It is difficult to stay above 98% since the scammers use the threat of negative feedback to blackmail sellers. Sellers should also always use delivery confirmation. Paypal will refund any claim of a lost item if the seller does not have delivery confirmation to prove delivery. If a seller ships without delivery confirmation for very long it will become known and advertised on the scammer message boards. After that every sale will go to scammers who don’t care how much they bid because they know they will claim it is lost. Then they will wait to file the lost item claim to avoid alerting the seller. Then WHAM, all of them will claim lost items at the same time! Paypal is completely unsympathetic and the seller can’t even leave negative feedback. I am in the process of transitioning to Amazon to see how that works out.
“Sellers should also always use delivery confirmation.”
Thank you for the tip. I have used delivery confimation but didn’t realize just how important it was. I didn’t realize there were scammer message boards.
Amen. As a collector of antique reloading tools (Ideal), I buy and sell quite a bit on eBay. Over 1.300 buys/sells with no problems, except one. Part of the reason is that by and large, that group of buyers/sellers are very good ethically. Anything I sell, over $20 or so, goes Delivery Confirmation and I have the buyer pay for it - I won't sell any other way. On the others, I save my receipt from the P.O. showing at least I shipped to a specific zipcode. If you ship foreign, there's a $1.00 "certificate of shipping" you can get that PayPal will recognize. I gave up on foreign shipments after one to Holland took a month and the guy filed a claim, which PayPal IMMEDIATELY put in escrow. Luckily, the guy was ethical and removed the complaint when it magically showed up in his mailbox.
What infuriates me with eBay is that they will yank an auction, treat you like a crook, and send you a boilerplate email along the lines of "You did something bad. Read our rules (sometimes arcane) to find out why." I had one auction where I was selling a tool for the "38-40 Remington, not Winchester" (completely different cartridge). Evidently they didn't like the word "not" (they don't allow comparisons) but I had to raise Hell with them to find that out. Then they busted me because I described a die as "7.7MM JAP" - it might be "offensive". I changed it to "7.7MM Nipponese" - "made by those wonderful folks who brought you Pearl Harbor and the Bataan Death March". That went through.