels like demanding, if you start expecting to get the buy it now prices you will be very sorely mistaken, or be waiting weeks or months for a very specific person who may of had one too many drinks that night to pop on and buy an over priced item from you.

Just be sensible, look for an item in very similar condition (i.e don't compare the price of a unboxed or tatty boxed item to a factory sealed snes game) then look for several  values of what the item sold for there will always be the odd extremely high sale price (idk maybe someone money launders on eBay or 2 drunk people entered into a bidding war) or the odd really low price where someone just got lucky (or unlucky for the seller) just work out the average price and then you have your general value. from that point its up to you how you proceed but i do recommend looking into eBay alternatives if you want to get the best deal

Ebay has its place, but unfortunately that isn't with the average seller no more, unless your are a company who sells millions of items, or you have a very "niche" audience which would be hard to sell locally.

Good luck and happy selling :D

Are micro transactions going too far?

This is a question that has been debated an awful lot and im sure it will continue to have its supports from each side, but personally I believe the whole micro transaction business model is a bit of a joke, you would be hard pushed to find an app on the apple market place that doesn't have some form of micro transaction.

In principle the whole idea seems like a nice bridge between full retail price business model and the free app experience everyone has come to expect in recent years, but unfortunately corporate greed will always take it too far and drain the business model dry until nobody at all trust or buys into the micro transaction scheme.

Personally I think the name is getting twisted to mean pay to play by many companies, its no longer a way to get optional extras or non essential feature in a game, more and more they are using micro transactions as a way to blackmail players into paying if they want to complete a level...... its not just pay and you get extra feature, now its getting much more sinister, one of the most guilty of this is a certain company who just makes various rip off's of old popular games.(i would say the name but i would probably get sued.....seriously they will sue anything or anyone)

The business model is simple, make a clone of and old popular game, make it nice and simple and easy for the first 10 levels or so, gradually getting harder which seems like a normal game business model, except that the sole reason behind this is to get people hooked before they break out the pretty much impossible levels unless you buy extra "power ups", now I'm sure some people will say "oh but i got up to level 500 without ever buying anything, but i wonder if they can honestly say they did it without spamming their friends for lives and boost items etc.... the whole thing is very much a pyramid scheme made into game for, except that peoples competitiveness is working against them where they consider paying to catch up to their friends, before they even realize, every few levels you are confronted with the "impossible level" the fact its not EVERY level lulls you into believing the problem is on your end and that the game is fair but you are just being unlucky on this particular level.

This is where the "micro transaction" scheme is being manipulated by combining it with social networking they game drives itself forward, that combined with the "unlimited levels" nature of these games, its pretty much a perpetual money making machine.....except now even the casual games are catching wind of whats happening, my mum has made a few of these in app purchases in the past but has recently stopped playing the games and has switch to playing free flash game alternatives the actual games have pretty much nothing going for them as they are nothing more that clones of games that already have hundreds of clones already.

Until consumers get to the point where they realize they are being milked for every penny they have, this kind of business model will become more and more common, its a sad time in the gaming industry as now even full priced retail games are starting to try adding these kind of tactics in the form of stripped down games which want you to pay AGAIN for content that was obviously meant to be included if the company hadn't gone on a ....hmmmmm lets see how much we can strip out of the game to sell to people who thought they where getting a complete game.

Android Vs IOS Vs Windows Phone

I know there has been a thousand blogs by a thousand diffrent people all bashing their "rival" phone operating system, but what about helping people out who dont really have any experiance with each OS to actually have a favorite, What about people who havnt even tried anything else before declaring their undying love for "insert generic favorite here". well now here is a review of all 3 major operating systems with all the plus's minuses.

So you want an impartial review one that isnt swamped with "IOS IS THE BEST and ANDROID IS POO" or visa versa let me just say I have used all 3 OS's for several months and let me just say there is NO perfect OS/phone,

Windows Phone

Benefits:- integration with Microsoft platform, so if you are heavily reliant on Microsoft software you may find windows phone a good seamless platform

Negatives:- very limited market place, pretty much nothing for free and very limited functionality of the apps that are available making it quite difficult to use unless you only use Microsoft services...one other major flaw which may of been fixed since i stopped using it was you couldn't change the Microsoft account tied to the phone without factory resetting the phone, which is bloody stupid

IOS

Benefits:- very simplistic and well built software, plenty of free apps and games.

Negatives:- still quite limited marketplace, yeah you will find hundreds of angry bird games and angry birds clones, but when it comes down to core functionality and productivity apps, there is nowhere near the freedom when compared to your usual PC experience

Android

Benefits:- very vast and broad marketplace, pretty much anything you can think of you can find an app that will achieve what you need without having to get to a desktop to do simple functions like unzipping files or downloading fairly standard file formats, in my opinion android is a true alternative to the standard PC, I don't think it would replace it, but you will find that you can do 90% of the stuff you would normally have to get compute access to achieve with the alternative OS's


negatives:-

Not very user friendly, despite the fact I myself find android to be very simple and easy to use, I would understand that some more mainstream users who are happy with a game of angry birds and Facebook could find android a very daunting  step for first time users, the android market is very broad and for most people just seeing all the different variations and specs and different processors etc can be quite intimidating,with iOS and windows phone it's very much one size fits all, but android can be much more tailored to an individual.

 unfortunately this come down to a trade off with simplicity vs functionality vs price

You have to pick what is more important, a nice simple uniform experience or a much more functional Operating system that can take a bit longer to get the hang of but can do so much more than it's counterparts, there is always jail breaking that gives a much more android level of freedom with apps but if you go down that route I personally think you might as well save the money and go for android

Personally if I had to summarise I would categorise the three options like this

Windows- designed in a very corporate and rigid business model, would probably be good for older people who just want a basic phone that can send emails and take pictures but doesn't have thousands of different apps and menu's and different ways of doing the same thing, it's pretty much a one way system

IOS- very simple and user friendly, best suited for casual users who are happy just browsing the internet and checking facebook, also good for games, although pretty much every games now is micro transaction ridden but for a casual gamer who doesn't mind waiting 6 hours between taking moves, it is a very good option for plenty of free games

Android- very much aimed at the more advanced user, who can filter through the technical jargon that sales people will throw at you when looking at buying an android phone, much more open and competitive marketplace meaning you don't get the same level of micro transactions as on ios but there is a lot less junky game clones on the market place so that might be why.

It all boils down to personal preference and personally I would advise anyone looking for making a first time purchase to try out all options before and see what one you feel most comfortable with