Anyone hear from Bob Beerbohm lately?

[DeliBebek]

As epic as this thread was in general, it was made more so by Mmehdy's accomplishing the little-seen "octuple tap," (eight consecutive posts by one poster) not only in the middle of a very active thread, but while talking on the phone and taking notes.

[BEAUMONTS]

"Bob Beerbong" and "Incredulous" are synonyms with each other.

You even mentioning to go to his ebay store is at this point basically a personal affront to 99 percent of the board.

I don't wish any ill will to Mr. Beerbohm but at some point it's really basic. either you are in business legitimately or you are dishonest. If you don't have the facilities to do it your self either hire someone or quite what your doing. Don't make your problems other people's problem.

Please do not pander any more of this Beerbohm modus operandi to the boards.

[skypinkblu]

In a perfect world, this would never happen, I just hope Bob can dig himself out of it. Again,from Bob he is requesting that you visit his ebay store….and buy one book to help him…….this is call to action for all board members...

 

one picture.....a thousand words

 

 

I cannot believe that some people on this board would resort to such an outrageous

insult, not only to our current hardworking President of the United States , BUT also Bob Beerbong himself;

 

How dare you….

 

I only think I asked from the "generous "board members here was…."to buy a comic book for Bob"

 

Folks, this is not a crime, but a rescue of a fellow or former fellow board member adrift at sea…..we need to throw out the "life preserver" to save a 47 year comic book collector, dealer,and historian. It is a very little price to pay……

 

I suggested E-Bay because Bob has time shipping requirements……

 

Let us think….about the bigger picture here……

 

Are we men or are we mice??

Bob Beerbong?

I saw that, too...perhaps that's the problem?

 

Seriously, Mitch no one is going to buy something that will help Bob delay sending out these paid for orders. This is an extremely generous and kind place, but most of us are not living in a Disney movie.

[G.A.tor]

Disney movies

[Timely]

So, bottom line for me is, I'll guess I'll come back to this thread in 30 days and see if all is right in the world or if the pitchforks need to be sharpened.

[ComicConnoisseur]

Yeah. It sucked. I was actually the largest amazon drop shipper on ebay at the time. Had spent the last year 18 hours a day working on making listings and building the business. Stopped me cold with one phone call.

 

Thanks offbeat.

Just curious as how you could make a profit doing it?

Those EBay and PayPal fees add up.

Was it because of Amazon Prime`s free shipping?

Did you list in your EBay listings that you were getting the stuff from Amazon?

Usually it`s Amazon that pulls the plug, and not EBay when it comes to using both of them together with drop shipping.

Just curious as money profits could be made during this holiday season if this drop shipping is done right.

 

[snitzer]

Disney movies + Beerbongs

[G.A.tor]

Disney movies + Beerbongs

better than hookers and heroin

[Straw-Man]

Disney movies + Beerbongs

better than hookers and heroin

 

don't get carried away.

[ComicConnoisseur]

I did move. Three months ago. And gave Bob my new address. It was three months after the original transaction, so it's no excuse on his part. But I've repeatedly given him a new address to mail them too. He just doesn't ever do it. The last I talked to him was two months ago. He ignores all my calls now.

 

Ebay did shut me down for selling. I was an amazon dropshipper. On April 9th of this year they had a whole bunch of fee updates. They also had a policy change (You won't find records of this policy change as it isn't written anywhere. They only call you and tell you directly if you violated it). Basically, amazon dropshipping is now "frowned upon" (their words) by ebay. They don't want amazon getting all the free advertisements to ebay's customers that amazon offers better prices. They blocked my selling for one month and told me I could come back after a month if I promise to them that I won't amazon dropship anymore. This was last well after I gave Bob the money. And has no bearing on the transaction between him and I. I've long since been allowed to sell on ebay again (and I never did anything wrong, amazon dropshipping has always been allowed and the online rulebook still says it's ok), I just no longer have anything to sell as amazon isn't an option anymore.

The possible reasons could be that

You put up too many EBay auctions with Amazon drop shipping, and this raised a red flag, and put you on their radar.

A EBay competitor found out about it, got upset you had great prices, and reported you.

A EBay seller found out they could have got it cheaper on Amazon, and felt stupid that they didn`t buy it themselves from Amazon, so they reported you.

I am just surprised Amazon didn`t find out, as they are much stricter then EBay when it comes to drop shipping.

[Matthew42383]

Honestly ComicCon, It's extremely profitable, especially during the holiday season. If you don't mind working 18 hours a day (if you are greedy), you could easily make more then a plastic surgeon yearly. If you only want a small store, you could easily work 1 hour a day and only make 150 daily. As big or small as you want it. And I know you can go on ebay and find people still doing it. It's still considered okay, rules wise. But when ebay catches you (and they will within a few months). They'll do the temporary block and phone call thing to you that they did to me. It's not worth the effort. I used a combination of ebay turbolister, a extremely useful program called pricespectre, and amazon/ebays website, along with a ebay fee calculator online.

 

Amazon has it in it's rules that you can't dropship. They'll remove your free shipping if they catch you. However if you are a big enough dropshipper they let you stay on. You wont find this in the rules either. (They know you are sending to ebay buyers and like the free advertising). If you are small and you lose it, all it takes to create a new account with free shipping is a yahoo email address, and about 15 bucks. You can usually find a amazon prime person selling the ability to attach you to their prime for about that on ebay). And you'll have free shipping for a year again. And Again. I'm not recommending this.

 

As far as ebay/paypal fees go, they charge you about 25%. I know there is alot of people who are going to start pulling out numbers like 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction, or estimates hovering around 13% but the 25% number is true. There are several hidden fees that add up and increase the overall average. (Listing fees for items that you don't sell as one of a dozen example I can spout out). Another big issues is people who steal or attempt to blackmail after a transaction. Depending on what categories of amazon items you sell this runs between 1-2 of all transactions, and you lose the gross amount here not just the net. Ebay is completely buyer-centric now. They tend to ban buyers who steal using faulty claims after they do it 3 or 4 times. (This is 60,000 transactions experience talking). Unfortunately, those people just open up a new account and do it some more. You'll even find people returning empty boxes or envelopes to you just for the tracking to prove they did to Paypal. You'll lose most of the cases. The ones that you off the most will be the people who when they checked out gave you a home address from a decade ago that's no longer valid and now blame you and try to steal their money back for their mistake.

 

But none of that fee matters. You just raise your price to accomodate that. Pricespectre does this for you automatically once you set it up. Creating listings can take a person about 30 seconds per listing once they get good at it. One day I remember spending 14 hours creating 500 appliance listings on turbolister and then uploading them all. The best part is by putting the quantity at 10, 20, or whatever per each listing, once you have a listing, you keep making money on it at 10 cents, 15 cents, 2 bucks, whatever a pop.

 

10 cents? Thats not worth it right? It is. Once an item sells, it takes me 30-45 seconds to copy and paste the buyers address and go through amazons checkout process. If I sell 500 items in a day, takes me 6 to 8 hours to ship them all. (You use amazon gift cards you buy beforehand to avoid the long cc payment process). Further, if you have a chase amazon credit card, you get 3% cash back on all purchases at amazon. At 20,000.00 in gross sales daily, thats an extra 600 bucks a day. Could easily make a 1000.00 that day for the net profit, not including cash back (seven days a week, 365 a year). Best time for sales, yeah are that one month time frame coming up. Sounds too good to be true. Well, it wasn't. But because of ebays cloak and dagger bs, they snag people who do it now because they don't like amazon's advertising directly to people who shop on ebay. (Afterall the purchase comes in a amazon box). And no you dont have to tell people it's shipped from amazon, just the same as if you sold a comic on there and were on vacation, you wouldnt bother telling the buyer that you were shipping it from CA instead of TX or whatever. Amazon will get the item there in 2 days, so it doesn't really matter where it ships from.

 

It's still a viable thing to do. Until ebay gets one complaint from a buyer that they recieved the exact item they ordered, a week before they expected to get it, had perfect communication, but are still pissed off because they found out that the seller (you) made money on the transaction after it came in an amazon box. I use to use the amazon gift option to get rid of this, but unfortunately while they wont write the price on the receipt still, the no longer use the plain brown boxes they did (they switched over to the amazon marking box).

 

It's just not worth the time, since it can be taken away with a moments notice after thousands of hours of work. Your not doing anything wrong (Amazon waives their shipping rules de facto, and its valid as far as ebays rules go). But because of behind the scenes decisions made by ebay executives after Meg Whitman left, they now use their "Ebay reserves the right to cancel any ebay account at any time for any reason even if the account holder has done absolutely nothing wrong" magical powers....

[Matthew42383]

It was a buyer complaining to ebay that they were too lazy to shop around. That's what it amounts to. I did maybe 50,000 transactions dropshipping, probably 50 or so people who were pissed off they were too lazy to pricematch and that was somehow my fault that I made money on a transaction. The April 9th update changed all that. They now take your account away behind the scenes when they get complaints like that (do to free advertising for amazon concerns). If you do this you'll find out when a woman in her mid forties calls you and tells you shes suspending your account, and no according to the policies you did nothing wrong, and you are valued ebay member....

[Matthew42383]

And all ebay competitors for your amazon drop shipped items, they are amazon dropshippers. Compare main pictures between an amazon item and the ebay listing. Youll see they are the same.

 

IF you are dead set on doing this to make money, there are two ways around it without angering anyone.

 

Either: List items that ship directly to a persons house from another website (like walmart.com). Ebay has no problem with anyone except amazon.

 

or

 

dropship on amazon instead. Creating your own listings of walmart, target, toysrus items etc. and sell on there. (Toys R US is your best bet as they were banned from selling on amazon themself after Toys R US won a lawsuit against them when Amazon tried to use bully tactics to steal billions from Toy's R Us nearly a decage ago. Further xmas time = toy buying season). Youll find a similar seperation between ebay and craigslist (despite ebay owning part of craigslist), for similar reasons interestingly enough.

 

Amazon to ebay dropshipping is the easiest though time constraint wise.

[Sqeggs]

If Mitch tells Bob that the only way he will ever rescue his reputation among his peers is by accepting responsibility for past actions Matthew might just get his refund, or his purchases.

 

Hats off to Mitch if he somehow gets this across. But Mitch, it will not work if in the same breath you enable Bob's behavior to continue. There are no effective half measures or compromises. Clarity, directness and simplicity will work best.

 

But sadly Bob's behavior will almost certainly never change. "Empathy" (pace, Claudio) and compassion play to his game.

 

More than likely Bob will already be calculating where to find his next mark.

 

 

I guess we will see over the next month whether BB finally makes good on this one. I hope Michael's gloomy diagnosis of his likely future behavior proves incorrect.

 

Kudos to Mitch for trying to resolve this issue (while enduring a ton of krap being hurled from the sidelines). (thumbs u

[Matthew42383]

I'm fed up with them though. A year of work in the trash because they can't even play by their own rules. I'm off to less frustrating things.

[vaillant]

If Mitch tells Bob that the only way he will ever rescue his reputation among his peers is by accepting responsibility for past actions Matthew might just get his refund, or his purchases.

 

Hats off to Mitch if he somehow gets this across. But Mitch, it will not work if in the same breath you enable Bob's behavior to continue. There are no effective half measures or compromises. Clarity, directness and simplicity will work best.

 

But sadly Bob's behavior will almost certainly never change. "Empathy" (pace, Claudio) and compassion play to his game.

Fair enough (thumbs u – but I did not imply empathy, and let alone compassion, should be excuses to let someone keeping stucked in his bad actions or habits. At all.

Since my knowledge of the person is limited, I just suggested more insistence done the right way, on the part of those who know him, might help.

I like the fact you say "almost": surely your attitude is more helpful than many others which have been manifested.

 

I applaud Matthew and these customers for their patience, but of course he need to realize, and I agree the best way would be for him, if economically able right now, to issue a refund. But this implies awareness, and what I simply suggested is this is not so bound to happen when for many people this is merely a "case closed" and the person is already someone to despise and nothing more.

 

Seriously, Mitch no one is going to buy something that will help Bob delay sending out these paid for orders. This is an extremely generous and kind place, but most of us are not living in a Disney movie.

Disney movies are no longer something to look to, for what matters.

[Matthew42383]

I'm waiting on Disney to destroy the Star Wars franchise myself.

[G.A.tor]

Disney movies + Beerbongs

better than hookers and heroin

 

don't get carried away.

whew. That's a relief

[Flex Mentallo]

 

I guess we will see over the next month whether BB finally makes good on this one. I hope Michael's gloomy diagnosis of his likely future behavior proves incorrect.

 

 

 

Here's hoping

[ComicConnoisseur]

Honestly ComicCon, It's extremely profitable, especially during the holiday season. If you don't mind working 18 hours a day (if you are greedy), you could easily make more then a plastic surgeon yearly. If you only want a small store, you could easily work 1 hour a day and only make 150 daily. As big or small as you want it. And I know you can go on ebay and find people still doing it. It's still considered okay, rules wise. But when ebay catches you (and they will within a few months). They'll do the temporary block and phone call thing to you that they did to me. It's not worth the effort. I used a combination of ebay turbolister, a extremely useful program called pricespectre, and amazon/ebays website, along with a ebay fee calculator online.

 

Amazon has it in it's rules that you can't dropship. They'll remove your free shipping if they catch you. However if you are a big enough dropshipper they let you stay on. You wont find this in the rules either. (They know you are sending to ebay buyers and like the free advertising). If you are small and you lose it, all it takes to create a new account with free shipping is a yahoo email address, and about 15 bucks. You can usually find a amazon prime person selling the ability to attach you to their prime for about that on ebay). And you'll have free shipping for a year again. And Again. I'm not recommending this.

 

As far as ebay/paypal fees go, they charge you about 25%. I know there is alot of people who are going to start pulling out numbers like 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction, or estimates hovering around 13% but the 25% number is true. There are several hidden fees that add up and increase the overall average. (Listing fees for items that you don't sell as one of a dozen example I can spout out). Another big issues is people who steal or attempt to blackmail after a transaction. Depending on what categories of amazon items you sell this runs between 1-2 of all transactions, and you lose the gross amount here not just the net. Ebay is completely buyer-centric now. They tend to ban buyers who steal using faulty claims after they do it 3 or 4 times. (This is 60,000 transactions experience talking). Unfortunately, those people just open up a new account and do it some more. You'll even find people returning empty boxes or envelopes to you just for the tracking to prove they did to Paypal. You'll lose most of the cases. The ones that you off the most will be the people who when they checked out gave you a home address from a decade ago that's no longer valid and now blame you and try to steal their money back for their mistake.

 

But none of that fee matters. You just raise your price to accomodate that. Pricespectre does this for you automatically once you set it up. Creating listings can take a person about 30 seconds per listing once they get good at it. One day I remember spending 14 hours creating 500 appliance listings on turbolister and then uploading them all. The best part is by putting the quantity at 10, 20, or whatever per each listing, once you have a listing, you keep making money on it at 10 cents, 15 cents, 2 bucks, whatever a pop.

 

10 cents? Thats not worth it right? It is. Once an item sells, it takes me 30-45 seconds to copy and paste the buyers address and go through amazons checkout process. If I sell 500 items in a day, takes me 6 to 8 hours to ship them all. (You use amazon gift cards you buy beforehand to avoid the long cc payment process). Further, if you have a chase amazon credit card, you get 3% cash back on all purchases at amazon. At 20,000.00 in gross sales daily, thats an extra 600 bucks a day. Could easily make a 1000.00 that day for the net profit, not including cash back (seven days a week, 365 a year). Best time for sales, yeah are that one month time frame coming up. Sounds too good to be true. Well, it wasn't. But because of ebays cloak and dagger bs, they snag people who do it now because they don't like amazon's advertising directly to people who shop on ebay. (Afterall the purchase comes in a amazon box). And no you dont have to tell people it's shipped from amazon, just the same as if you sold a comic on there and were on vacation, you wouldnt bother telling the buyer that you were shipping it from CA instead of TX or whatever. Amazon will get the item there in 2 days, so it doesn't really matter where it ships from.

 

It's still a viable thing to do. Until ebay gets one complaint from a buyer that they recieved the exact item they ordered, a week before they expected to get it, had perfect communication, but are still pissed off because they found out that the seller (you) made money on the transaction after it came in an amazon box. I use to use the amazon gift option to get rid of this, but unfortunately while they wont write the price on the receipt still, the no longer use the plain brown boxes they did (they switched over to the amazon marking box).

 

It's just not worth the time, since it can be taken away with a moments notice after thousands of hours of work. Your not doing anything wrong (Amazon waives their shipping rules de facto, and its valid as far as ebays rules go). But because of behind the scenes decisions made by ebay executives after Meg Whitman left, they now use their "Ebay reserves the right to cancel any ebay account at any time for any reason even if the account holder has done absolutely nothing wrong" magical powers....

Thanks for the advice. I delved into drop shipping few times, and made some decent money. I have never had the time to take it serious, but I might experiment doing it for a month or two. I have a month vacation coming up. I don`t really care if my EBay or Amazon accounts get suspended, as I don`t rely on them to make a living. I also have been on Amazon for 5 years and EBay for over a decade, so it`s about time I went for a decent score! If it works I will come back and buy some decent books from MR.BEDROCK and GATOR.