For Anyone selling Services On eBay

[G.Beard]

Hi.

I have just been looking through the results for logic board repair on eBay....
What I find amazing is that a skilled service like logic board repair can be found cheaper than having someone screw in a new fucking keyboard!

I find it incredable that people will sell their time SO cheap just to undercut the next person.
We do things other people are affraid to do, or don't have the time to learn, or are simply too brain dead to get to grips with..... Not that any of us are any kind of genius, but truely, there are some fucking stupid people in this industry. Most of them opperating screw drivers for more than the cost of a logic repair!

Your skill set, and so your time, is worth more.

Anyone care to add to this?... I just don't get it

 

[smiba]

Most of the cheap ones are crap, you can be cheap if you just take a look at it and discard all those that are not fixable in 20 minutes

 

[Alan.L]

i bet they're cowboys, dump the board in a Ultrasonic and hope will work afterward. all the hints will be gone when they give the board to a genuine repair technician .

 

[G.Beard]

i bet they're cowboys, dump the board in a Ultrasonic and hope will work afterward. all the hints will be gone when they give the board to a genuine repair technician .

Actually some of these guys doing cheap work are on this forum and do genuinely attempt to do the work properly. The fact that I have repaired three of their failures in the past few months is something else entirely. The reason I posted this hear is because I know they will see it.

 

[dukefawks]

The people looking for the cheapest repairs on Ebay are NOT the kind of customers I want to deal with. So I have no issues with the idiots on Ebay trying to undercut everyone.

 

[Gurmon]

I believe it's because they don't have a true customer/client base. If you are relying on ebay for work you pretty much can only differentiate yourself with price.

I tried it for two weeks, it was pure headache, not the type of customers i'm after.

 

[larossmann]

On eBay you are invisible until you get a certain amount of sales. You will show up at the bottom. This means lowering price is the only way you have a hope of being visible, when someone searches by lowest price: as new people will not show up on a relevance search.

In terms of seller rating, I recall you needed something like 0.5% of your customers to be bitchy to be top rated. 2% just to exist, over 2% and you are downrated and your listings go away. This is 6 year old info from when I was a volume seller with hundreds to thousands of sales a day on eBay.

So let's say I get 1 person in 100 who screws something in the wrong way and blames me. This means I need to sell 200 items where no one complains in order to "fix" the ratio. Which means finding some item to sell at a low cost and running it out the door as fast as I can.

Of course someone in that new 200 will find something wrong - you can't sell 200 items and not have a single thing go wrong when you sell specialized items in a DIY repair industry on a garbage platform like eBay. So now you go and try to sell 400 items to make up for it.

And it goes on and on.

eBay is a circle to the bottom. Find a customer base some other way. On eBay & Amazon you don't own your success, you don't own your customers. You don't even own your money - the profit will all be sifted away to eBay & PayPal. Reasonable prices are not allowed on eBay, only rock bottom, and what little you get from it will be eaten in fees and claims.

Many people will say if they stop selling on eBay then their business goes away, to which I can only ask Did you have a business at all?

 

[G.Beard]

On eBay you are invisible until you get a certain amount of sales. You will show up at the bottom. This means lowering price is the only way you have a hope of being visible, when someone searches by lowest price: as new people will not show up on a relevance search.

In terms of seller rating, I recall you needed something like 0.5% of your customers to be bitchy to be top rated. 2% just to exist, over 2% and you are downrated and your listings go away. This is 6 year old info from when I was a volume seller with hundreds to thousands of sales a day on eBay.

So let's say I get 1 person in 100 who screws something in the wrong way and blames me. This means I need to sell 200 items where no one complains in order to "fix" the ratio. Which means finding some item to sell at a low cost and running it out the door as fast as I can.

Of course someone in that new 200 will find something wrong - you can't sell 200 items and not have a single thing go wrong when you sell specialized items in a DIY repair industry on a garbage platform like eBay. So now you go and try to sell 400 items to make up for it.

And it goes on and on.

eBay is a circle to the bottom. Find a customer base some other way. On eBay & Amazon you don't own your success, you don't own your customers. You don't even own your money - the profit will all be sifted away to eBay & PayPal. Reasonable prices are not allowed on eBay, only rock bottom, and what little you get from it will be eaten in fees and claims.

Many people will say if they stop selling on eBay then their business goes away, to which I can only ask Did you have a business at all?

I agree partly. I agree a good customer base is essential and also believe a truely good customer base would be made up of good busness / trade customers. It's just easier to deal with.

The point I would like to make here is, I have aquired all of my current bussiness customers through eBay. I have 2 accounts and both are top rated. One with 0.76% defect rate and 0.96% returns rate. one with 0.0% and 0.0%.

When I list an item like a MacBook it is always on the front page of results. This has nothing to do with price. Granted, I worked my fucking arse off and jumped though hoops for a year to get there. I still jump hoops to stay there.

So far 100% FB. I think that if you do a good job, are selective about what customers you actually take on, and provide services to the best of your abilities, there is not too much of an issue. Also Top Rated gotten a lot easier to get now since all you really have to do is post on time and solve cases yourself without eBay getng involved.

However, I think eBay should only be a small part of any business.... Even eBay is a small part of eBay's entire empire.

 

[ALB-Repairs]

I am slightly cheaper than I should be but I believe my pricing is fair, and I would lose a lot of my trade customers if I were to change my pricing structure.
It can be argued that a lower price can mean a higher quantity, If you are good/efficient and have the right staff in place at a viable price you get a much higher workload, and due to the low nature overheads of board repair, I would assume more work = more gross profit?

That's just my thought process though and assumes you have well-trained staff, high success rate, good efficiency, hassle-free customers and probably a few more variables that I've missed.

 

[G.Beard]

I am slightly cheaper than I should be but I believe my pricing is fair, and I would lose a lot of my trade customers if I were to change my pricing structure.
It can be argued that a lower price can mean a higher quantity, If you are good/efficient and have the right staff in place at a viable price you get a much higher workload, and due to the low nature overheads of board repair, I would assume more work = more gross profit?

That's just my thought process though and assumes you have well-trained staff, high success rate, good efficiency, hassle-free customers and probably a few more variables that I've missed.

OK let's take a look at the rational here.

With your assumption of well trained staff and high success rate...

You have well trained staff which takes time and energy finding good staff - Time you invested.
You have a fast efficient service - More time and energy spent getting there.

Then you assume high success rates - Even more time and energy learning - Customer knows they get 95% machines back working.

All of this invested time and energy IS WHAT PEOPLE PAY FOR and what makes a service worth more. People don't just pay for a repaired machine. They are paying for you time and all the time you spent learning. That's the point of having a skill and not working as some numb-nuts grunt at the checkout for £7.50/h.

To say that you may not be able to keep your customers if you charge a proper rate is indirectly contradictory to the superior service you are alluding to.