After perusing various unhelpful sites, feeds, and forums, I have come to a decision for how I’m going to handle my store inventory at the end of the week.
I’m going to pull all my listings, remove any mention of the word “spell,” take them out of the Metaphysical category, and put them back up, with very little copy/explanation, in the Religious Products and Supplies category. I think I will try “Prayer Oil” as a general title for about half of them, and “Candle Oil” for the other half. And I’m going to see if any of that flies. They may very well blow me up next week and suspend me/shut me down, but I don’t see how going this route is any different than offering holy water, holy oil, relics, or prayer beads, so I’m going to try it on the guess that the real problem is intangible items making outrageous claims that create problems for returns. Since I don’t accept returns, I expect that that will keep me in their headlights anyway, but I’ll see how this goes.
Since they have changed their requirements for sellers, dinging and raising fees on anyone that doesn’t ship in 24 hours and doesn’t offer 14 day returns, I regret that the prices on ebay keep going up to make up the difference (they end up getting about 25% of your money when you shop through ebay and pay with paypal, and it’s worse with items that have lower costs like small bottles of oil – they get nearly $2.00 in fees on a $5 bottle of oil that ships for $2.50 . And if you don’t ship according to their standards, designed to get rid of small businesses, artists, custom items, and the “funky flea market” feel that is what drew so many to ebay, then they don’t care about you, and they sink your listings way down in the search results, meaning unsold inventory sits longer accruing more fees as it gets relisted every month). But I don’t want to just dump the store entirely, for starters because the occasional auction is fun, and also because as a seller you can’t get the traffic ebay gets you anywhere else. Also, I want to see just how far they push this and if they are willing to get egg on their face in various religious communities by actively gunning for non-Christian religious folks which they are very, very close to doing.
In the meanwhile, I will have a full inventory, minus forbidden things like chicken feet, at Bonanza, and my store at KarmaZain.com is fully functioning for US and International buyers, including updated Altar Work and Consultations pages.
Big Lucky Hoodoo 