More Transaction Frustration

I find all too often that sellers make certain situations very difficult for buyers. A seller recently mailed the wrong item to me. She realized her mistake and emailed me to refuse the package. I bought the item on my secondary account and did not check my messages until after I received the package. Even if I had checked my messages before I opened the package, I would not have wanted to write "refused" on the package and hope that it would somehow make it back to the seller.

Since I did open the package, I had to package it again in order to prepare it for mailing. The seller's actions (or lack of) made my next step much more difficult. First of all, the seller sent me a PayPal payment rather than simply refunding part of what I paid her. Since it was sent as a payment, I had to pay $0.47 in fees, so what I received was less than what I needed for the postage. Aside from that, the seller did not click on the selection to include her address when she sent the payment, so that I did not have her address as part of the payment file. This was what caused me to go to more trouble than necessary. If the seller had included her address in the payment, I would have had a handy link in which I could have very quickly created a shipping label without having to type all of the information in myself. Sigh . . .

I then went to my original payment to the seller. I have discovered that if a seller accepts returns, then there is a handy link in the original payment file so that a buyer can easily create a shipping label. Needless to say, this seller had that feature blocked. I had no choice but to get the outer wrapping from the seller's package and manually type her address into the PayPal Ship Now page:

https://www.paypal.com/shipnow

I am giving the link here because this is a little-known piece of information. If I did not know about PayPal Ship Now from reading eBay's message boards, I would have had no way of generating a shipping label for my return transaction. I cannot even find a link to PayPal Ship Now on the PayPal site, and I have tried more than once. This link is good for whenever a package has to be sent to someone, and there is not an associated PayPal transaction.

In the past, I have had multiple sellers send me refunds by sending me a payment instead of using the refund link. One time, I told a seller ahead of time that all transactions have a refund link near the bottom of the page and to use it instead of sending a payment. That seller said she couldn't find it and sent me a payment. Here is a screen capture of the lower part of the screen for a PayPal payment that I received recently with all personal information removed:


I highlighted the refund part in yellow so that it would stand out. It is not that hard to find. It may be that some people are afraid to use it, thinking that they might accidentally refund all of the payment. When "Issue Refund" is selected, the next page has the seller enter the amount, and then a second page asks for the seller to confirm the amount. As long as the seller confirms the amount, there is no way that a seller can accidentally refund all of the payment.

An Interesting Adventure Girls Book

Around a year ago, I bought an A. L. Burt edition of one of the Adventure Girls books to upgrade one in my collection. Nearly all of the Adventure Girls books that come up for sale are the Saalfield reprints, so it is rather difficult to get the A. L. Burt books with intact dust jackets.


The book is The Adventure Girls in the Air, and I was quite surprised by something I noticed inside the book in the lower right corner of the front free endpaper.



"AUTHOR'S COPY" is ink-stamped on the front free endpaper. The only explanation that I can think of is that this book was one of the books that A. L. Burt sent to Clair Blank when the Adventure Girls series was first published. If so, this book is not only a true first printing, but more importantly, it was once the personal property of Clair Blank. How neat is that?

More on eBay's Search Problems

I am frustrated with eBay's search. The results are still inconsistent, and items are still missing from search. I just reloaded the search multiple times with the results changing between 2868, 2869, 2871, 2873, 2870, 2867, 2872, and 2867. These results are very close, so it shouldn't be a big deal, right? But what if that one item that I would want to buy is one of the six items that is not showing in all of the results pages?

Last night I did a search for Nancy Drew under title and description. Near the bottom of the third page was a Connie Blair book. After I clicked on the link to the next page, I saw the same Connie Blair book listed several down from the top on the fourth page. This annoys me. No doubt several dropped items were missing on my previous pages and were added back into my results when I went to the next page, thus shifting the Connie Blair book from the third to the fourth page. The problem is that I was already to the fourth page, so I missed those dropped items. I went back to the first page and reloaded, but I had trouble getting consistent results with the slightly higher number of items. I don't have the patience to reload each page five to ten times to try to see all of the items.

I am still using eBay's old search, because I refuse to use eBay's new search until they force me to use it. Sometime recently, they did opt me into the new search, but I opted out. I'm not going there. I just read on eBay's message boards that some people who are using new search are unable to see any of the results pages except for the very first one. This is not good. New buyers will automatically be opted into the new search and won't realize that they can opt out. As a result, new buyers will never see all of the results.

PayPal also has a nasty glitch. Many payments that are sent by eCheck are showing up as unclaimed in the seller's account, even after the eCheck has cleared. The sellers are only able to get their money after calling PayPal customer service and having someone manually release the payment. EBay has not mentioned this glitch on their announcements, which is most curious.

I may not sell anything until the end of the year because of all of these problems. As it is, I typically do not sell during December because I do not wish to deal with buyers who buy books around December 15, pay for media mail, and wait a week to tell me that they really, really, need the book for Christmas and where is it/what if it doesn't arrive on time? I avoid that by not selling.

The Linda Carlton Boxed Set

I recently purchased a boxed set of the first three Linda Carlton books by Edith Lavell.


The boxed set was put out by Saalfield. I have had a similar boxed set of the Adventure Girls series for quite a long time. Notice that the spines of the books in this set match the design of the boxed set. Since the Saalfield boxed sets contain only three volumes, this must be the reason why volumes four and five from the Linda Carlton series were never reprinted, thus making them nearly impossible to find.

Below is a scan of the back panel of one of the Linda Carlton dust jackets.


Notice that each series listed on the back panel has three titles. Since I also have an Adventure Girls boxed set, I strongly suspect that each of these series was released by Saalfiend in a boxed set. It is quite unusual to have a boxed set survive 60 to 70 years, so they do not come up for sale very often.

I recently saw another Saalfield boxed set on eBay in which three unrelated titles were packaged together. Here is the seller's picture:


The three books are Bobs - A Girl Detective, The Valdmere Mystery, and The Sandalwood Boxes.

Girl Scouts Series #11 and #12

The Girl Scouts series by Edith Lavell consists of ten volumes. The A. L. Burt Company also published two additional Girl Scouts books that were written by Harriet Pyne Grove and added to the end of the Lavell series. Since the tenth title of the Lavell books ends with Marjorie thinking of her future and appearing to live happily ever after, the end of the story of Marjorie Wilkinson definitely ends with volume 10.

I have always thought that the two books by Harriet Pyne Grove are unrelated to the Lavell books. I now have a copy of volume 12, The Girl Scout's Problem Solved. I have not read it but have flipped through it. I recognize none of the names of the different characters, so I am confident that the story is unrelated to the Lavell books. I do not have a copy of volume 11, The Girl Scouts of the Cardinal Patrol, so it is possible that some link could be made in that volume, but at this point in time, I feel that it is highly unlikely.

It is not unheard of for publishers to link books together in a series when in fact the books are unrelated to each other. The Moving Picture Girls series by Gertrude W. Morrison consists of seven titles. When the series was reprinted by World Syndicate and Goldsmith, a title named The Moving Picture Girls' Holidays was added to the set and even has the author stated as Laura Lee Hope on the dust jacket, yet that title has no relation to the other seven books. The Moving Picture Girls' Holidays is a book from the Ethel Morton series by Mable S. C. Smith.

Seen below is the copyright page of The Girl Scout's Problem Solved in which the two books by Harriet Pyne Grove are listed as part of the series by Edith Lavell.


The Girl Scouts of the Cardinal Patrol and The Girl Scout's Problem Solved are only listed on the books and jackets of those two titles. The ten books by Edith Lavell have no mention of volumes 11 and 12 on any of the books or jackets. The Lavell series is just the ten volumes, and the books by Harriet Pyne Grove are a short two-volume series that are packaged as part of the Lavell series.

Some eBay Observations Part II

A little over a week ago, I made some observations about my experiences of the previous week on eBay. During that week, I had far more buyer questions than usual. Prospective buyers wanted me to break up sets and sell them just one or two books cheaply, and a buyer told me that I should reconsider my price for the complete set of Nancy Drew books because it was overpriced.

Another buyer asked me whether I would be willing to sell the complete set of Nancy Drew books privately, so I asked her for clarification. She never responded. I was looking at closed listings this weekend and noticed that she had won an auction for a complete set of Nancy Drew books for around $100 several days after she contacted me. I think I can conclude that she was wanting me to sell my complete set to her for far less than $295, which would not have been in my best interest. I never can understand why people think that I would cancel a listing before it ends in order to sell it for below the opening bid. I always let auctions run to completion before I even think about lowering the price. Anybody could be waiting until the last few seconds to place a bid.

I relisted some of the lots that did not sell, and those lots have now closed. The ones that I relisted were the ones for which I had many questions during the previous week. This time I had no questions about my listings. Nobody wanted me to break up the lots, and nobody wanted me to sell the books at a lower price. This time all of my lots sold.

The supposedly overpriced complete set of Nancy Drew books sold, as I knew it would eventually. I only had to relist it once! The books are worth at least $5 each rather than the $1-2 each suggested by that one person.

It may just be coincidence that all of my listings sold this week. Some weeks are better than others, and it all depends upon who is looking. Rather than lowering any of my prices, I relisted the lots at the same prices but with free shipping. Free shipping gives listings a rather large boost in eBay's Best Match search. What I need to do is list a bunch of Nancy Drew books with dust jackets and list some with free shipping and others without free shipping. That is the only way I'll know for certain whether there is a correlation between free shipping and the sell-through rate.

Of the four items I sold this week, two of them had multiple bids. For those two lots, the final price was slightly above what the total cost would have been for those lots during the previous week with the shipping factored in. The first lot was originally priced at $34.99 plus $7.78 shipping for a total of $42.77. The relisted lot closed at $48.77 with free shipping. The second lot was originally priced at $34.99 plus $8.48 shipping for a total of $43.47. The relisted lot closed at $50.99 with free shipping.

Even though I had to pay eBay fees on the shipping amount since it was figured into the item price, I still did better with both lots than I would have during the previous week if they had sold at the opening bids.

EBay Search is Broken—Again

I was searching a seller's completed auctions for the second time tonight, and I noticed that an item was missing that I had seen earlier. I hit refresh several times, and the items that were displayed changed each time.

I then did a Nancy Drew search from within the books category. I kept refreshing, and each time I saw a different number of results. All from within around minute's time, the search returned 2922, 2930, 2909, 2902, 2914, 2915, 2905, 2907, 2892, 2920, 2912, 2923, 2903, 2918, and 2911 listings. I got tired of doing it, so I quit, but it is apparent that the old problem of dropped items has returned again.

Items do drop out of search as they end, and at the same time, new items are also being listed, so there is always some slight variance. This would normally account for the results which were similar, such as 2911 and 2912. The results should never vary by more than just a couple of items. Something is wrong. This is an old problem that goes back several years, and it returns at least a couple of times each year.

When a search is done, the results are returned by one of eBay's servers. All of the servers are supposed to contain the same data, but sometimes they get out of sync and return different results. When they get out of sync, items are dropped from the results, depending upon which server produces the results.

It is a bad problem because when a seller's item is one of the dropped items, the seller may receive fewer bids. On the other hand, buyers can get good deals when they are interested in an item that is dropped from most of the search results, so fewer people see it. This happened to me several years ago when I won an auction for the first printing of Nancy's Mysterious Letter in dust jacket for only $150.00. It closed at a time when the search results were particularly bad, but I happened to be lucky enough to spot that auction. It seems like I did not see that auction until close to the end because it had been missing during other searches.

Kit Hunter #4 Bush Adventure

I am reading the fourth Kit Hunter book, Kit Hunter, Show Jumper, in Bush Adventure. During a certain scene, I suddenly realized that the cover art shows Kit on a horse trying to escape from a fire in the Australian bush country. I had not made the connection that all of the pretty yellow, orange, and red colors depict a fire. I believe the problem is that Kit looks a bit too happy in the cover art. She is smiling like she is out for a fun gallop on her horse. If the picture had shown her looking like she is worried, I might have realized that she is surrounded by fire. This is a perfect example of someone looking at something yet not really looking at it.

This book has a very good mystery and is quite exciting. Colonel Hamden, Kit, and Mary have gone to Australia with John Parker, a very wealthy rancher who just purchased some horses. The plan is for Colonel Hamden and the others to oversee the horses during the first few months they are in Australia and to make certain that the horses make a good impression, thus improving their business.

During the journey to Australia, a storm strikes the ship, and Kit worries about the safety of the horses down in the hold. When Kit checks on the horses, several of them have escaped from their stalls, and a crewman is found seriously injured. Kit learns from the crewman that he accepted money in return for making something bad happen to the horses. Kit wonders whether someone has a grudge against John Parker.

Upon her arrival in Australia, Kit overhears a suspicious conversation, giving her further reason to believe someone is out to get John Parker. At the ranch, Kit learns that Mr. Parker had fired a previous tutor for his two young children because the man had begun to meddle in his affairs. Mr. Parker has hired a new tutor, and Kit soon becomes suspicious of him.

Kit decides to withhold her suspicions of the new tutor since she is not certain of anything. Too late, Kit realizes that she should have said something, because Kit is blamed for something that the tutor did. Kit finds herself in a very difficult position and must solve the mystery in order to exonerate herself.

So far, I have liked the fourth Kit Hunter book, Bush Adventure, the best. It has so many of the traditional elements of mystery and suspense that are found in series books.