Ebay knockoffs and scams - who has stories?

[Yamar]

OK...
Those of you who mention that these folks are buying from you and then asking to ship directly to their customers... answer me this. WHY would you do that? If they are paying via paypal (or really any other credit card verified means), shouldn't you really be only shipping to THEIR address? If you get a "can you ship directly to my friend", then the answer is no - doing so normally removes any seller protection from Paypal anyway. I understand that they can simply re-label it and ship it on and like Tim says, you can't help that. But you can avoid doing ALL of their work for them. Plus, if you're absolutely certain of someone doing this, you could always F'em and send something... interesting... in the tube instead so when their buyer gets it...

[farleypig]

just did a quick ebay search - someone is selling one of my kimono art prints for $114. that is $96 more than I was selling them for last week at Flatstock. Or on Etsy. Or ever.
Either good luck budy - or maybe i should raise my prices!

[squeegeethree]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. You all (in general) are selling your work for too cheap. Most of you are still selling at 90s prices. Meanwhile everything else in the world and your lives as gone up in price. But I see none of you making any gains in prices until you ALL elect to charge more.

[alexfugazi]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. You all (in general) are selling your work for too cheap. Most of you are still selling at 90s prices. Meanwhile everything else in the world and your lives as gone up in price. But I see none of you making any gains in prices until you ALL elect to charge more.

I just print more editions.

[Grushkin]

those darn eBay'ers are still cutting apart ART OF ROCK and sellin' the images piece by piece ("great way to collect all your favorite bands!!"). Should have thought to do it myself , , , I guess

[Yamar]

Art of Rock sells OK, but the money is in AoMR!!!

[tbonealjaxx]

Ok people,

I read this thread a few days ago when it started. Then yesterday I received an inquiry from cambrias-closet@hotmail.com on the dimensions of our recent Elton John print. Today we got the order from our store... but when we went to paypal, he (she?) was listed as a different name and address.

This was our reply:
Hello Christopher Jones,
There's a problem! Your paypal name/address doesn't match!

The name/ shipping address we have is:
(customer address)

If they don't match, we don't ship. Please verify the name and shipping address so we can send out your poster ASAP. If we don't hear from you within 48 hours, we will assume that you do not want the poster, or that someone has hacked your account, in which case you should contact PayPal immediately.

Thank You!

He wrote back within minutes with:

I purchased it to send to a friend for me.
My name is Christopher jones and the address registered is (his address)
I can't order something from you to be sent to a friend as a gift?

Which instantly raised the flag.. I thought, I just read this on GP!

We went on ebay, and sure enough, under cambrias-closet was this: Elton John in Evansville, IN 03.20.12 official gig poster | eBay

So we decided to experiment, and replied with:

Sorry, but we have a strict policy with re-sellers on one of our prints that are not sold out. We found your ebay listing here: (link)

Our policy is that re-sellers get a 10% commission on the sale price of our non sold out prints, which calculates to you owing us $52 (you keep $9.99)
Please remit to our paypal and write back to this address when you do. Otherwise, your payment will be refunded.

If you wish to re-sell our posters in the future, please let us know before they are listed.

He replied with:

Well you know what I'll just tell them that I'm out of stock and refund their money. Just send the poster to me since I've already paid (address)

We ended it by refunding his money.

All of this aside, I'm with squeegeethree on all electing to charge more. I mean, this guy, after straight out lying twice to us, thought we would just send the print to him anyway, which all that would accomplish is making him spend a few bucks to re-ship it for his re-sell price. Apparently, all poster artists prints are selling for 3 sometimes 4x the amount we're selling them for, sometimes THE SAME DAY we put them up for sale.

Did I lose a sale, yep, but somehow I feel like it was worth it to be able to share this with all of you

[alexfugazi]

I understand not wanting to ship to an address that wasn't protected by the Paypal seller protection policy- but who cares who does what with your posters after they're sold? If they found a customer for your product that you couldn't find, then I feel as though they were doing you a favor.

I really don't understand the problem here. If you don't want anyone to make anything of what you make, then you really shouldn't make anything.

[lil_tuffy]

Not only did you lose a sale, you lost money spending all of that time busting that dude's nuts. People do this all of the time. It;s neither illegal or unethical. Maybe having you do their fulfillment for them is a bit weird but it's not that big of a deal.

[tbonealjaxx]

Really? It just seems wrong to me. I was on the fence about it at first, but just the way he tried to say it was for his "friend" in the beginning irked me. Why not just be straight up about it? Why lie? Would someone who was doing something they felt was ethical and fair do this? We have had people contact us about re-selling before, some buy quite a few prints at once (at a discounted rate) and re-sell them, others ask if they can list them on their site and contact us when a sale is made.. both we're very cool with. This guy not only did neither, but expected us to do the fulfillment for him. It rubs me the wrong way...