Actually wfturner, I am a SHE, lol. Anyway, after posting yesterday, I found an older thread on this forum where someone had the same question and a person posted an eBay link. I looked at the eBay link and called the people. I no longer use eBay and most certainly will not ever use PayPal again, so I asked them if I could buy from them without using eBay. Here is the link to the people I bought them from: International Component Strategies, Inc. | Auto Parts | OEM Services | Auto Parts Surplus They have actually sold this business and I got to them just in time. Hopefully the new folks won't raise the prices.

So, I purchased them direct. The right side is $55.00 and the left side is $60.00. To the poster who wondered why one side is more than the other, the lady I ordered from said she thinks that the left side is the side that gets hit most often in an accident so they charge more for it.

What I am going to do is replace these and my husband will paint the other ones for me and keep them in storage. Then God forbid, something happens, I'll have a set ready. Since they are no longer making Hummers, it's "possible" that the prices for parts will go up and could become scarce. Now, had these mouldings been a lot more money, I would have opted to just paint these or use the Forever Black on them.

I appreciate so much all the quick responses to my question on this forum. Wow, you guys (and gals?) are great!! Am I the only female with an H3 on here? lol

God bless all of you. I'll be posting more things, now that my vehicle is out of warranty.

My name is Wynter. Ghost Rider is my business. I sell biker leather and motorcycle helmets.

Nice to "meet" you all!!

 

There are many lady members. Gals can be counted as owners of all different models, some of those are also seriously into off roading.

Welcome.

 

Can you venture into why you don't buy off ebay and for sure don't use paypal? I haven't had a bad experience with either yet and don't do it a lot but I have used both. So many won't take anything but paypal... I have used it for several years with no probs yet but don't fully trust it either. I used a credit card with a smaller limit on it for my paypal account and for sure won't link it to my bank like they want to... what's your experience with it.

 

Slumlord, I'd be happy to. It's a VERY long story. I sold on eBay for several years, made lots of money, (though lots of hours and stress due to eBay rules which kept getting worse). Back in early 2008, John Donahoe took over as CEO of eBay. When he did, he changed a lot of rules, made it difficult to be an eBay seller and raised the rates yet again.

In case you did not know, PayPal is owned by eBay. It's a total monopoly, they won't let you use anything but PayPal on eBay. As a seller we could offer folks the option of mailing in a check or money order, but since eBay did not make any money on the payment of check or money order like they do with PayPal fees, they decided to take that option away. Many people don't have credit cards, so that left them out.

I was booted off of eBay. After several years of paying eBay (not including PayPals fees), about $2000.00 per month in fees (final value fees, listing fees, etc.), they changed the rating system. This star system, where 5 stars is perfect and anything under 5 stars is not perfect. At the time I was booted off of eBay, I had added an additional store. This new store did not have many ratings (feedback) yet and someone rated me low on shipping charges. With not having many feedback yet, it only took one low rating to bring one below the 4.8 star rating and they removed all my listings from this new store AND my large store that I had for years (due to it being associated since I owned both stores).

The problem with this rating system is that no one likes to pay shipping. I had a fair shipping price. Some merchandise I have locally and what I don't have locally, I dropshipped. There is a $5.00 "handling" fee on top of the actual shipping. Anyway, you could ship something for $5.00 and someone would still not be happy. The thing is that when you buy on eBay you know BEFORE you bid or buy what the shipping is. Let's say that you are buying an item on eBay for $10.00 and they are charging $10.00 for shipping, making the total price $20.00 that the buyer is paying. Locally that same exact item costs them $25.00. The customer still saved $5.00 over the local price, but they would still complain about the shipping price. Some people have a hard time understanding that they only need to worry about their TOTAL price. Personally I have always looked at the total price (shipping and item) and based my decision to buy or bid based on that. I could not care less if someone charged a penny for the item and $20.00 for the shipping which would cost me a total of $20.01 if it was going to cost me more than that locally.

Like I said it's a LONG story and don't get me started on PayPal!! lol I had sold a carbon fiber DOT helmet to a customer on eBay. He decided he did not want it (so he claimed), went to PayPal, told them that he returned it to me. I never received it. In my response to his "complaint" to PayPal, he did not give a tracking number. PayPal sided with the buyer and refunded him. I was out my helmet, my money, my shipping charge, my eBay fees. That is just one of many such situations. One time PayPal decided that after several years of selling biker leathers and helmets on eBay that my merchandise was suddenly deemed "dangerous". So, the $400.00 plus dollars that was in my PayPal account was frozen for 6 months to make sure that no one would do a chargeback. Understand that during that 6 months, I could not remove my own money, nor take payments, and I certainly did not earn any interest on MY money. Once the 6 months were up, they unfroze my money and I closed this account for good. Thank God I had been transferring my money out of PayPal to my own bank account otherwise I would have had a LOT more money "frozen". Please note that PayPal does this to people all the time (earning interest on OUR money that they will suddenly freeze with no good reason). My advice, don't keep any kind of balance in your PayPal account that you can't afford to have frozen for 6 months. Check out PayPalSucks.com for more horror stories.

Sorry for the long book, but this is only a tiny part of the story.

Long story short: eBay and PayPal are not to be trusted. This is my opinion, not the opinion of this forum, but my opinion based on my experiences.

When you sign up for PayPal there are many terms of service that you have signed up for. These days if you are a newer seller PayPal freezes your money until up to 21 days after the customer receives their merchandise. That's difficult for small sellers that have to pay for the merchandise, the shipping, the eBay fees and PayPal fees before they ever get a penny.

Another thing that eBay did when John Donahoe took over was not allow the seller to give negative feedback to the buyer, but the buyer could still give negative feedback to the seller. Very lopsided.

I can tell you that I have been blackmailed with negative feedback. I have had customers threaten me with negative feedback if I did not included something extra for them in their package. I even forwarded the emails to eBay and they did NOTHING to these buyers. I received numerous negative feedbacks that I did not deserve. eBay never took into account that I had beautiful feedback BEFORE John Donahoe took over. But once buyers found out that sellers had no way to give them negative feedback, things went to heck fast!!! Now, don't get me wrong, MOST buyers are honest people, but there are enough bad apples on eBay to make it bad for decent people trying to make a living.

I don't miss the stress of selling on eBay. Having to worry about getting undeserved negative feedback or low star ratings put a lot of stress on you. No matter what you do there are just some people who will NOT give an A rating, a 5 Star rating, a 100% rating because they don't believe that anyone or anything is perfect. Even if their transaction with you had gone perfectly, they just don't give out 5 stars.

I've seen sellers who offer FREE SHIPPING get low ratings on SHIPPING AND HANDLING!!! That proves that some people just give low ratings to be ugly. A seller can't go any lower than FREE. Of course we all know shipping is NOT free that if one offers free shipping that you have to build the shipping price into the items price. Unfortunately UPS, Fedex and the Post Office just won't ship stuff for FREE!

 

Sorry for the gender mix up, Wynter-
It is very hard to figure out a persons sex from Ghost Rider
I have now informed and apologize.
If you decide to paint them yourself, this stuff is what auto repair places use, just for this purpose. You can find them only at auto paint stores
Touch Up Paint for your Car Truck or Van by DuPont R-M SEM 3M Bumper Coater Masking Products and Tapes

If the plastic molecular structure has broken down from UV, no amount of Aromor-All or what ever you use will bring it back to life. Painting or spend the bucks for new ones
good Luck
P.S. I'm not a fan of eBay either









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WoW! Thanks for the tutorial. I had no idea of all of this. You are right, that is a shi__y way to run a business. Surprized more folks don't realize it and leave them also. I don't have a balance, I have sold a few things and bought a few things but I guess haven't had any probs. yet.... How are you selling your leather and helmets now? I did get burned for 40 bucks on a college text book for my daughter. It wasn't even the book he advertized and when I sent the guy an email telling him of the mistake he ranted on me and cursed me told me to man up and so so so .... I was not ugly at all and just wanted to know if he had accidentally sent me some body else's order. I even offered to send it on to whoever needed it if it was a mistake. Anyway to make it short. after finding out the guy was a raving loonatic I was done coresponding with him and tried to take it up with e-bay. Never did get satisfaction. They just kept sending me back to him and I was done with him. Finally said F__ it and took the 40 dollar lose. did give him really bad review though....

 

slumlord, that seller was wrong to go off on you when he sent you the wrong book. I can tell you though that eBay can take nice people and turn them into raving lunatics! lol Not excusing the guy, but perhaps he had just been messed over by eBay or PayPal and was taking it out on you, who knows!

Are we allowed to give out our own websites? I don't want to break any forum rules. Basically though, take my username, add the word leather.com to it and there you go. No spaces or dashes.

 

You know I hear this alot about ebay from former sellers who cannot roll with the changes,

From the other side of the coin:

Everything changes.

To sell on ebay you need to be able to work within their never ending rules. I have been selling since they first opened their virtual doors and continue to do so, I do not make millions of dollars, I make just under a six figure income a year. I also work 10 hours a day every single day of the week, but I work for myself and to me that is worth the extra hours. Anyone who has had their own business will tell you that you work far harder for yourself if you wish to be successful at it.

As with any business, brick and mortar or online you have to deal with chargebacks, problem customers, people that want something for free and flat out liars. There are many ways to minimize losses. The star system has its pros and cons. As a buyer I like it, as a seller I hate it lol. You can easily get around 2 out of 4 of the ratings.

1. offer free shipping on everything you sell, build it into your total cost. It boosts your search rankings and the buyer cannot leave you poor feedback based on shipping charges. No one likes inflated shipping charges or offering and expensive item for cheap and then adding a 70 dollar ship charge. This is also against ebays multitude of rules for fee avoidance since theri fee is based on your items final sale price.

2. Always ship within 24 hours of receiving payment, Excluding weekends. Again this takes away the buyers ability to rate you on speed of shipping their item, it also puts you in the top seller category and gives you 20% off of your final value fees which when you get into the 5 figure sales a month category is a pretty significant savings and you want to maintain it.

That leaves you 2 stars left to deal with,

Sellers communication. Buyers want to know you received their payment and that you shipped their item. It does not matter that they get a receipt from Paypal or Ebay after they pay you. They want to hear from you. There are many programs for volume sellers to automate responses, " Thanks for your payment, ships tomorrow, here is your tracking number" etc.

The last star is, How accurate was the items description. This is where most people lose stars, They want to sell something but quite often 'neglect' to mention any flaws the item may have. ' thats no big deal', they will never notice it'. Yes they will.

People like to be lazy and take one picture of an item, That's not good enough. You need to put alot of thought and effort into your listings if you have a business. A couple lines of text and a picture do not cut it. Like any business it takes money to make money, If you can't do html hire it done, take a class, whatever you need to do. The same for photography. Many colleges offer a quick class in the basics of photography as well as quick web design. A class in psychology will also help you alot more than you realize in dealing with people.

The two stars you have to address are honesty in your descriptions and communication with your customers. How would you feel if you spent 500 bucks for something and get no communication at all? Makes me kind of nervous. Honesty really needs no explanation. People do not want to see excessive shipping charges, or handling or packaging fees.

Packaging is another key factor, You cannot just throw someones 100 dollar purchase in a box with no padding and let UPS play football with it for 2,000 miles and expect them to be happy.
Drop shipping is simple, Do not do it. If you do not have them item on hand do not sell it.
If your supplier drops the ball, guess who gets the negative feedback for it?

People look on ebay to shop for bargains not to pay retail price, If I want retail I shop close to home. Other than groceries I purchase 99% of everything else online. It's faster, no sales tax, more options to deal with and better deals.
Anytime you communicate with a buyer thru ebay the messages are automatically stored by ebay. Any attempt at feedback extortion by either side is not tolerated and they will take action but it is up to you to pursue the issue in a cal professional manner, and to be able to supply the appropriate facts to back it up. I have dealt with it many times over the years,' I want this or you get negative feedback' and I have won every single time. Sending them a nasty email because some guy is giving you crap about an item will get you absolutely nowhere.

Paypal has very simple rules, everything that ships needs to be traceable. How would anyone know who got what if you don't? There are always people who think they can get something for nothing and will try very hard to do so, returns in an empty box etc. 99 times out of 100 a call to their local police department will immediately change their attitude. Suddenly they remember they accidentally forgot to put it back in the box, lol. The other 1% is just called the cost of doing business. Sometimes you just have to eat a sale or cut your losses and move on. I don't agonize over it and be po'ed all week over 50 bucks.

New sellers have restrictions placed on their accounts for good reason, nearly every auction site does this to keep people from signing up, selling 10k worth of high dollar electronics and disappearing with the cash. Every business needs start up money, if you can't float the bills and maintain an inventory for 6 months without maxing out all your credit options I would save more money.

Alot of people seem to think they can just start buying stuff on sale somewhere and open up an ebay shop. You don't really think your the only person whos thought of buying all those clearance items to resell do you? There are alot of other factors involved, shipping, packaging, ebay fees, paypal fees and your own time involved. You can't just buy one shipping box and expect to make money, you have to buy hundreds. I have several storage facilities, 2 of them are full of shipping supplies.

You might not like the rules, you might think they are stupid and make no sense and you might be right alot of the time, but it's their playground and you have to play by their rules to use it, no one is twisting your arm.
You'll find that if you sell from a buyers point of view you will be alot happier.
You can always try your hand at making your own auction site, except that even a glimmer of success will bring the wrath of the gods of ebay down upon you and they will crush the life from you.

Sorry for the long post on that one.

Back to our regular programming, Back to Black does not run and slot of people swear by it. I think last time I bought some it was 7 bucks or so.

 

LOL, you are like me, a BOOK writer! I have problems saying things in a few words.

I agree with what you are saying talusfan. My issue is that all my stuff went to crap when John Donahoe took over and shortly before that opening an additional store. I would probably have been ok if that had not happened. Having said that, the star system sucks. The seller not being able to leave negative feedback to deserving customers sucks.

I know it's their playground and I understand the rules, but the booting someone off for life because some moron gives you a low star rating or a negative feedback on a new store is not cause to take someone who had been with them for years and completely boot them out. That's what happened to me, so yes, I am angry, but truly, I don't miss the hassle of eBay.

I have owned my own business since 2003 and yes, I work harder and longer hours for myself and YES, I love not having a boss. I will tell you that rip offs and fraud have been a very minimum thing selling directly from my own websites versus selling on eBay. This is my experience. I know sellers who have been beyond blessed and never had anything bad happen. Don't know why I had so many problems, but I did.

Glad it's going well for you.

 

ive not in 2 years seen a greater collection of thousands of words more unrelated to the original topic,or hummers in general.
wash your mouths out with back to black.
i hear u can get it on ebay.....