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I have bought a few things off E bay recently. It seems like since they changed the "get paid" routine that shipping just takes for ever. I have had several things take about a week just to acknowledge that they were shipped. Anyone else have this problem.? What's going on?
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Haven't had any real problems with eBay lately but due to previous issues, I've mostly given up on them and only use them sparingly those days... They switched away from PayPal as the default to something else apparently and their payment system has become even more obnoxious. But my experiences are mostly related to Europe, so yours may differ.
But unless the seller is using Ebay's own shipping services, the delay should really be with the seller and not so much with Ebay, or is the problem that the payment hasn't cleared yet with the seller?
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90% of my online purchases are through Amazon, and being in a metropolitan area where there are lots of warehouses & trucks, those deliveries have been very reliable. I really like how I can track the Amazon delivery trucks online & see if I have time to pop into the shower or run down to the corner store before the delivery driver gets here.
But I have had a couple of issues with e-bay deliveries, which have usually been due to post office delays. Sometimes a package that originates less than 30miles from my house is sent all the way down to a sorting center in Los Angeles or up to Sacramento because (they claim) due to manpower shortages and a 'backlog' at the local sorting center here in San Francisco. Last week, I was waiting for a book to arrive. For five friggin' days, tracking had it marked as "out for deivery" - - but by the end of the day, it had been sent back to another sorting center in The City. It went around in this loop all week. It finally showed up on the 6th day - - which was the only day when I did NOT get an "out for delivery" e-mail & text message. I had this happen once last year too, and that package never did show up and the P.O was no help in tracking it down.
However, I'd like 'tip my hat' to one local e-bay seller. I sometimes order Chinese language DVD's for an older, Asian neighbor whose knowledge of both English, e-bay and computers in general, is a bit sparse. Every time I've ordered disks for this guy, they have shown up usually in less than 12hrs after I've ordered them. It turns out that the seller works out of a house that is about a mile west of where I live. He would literally, actually have to drive PAST my address to get to the post office. So he just rings my buzzer and stuffs it through the mail slot the next morning when he goes out to shop or when he's out walking his dog or something. SInce he doesn't charge extra for shipping, he probably saves a little money by not having to post the package. Not that's real customer service! - - and I've let him know how much my neighbor appreciates the fast delivery, since he's sort of house-bound and looks forward to getting those DVD's
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I mostly buy used drives for my own projects/ experiments. And I scored an open box Raspberry Pi 4 for $40. I built a tiny NAS server out of a Pi 3 that I had sitting new in storage for 5 years. Works great, but its USB 2 and only 10/100 ethernet. So will build a second one out of the 4 and put the 3 back in mothballs. Luckily, the little computer printed case I bought for it holds either model. Plus doing this stuff has taught me a lot about the Linux commands, etc. A couple of Ebay things have shipped, but I have also been buying more parts from.Amazon. I usually get the stuff in about a day from them... occasionally the same day if I order really early AM. So no complaints about Amazon...Comment
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Keep in mind that Ebay is more of a "free-for-all" than Amazon, as everybody can put their stuff on Ebay, even though Ebay has made the latter part frustratingly complex over the years, in fact so frustratingly complex that I've now commissioned a friend of mine to sell my stuff via them, as he has built a reputation and manages to get the stuff into relevant positions on search results. If I put something up, it lands on page 324...
Stuff I order off of Ebay seldomly arrives next day, unless the seller happens to be in the same country and is one of those "big boys", who are doing this for a living. Most smaller, independent sellers need a day or two extra to get stuff shipped to you. Also, sometimes, you end up buying something from a "local" vendor, but it ends up being some Chinese "bait-and-switch", where they're going to ship your item straight from China. Not only will that usually take ages, you're usually also hit with a hefty import tax on those. I tend to cancel most of those, because when I wanted to buy from a Chinese seller, I would've done so, probably straight via AliExpress or Alibaba.Comment
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Actually, just about anyone can also sell on Amazon. You just have to be qualified by Amazon to do so...Comment
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I haven't checked for a while as I don't really have anything to sell on Amazon, but doesn't Amazon require far stricter adherence to their (as in Amazon's) policies in order to be able to sell via their merchants platform? Ebay once started as the digital counterpart of your average yard sale and I still see them more in that way nowadays. Whereas Amazon started out as the on-line version of Barnes & Noble and from there became the on-line version of Walmart...Comment
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Yes, Amazon ios very strict. They even send a person out to inspect your facility...Comment
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Amazon also have a huge, in house logistics operation, including what is now one of the largest cargo only airlines in the country. My local airport (Ontario, CA) is one of the biggest for cargo movements in the country - passenger flights are only about 20% of its business. UPS used to have the biggest presence there, but the first time I flew after the pandemic hit (September last year), I was shocked to see that a former Air National Guard ramp at the western end of the field now had around 20 Prime Air 767s parked there. They have also started to fly into what was the ghost airport at San Bernardino (it was transformed into a civil airport at huge expense, and helped by a healthy dose of local political corruption, after the Air Force left in the '90s, but has never been able to attract regular commercial flights, until about six months ago), too.Comment
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Well, 767's are really cheap to buy/lease right now because most are retired and sitting in storage at Marana, AZ. I'm surprised MIT hasn't bought one yet??Comment
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BTW, an EBay seller called flippin_fast_shippin lived up to his moniker...Comment
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The gas mileage would be a bit of a bummer, compared to that of our flatbed truck...Originally posted by Mark GulbrandsenComment
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You may also run into some maximum clearance height issues and some very tight corners if you want to taxi to work with it...
But yeah, everything seems to be in Amazon's favor, airplane leases for almost new airplanes were never as cheap as they are now... A local airline maintenance company has kept themself busy by converting passenger planes to cargo planes, many of them are just a few years old... I guess Amazon is one of the few companies that could make the A380 work as a freighter...Comment
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Nah, it's practically already been done. They can park it at the garage near Hollywood and Vine!Originally posted by Marcel Birgelen View PostComment
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As I understand it, A380s are pretty much useless for freighter conversion, because the upper deck's loading capacity can't take the weight of anything close to being useful, relative to the volume of the upper deck space. And you can't simply remove the upper deck to carry large items, because that would destroy the structural integrity of the airframe. Friends and relatives in the aviation industry have opined to me that Airbus made a major blunder by either not thinking of this eventuality at all (that a market could eventually exist for converting A380s to freighters), or taking the gamble that it wasn't worth designing in that ability. Given the number of A380s that were mothballed when the pandemic hit, combined with the huge growth in the air cargo market just as the passenger market contracted, it was a gamble they lost spectacularly, if so.Originally posted by Marcel BirgelenLast edited by Leo Enticknap; 08-20-2021, 11:23 AM.Comment
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