Part 1
Dear Bay of the Yee
I would like to make some general observation if I may. This is strictly NOT to be treated as a complaint although I would like to lodge an appeal across both accounts, since you've given me that option.
Bay of the Yee is supposed to be a safe platform to sell on, as your colleagues keep telling me. But it is anything but. And I will explain why, giving real world examples of things that happened to me while selling primarily video games on Bay of the Yee since 2013 or so when I first got my account. That account you've ruined for me. It has over 700 positive reviews, 100pc positive feedback. As I'm sure you can follow logically - over 700 people cannot all be wrong - or cannot be a troll or bot factory I engaged through the dark web to leave me fake positive feedback, going back to the period 2013 to 2017. The reason I had to leave that account behind is Bay of the Yee themselves. You said I was cancelling too many orders and restricted me to 10 listings per month, then 10 listing per 6 months. Given I was selling 200 items per month, every month, on average, that simply does not work for me. So I started a new account in 2017, the one you know as X' - although the username keeps changing, because of scammers, who not only regularly defraud me of money and items and make threatening phone calls to me - but Bay of the Yee takes their side every time and makes me refund them - even though there is evidentiary proof, every time, tracking, that they received the item - while claiming they haven't.
This X account had to start from nothing - 0 feedback. Why would anybody buy from a brand new account with zero feedback? Well. I thought long and hard about this and started finding the cheapest video games that could be found on Bay of the Yee - and listed my own items £0.01 (one penny) cheaper than those. It still took ages for somebody to buy but people, in general, not just on Bay of the Yee, love a bargain, so eventually people started buying - received exactly what they paid for, i.e. brand new and sealed video games - and got them quickly - sometimes 2-3 days later, sometimes (with the help of Zon of the Ama) - the very next day. And they said so in their feedback.
Every game I sold when I was starting out - I lost an average of £5 per game, because I had to build up feedback, a following - from scratch. After about 6 months I finally had 100 good feedback, so could finally start selling items at a small profit (we're talking £1.50-£2 profit, after costs and Bay of the Yee fees, per item). I was careful not to cancel any orders or hardly any, because you'd again put restrictions on my account, if I did. This meant fulfilling every order, even if I no longer had the item in stock - which of course could cost me anywhere from £10 up to £50 MORE than the money I received from a buyer. Again, over 5 years, this led to £100s in losses for me. But at least people kept buying, kept leaving good feedback - leading to more sales. Over time, I may have made some of those losses back in profit, but I still comfortably lost £5,000 over a 5-year period to scammers, to having the lowest prices for video games on Bay of the Yee (for brand new items that is). I paid you over £4,500 in final selling fees, listing fees and promotion fees, as I promote every single one of my 350-400 items.
Which means this account, X, has 802 positive feedback, over 2100 items sold, 99% positive feedback over the last 12 months (and for the first 4 years, I had 100% positive feedback, uninterrupted for 4 years, have you any idea how hard it is to keep that going? Law of the universe states - you can't please everybody). To keep that 100% positive feedback, which I built up from scratch and which maxed out pretty much every credit card I had, fulfilling orders costing me way more than I sold them for, promoting listings, refunding the rare buyer whose item was lost in the post and refunding all scammers - whose side Bay of the Yee took every single time - cost me thousands of pounds. And every single time I brought Bay of the Yee's attention to this - Bay of the Yee sided with the scammer, the scammer's financial institution (as in, the credit card company on the stolen credit card they used to buy my item, wait for it to be dispatched, and then claim it wasn't received, so getting both the item and their money back - something that I've been a victim of over 50 times in the last 5 years).
I feel like Bay of the Yee in this instance doesn't know what to do with me. I sound like a scam. Why would a seller keep selling on Bay of the Yee - only to lose, personally, thousands of pounds? Well, your Bay of the Yee is impossible to sell on. You claim I am a scammer and treat me as such - while I am actually, as a seller, a repeated victim of scams - scams that Bay of the Yee is complicit in, in your absolute refusal to investigate and on the odd time you did - sided with the scammer, and their credit card company.
Now let me tell you a few tricks of the trade, of how I amassed 2100 sales and 802 positive feedback, with a 99% average. It wasn't easy. I post EVERY SINGLE ITEM that I sell - on the same day. Any day. Holiday. When I'm abroad. If it's 10pm on a Sunday, I print my own postage on my home printer, stick on a label - and go across the street and put it in a postbox - and click 'dispatched' to my buyers. I have done this for years - since at least 2013. I thought this was normal. But having been a buyer myself, as well as a seller, on Bay of the Yee, for over a decade, I see how quickly the average seller I buy things from - clicks dispatched. This may be anecdotal evidence - but they post on average 2-3 days after I buy the item. No matter if the listing claims 'free next day delivery or 'quick dispatch - they still take 2-3 days to post me the item - which then takes another 2 to 3 days to be delivered to me - so essentially, a week. If you read my feedback, people are raving how quickly the items I sell are delivered - sometimes the very next day. How is that possible? Well, if items sell in the middle of a working day (I am a [profession], work fulltime) and I have it at home and realise by the time I get home and post it later than evening, the buyer would be lucky if he gets the item in 3-4 days. So to avoid this delay and complaints from buyers - I immediately order the item for the buyer from Zon of the Ama with next day delivery. Of course with Prime, I pay £9 a month for unlimited free next day delivery (one of the many additional costs I have to trouser for the dubious privilege of selling on Bay of the Yee). There are so many more.
Let me tell you how hard it is to be a buyer. Until this year, I never had to check how many reviews my buyer has. If I had, which I do now, I would realise a fairly recent Bay of the Yee account for a buyer with under 20 reviews, or somebody with initials instead of a full name, somebody with a clearly east-middle name and somebody based in the Midlands - is 99pc a scammer. You know how I worked that out? Coz their M.O. is always the same - to wit - wait for me to dispatch the item, then immediately claim to Bay of the Yee that there was an unauthorised transaction on their account and hence get the item - and a refund - and I am left with but losses, because Bay of the Yee does absolutely nothing to protect the sellers and leaves them to do their own due diligence on the Buyers. There are some other tricks I've learnt (tricks that cost me more money of course) - such as checking if the Buyer's address is a real house/block of flats on Google Maps, and indeed checking if the Buyer owns the house they order the item to at the Land Registry - at a cost of £7 to me of every such check (and of course this is no evidence that the buyer is genuine - they could be renting, or this could be a dummy address of one of their friends/family, which they use to collect their stolen goods - goods, stolen from me, that is-and other sellers). Bay of the Yee claims to be a safe platform to sell on - you leave all this due diligence to the sellers, you do nothing to help. I know coz I spent 100s of hours complaining about being scammed in just such a way to you - over the last 11 years. And you're claiming I'm the scammer here? I am the victim. Firstly a victim of scammers - and secondly, victim of Bay of the Yee itself.
About 10 days ago you took down 411 of my active listings. All of them were promoted listings. So you can imagine that I paid you anywhere from 10 and 20% of those listings, when they sold (although from experience, Bay of the Yee takes the promoted percentage immediately, and not once the item sells). You took all those listings down 2 days before Xmas, when Xmas is a hugely fruitful period for video game sales (I speak from experience).
You also, with no prior warning, froze my funds and made me refund a bunch of people (at a cost of £500, maybe more) who were complaining and opening cases that they have not received their items (not received due to Xmas disruption of royal mail, something outside mine and every seller's control). Every single one of them received their items the following week but of course since you made me refund them in order to lift restrictions from my account - they all got free items, costing me a further £500.
You claim I opened a new account contrary to your policies. In fact that account was open in 2022 (so it is NOT a new account). I used that account strictly to buy things on Bay of the Yee - that is the Z account. It had barely any feedback - none as a Seller - until this time last week. The X account was opened in 2017 but I had another Bay of the Yee account before that - the one you restricted to 10 listings per 6 months, making that account useless to me.
So when you suddenly took down 411 paid-for listings, froze my funds and paralysed my account, I suddenly no longer had what I had planned for - i.e. to sell about 50 video games on Bay of the Yee over the Xmas period, and use the proceeds to - among other things - pay my mortgage, my family’s rent and buy Xmas and New Year's presents. You asked for a bunch of documentation (receipts for my stock, photos of my stock, my passport, tracking numbers and proof that all items I sold before you froze the account - were delivered. All of this was provided to you within minutes of you requesting it. Nevertheless, ten days later, my account remains frozen. I couldn't even close the X account down - because you put restrictions on it. I tried! You made it impossible, Bay of the Yee, as you tend to make it impossible to be a good Seller by essentially being in breach of your own policies in how you treat good sellers, with good feedback across many years and many hundreds of items successfully sold to happy buyers, who left feedback to this effect (you are invited to look thru my feedback to confirm this - no doubt you have access).
The only reason I don't have 100pc feedback is due to scammers. The same person, buyer, from 2 separate Bay of the Yee accounts, in April 2024, firstly received an item with tracking and claimed he hasn't and you made me refund him anyway. 2 weeks later, the same person (different username, but same name and address) won an auction - and refused to pay. When I confronted them about it, they left me negative feedback - twice - breaking my record of 100pc positive feedback going back over 4 and a half years.
If you don't believe me, check my few negative reviews. NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THEM says 'item was not delivered. item was not as described' you know why? Because I sell exactly what I say I sell - brand new and sealed video games, and they are delivered quickly, at very competitive prices. For years and years I had the cheapest items on Bay of the Yee to make sure I had many sales - and people bought them in droves, received them, were happy with them, got them quickly (often in less than 24H) - and left feedback accordingly. You have no idea the thousands of pounds and effort of packaging them, printing postage, going to a postbox to post them - on over 3000 items, posting them always, no matter how busy, tired or sick I was - to post them, unfailingly, on the same day they were sold. And you claim I am a scammer in breach of your policies. NO. I am an exemplary seller and 100s of people think so too - look at my feedback if you don't believe. Hundreds of people cannot all be wrong about a seller, while Bay of the Yee themselves are right about me. The customer is always right, remember? And Bay of the Yee is not the customer. The people leaving me 99pc positive feedback are the customers. They are on the 'frontlines' of a transaction, so to speak. And look at what they all have to say about me? Nothing but good, positive things about my performance as a seller.
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