I'm disappointed that there is no option to disable conversations either globally or per conversation. This really sucks and shows that the Google people assume way too much on how people handle their e-mail. I agree personally on the feature request but it's interesting you say Google "assumes". Since it is a web mail service they probably have extensive data on exactly how everyone uses the Gmail. Plus they get feedback from their own use as well as from users. Perhaps it is just not a feature in high demand? Or perhaps it is a designed in "feature" kind of like Apple's one button mouse that they are disinclined to change? Who knows for sure...
That said, I would like tagging to not ALWAYS work on a per conversation basis. I don't mind if that is the defaults but I'd like to be able to make other choices when it makes sense. I agree there are times when it's not the most appropriate basis for sorting mail and I would like to be able to choose.
Until recently, most phones lacked over-the-air firmware upgrade capability. True but generally the phone manufacturers don't exactly spend a ton of effort on firmware upgrades either. They'd rather you just bought a new phone.
Erm. You have a UPS on your computer and it still has dodgy power? You have something seriously wrong in that case. No, that's why I don't have hard drives dying from surges anymore. I learned my lesson long ago after I fried one too many bits of electronics. I've lived in too many areas with dodgy power to trust what comes out of the wall anymore. Now my main problems are static and shock from the odd bit of dropped equipment.
Though I did once have a UPS and the attached computers fry due to a nearby lightning strike. Get 1.21gigawats across a UPS and it doesn't matter what you've got protecting it.:-)
Even bare bones UPSes wont allow the voltage fluctuate. That's not true for all UPSes especially some of the cheaper ones. Some will allow fluctuations but only within "safe" ranges. Offline/Standby units just monitor but don't trigger until certain defined conditions are met. You need power conditioning equipment to keep the voltage pegged at specific voltage/amperage levels. (Yes I have some) Usually it's more expensive and not always necessary.
Ummm... "Bludge" is a common word in most of the English speaking word... Also, you could always just Google it. That sound you hear is a joke going over your head.
And no, it isn't common in most of the english speaking world - hence the joke. It certainly is never used here in the US nor, to the best of my knowledge, in Canada either. I'm pretty sure I've never heard anyone from the UK or India use the word either though I've spent considerably less time there. Might be common among the Aussies and Kiwis but I wouldn't know.
How the hell do you get power surges in a computer? Forgot to mention ethernet cables and phone cables are susceptible to power surges too - more so than the main power cable in my experience. I've seen more than a few fried ethernet cards and motherboards from an insufficiently protected dsl modem.
I also admit that I use RAID 5 on my home server (my main data store) but not on my other computers. Actually I use RAID 0 on one of my servers. Still lost two hard drives on it.
How the hell do you get power surges in a computer? Power supplies do not filter out all surges and by design they can't help with power dips. Flip you box on/off 20 times in under 5 seconds and you'll likely have some dead equipment. Have a lightning strike in your vicinity and you likely will have some friend equipment regardless of your power supply make. Recently I had a loose neutral wire on my main in my house which made voltages swing by + or - 40 volts. Not good for the equipment.
And yes I use battery backups on every computer I own plus have filtering gear on every ethernet and phone cable too. I don't trust power quality or reliability at all.
You must be using some pretty dodgy power supplies. I usually put PC Power and Cooling supplies - generally regarded as among the best - in most of my machines. Still lose hard drives and occasionally other gear from time to time.
They should die, absorbing the surge rather than letting it through. Perhaps in theory but the real world doesn't work like that. Frankly most power supplies are poorly made, under-engineered pieces of crap anyway.
Writes to a hard drive dont matter in the slightest. They are the same as reads in terms of wear and tear. Exactly. You get twice as much wear whereas a SSD gets zero wear on a read operation. I'm joking but only a little. In either case with either device you are shortening the lifetime of the device.
If you write to SSDs a lot then your looking at it having a very short life. This has been disputed ad-nauseum here and elsewhere. I'd prefer to see some actual real world data from folks who've used numerous SSD drives for extended periods. I have seen no compelling evidence that SSD drives are any less reliable or long lasting than platter drives. Not that I would really trust either one.
in Florida teachers get pretty decent wages. They make more than double minimum wage You have a very weird definition of "decent wages". Twice minimum wage is roughly $25,000 a year as June 2008. For a person with a spouse and three children that is right at the poverty line
Teaching is a feel good job, not a lucrative one. That depends entirely on who you teach. Tony Robins reportedly makes $30 million with his self help teachings. Granted he's an extreme example but there is money in teaching, just not K-12 teaching.
Anyone who thinks teaching is a bludge, doesn't know anything about teaching. I know plenty about teaching but can you teach me what the heck a bludge is? Is that some sort of mythical fairy creature? Or something you pound someone else with? Have you been reading too much Harry Potter?
$48k? Chump change. I remember back when the company I worked for at the time paid over six figures for a pimped out server back in the late 90's... Server hell - I had an SGI Octane on my desk for a while that cost almost $50K. Two years later it had roughly the same performance as a $5K PC. Plus we had an SGI Onyx AND and Origin2000 that cost a cool quarter million each, plus maintenance.
Hard drives are hardly unreliable. I've never had one die on me yet. You're either incredibly lucky, haven't owned many hard drives or lying. I'll presume you're honest (despite your handle) and the other two are equally likely in my opinion. Personally I've had at least 15 hard drives crap out on me over the years, not those of counting friends, family and coworkers which sends the number well into triple digits. And those are just those I've seen first hand. Add in the ones I know about at companies I've worked in and the number is in the thousands easily. Hard drives are amazing things but they should NEVER be thought of as reliable. In my experience they are the least reliable thing in the computer thanks to all the moving parts. Frankly it's amazing they work as well as they do.
They've worked fabulously until now and there is no reason why they will die overnight. Sure there is. Power surges is the most obvious reason - I've lost several to those. Sometimes hard drives give warnings such as poor performance or weird noises but more often they just break all of a sudden without any warning. Even software to detect drive failures when available is unreliable in detecting imminent failures.
And you want to *reduce* writes to SSDs, not increase them. You want to reduce writes to hard drives too. What's your point?
10,000 T is instantly lethal to organic life
wikipedia says 0.1MT (10^5 T). that's 100000 T Please cite a primary source. I use wikipedia too but it's not an authoritative reference in this particular case.
Right, and who would be so stupid to think that the stakes are not geared towards the seller in the case of Amazon or Wal*Mart? Both sell commodity items for barely profitable margins because buyers can easily go elsewhere for anything they sell. So in order to attract customers they have to drive prices down as far as possible which pretty much only benefits those who buy from them. Yeah, Wal*Mart really have buyers over a barrel. Please...
Just because things are tilted against the buyer everywhere else, doesn't mean they aren't also tilted against the buyer on eBay. It's just that with eBay, things are even more tilted against the buyer than usual. eBay is a marketplace where items sell for wholesale at best to liquidation prices. That means that buyers have the advantage in pricing power which is usually the most reliable indicator of who has the upper hand in the transaction. Furthermore eBay offers sellers NO volume discounts, has pathetic and illogical security allowing countless items to be fenced through their site, through PayPal enforces allows returns for anything for any reason, lets manufacturers pull auctions of branded items being legally sold at will, raises sellers rates every 6 months like clockwork (which is where eBay really makes their money), plus takes away defense mechanisms like negative feedback.
Your counter argument is that buyers usually send money first so they are being screwed even though they can almost always get it back if they use PayPal which most of them do. I'm done with this discussion as it's clear you have no experience and certainly no credible arguments.
But typical individual buyers have feedback numbers under 100. So what? There are NO meaningful consequences to a single negative feedback for a buyer unless they have essentially zero feedback. Plus when sellers have less than 100 feedbacks (and ALL of then do/did at one point) they get threatened constantly and there ARE serious consequences for sellers. That's a useless argument and a perfect example of how eBay's feedback system is flawed and nearly useless.
The way sellers were using the feedback system was outrageous Buyers behave no better and abuse feedback every bit as much. The answer is to really change the feedback system to something useful, not unbalance it against the sellers.
Go try to sell some stuff on eBay. Seriously. Go conduct 100 auctions with something that has some real value. Then come back and we can have this discussion. Until then you are simply trolling about things you don't understand and haven't experienced.
The evidence is that the buyer has to risk sending their money, before receiving any goods. As a seller. you can check for fraudulent payments before sending the goods. EBay does NOT require the buyer to send money first. Never has and probably never will. You are perfectly welcome to sell something and then send it before payment. As a buyer you are also welcome to ask the seller to ship the item COD (some will) or even use an escrow service if the item is valuable enough to justify one.
Of course a seller would be a grade-A moron to ship an item before receiving payment since eBay CANNOT legally compel transfer of funds for payment. Which is why eBay gives such generous refund terms (which through PayPal they CAN compel) and recommends against sending hard to recover payment methods such as money orders. That's not eBay favoring sellers, that's sellers not being retarded. Why don't you go and ask Amazon or Wal*Mart to give you something before paying sometime. I'm sure they'll be happy to oblige you. Only a retard would imply that eBay sellers are favored because they don't behave like complete fools.
As for checking for fraudulent payments, there is no way for eBay sellers to check for a stolen credit card. Sellers just have to hope the credit card company finds out and cancels it before payment occurs. If you accept that form of payment (through PayPal or directly) as a vendor you will have a hard time recovering your money from fraudulent transactions. Happened to me numerous times.
This let sellers use the feedback system in very vindictive ways, even though it is the individual buyer who relies on that positive feedback more. Get a clue. Sellers are HIGHLY protective of their feedback ratings for some very good reasons. A low positive rating directly affects how much they get for their auctions and can even get them kicked out of the power seller program or off eBay. Worst thing that happens to a buyer from negative feedback is that they might be looked at more carefully when buying high priced stuff which they should damn well expect. Only the retarded ones get kicked off due to too many negative feedbacks.
Anyway, sounds like your beef is more with Paypal than with eBay (although there is a fine line between the two). I have no beef with either and continue to use both services to this day. I'm simply extremely well aware of the flaws in the service and no longer sell on eBay because the economics of it don't work. Furthermore there is NO line between the two since PayPal is a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay. Furthermore well over 90% of payments for items sold on eBay come through PayPal. Sellers who don't use it won't sell much on eBay. The two are inextricably linked so PayPal policies effectively ARE eBay policies and vice-versa when selling on eBay.
What the fuck? eBay has never been favorable to buyers. It has always been tilted in favor of sellers, to a ridiculous degree. And your evidence is what? EBay's policies when followed, favor the buyer in the sense that they will almost always allow the buyer to get their money back - they are made whole in the legal sense. The seller is NOT made whole BY POLICY. At best the seller will be out their time and shipping fees. Are there crooked sellers? Absolutely. But there are least as many crooked buyers. Do you have ANY idea how many auctions are paid for with fake credit cards? Do you have any idea how often sellers get ripped off for shipping fees and get shipped back empty or damaged boxes? Clearly you don't.
So, what if they don't pay with PayPal, huh? Pay with a credit card and dispute the charges. Or use a credit card with PayPal, get PayPal to reverse the charges and then dispute it and get double your money back. Happens all the time even though it's illegal as hell.
Well, fuck you for trying to run a business on eBay. It should be about individual sellers selling their used personal items, not fucktards who ruin it for everybody. And fuck you for thinking you get to determine what eBay is used for and by whom. Arrogant prick...
"Our competition has a huge head start", sucks, but it's not a barrier to entry. Uhh yeah actually it certainly can be a barrier to entry. Please study learning curves and Porter's Five Forces before you say something so absurd again.
A barrier to entry is something like "It costs millions of dollars to launch a satelite" or "The equipment costs $50000". Capital requirements are just one of many possible barriers to entry and not necessarily the most important one. Plus in eBay's case the relevant barrier is network effects, the same thing that gave Microsoft their monopoly.
I'm not saying I'm a big fan of PayPal or eBay, but changing the feedback stuff was pretty legitimate. A lot (most?) sellers wouldn't leave feedback for the buyer until the buyer left positive feedback for them. And? Nothing good comes to a seller by leaving feedback. Leaving positive feedback does not result in repeat business, it takes time from their day, and if the feedback is anything other than positive it always results in retaliation. Taking retaliatory feedback away from sellers simply tilts the equation even more towards buyers. Buyers can now leave undeserved negative feedback with impunity. Sometimes the seller deserves a negative but just as often so does the buyer.
There is *a lot* more risk to the buyer than there is to the seller on eBay. Hogwash. If a buyer pays with PayPal and they want their money back they'll get it almost every time. Read eBay's policies someday. You'll find they are definitely tilted in favor of the buyers.
It would be much easier to scam a buyer than it would be to scam a seller. I've conducted over 10,000 auctions and I can say with authority you could not be more wrong. Want to know how? Buy something and pay with PayPal, receive it, open a PayPal dispute claiming the item was not as described, send back an empty box or send the item back damaged and when PayPal gets confirmation of a return shipment they will give the buyer his money back. Seller is out shipping, the item as well as the cost of the item and their time to conduct the auction.
Doesn't work for sellers because even if they send an empty box, the buyer can just ship an empty box right back and get a refund if they paid with PayPal and PayPal will provide buyer protection up to a certain dollar value.
It seems PayPal has (or at least had, if they've since changed) pretty poor if any safety net for *either* party. PayPal is no panacea for buyers either but generally speaking buyers are more protected than sellers. I can enumerate policies if you like but I've had a LOT of experience on bother sides of disputes. Trust me, the buyer comes out on top most of the time if money is going to change hands in a dispute.
As I've said elsewhere, the only way PayPal's policies would make sense is if they actually had some sort of affordable escrow service. But that will never happen because eBay doesn't want the liability or the expense. As it is, PayPal is in the enviable position of being an unregulated bank with a marketplace (eBay) essentially to themselves.
It has been my experience that the only real way to make a profit on eBay is if you stole the item in the first place... Sadly that's probably close to true. Price levels on eBay are wholesale at best and often are down to liquidation levels. Sellers outnumber buyers and sellers have close to zero pricing power. If you have any sort of luxury goods which might have a margin the maker (think Gucci or Rolex) will have your auctions pulled even if the items are completely authentic with a fully documented paper trail. Furthermore there are so many thieves fencing stolen goods through eBay someone who acquires the same items honestly will be lucky to break even on them.
In my opinion the only ones making money on eBay IS eBay... and some thieves.
I did get screwed by PayPal as a buyer once - bought two of an item and only received one, but I was told that as long as I received *something*, even an empty package, that PayPal wouldn't help me out. Maybe that's changed. Nope. PayPal accepts delivery confirmation from a major carrier as "proof" that the item in question was successfully returned. They make NO effort to confirm that the item in question was actually in the box, in appropriate condition, or packed properly. I've received return boxes that someone put a china in with no padding whatsoever - PayPal still returns their money. I've received boxes containing nothing - PayPal still returns their money. I've had the carrier lose the package but claim it was "delivered" - PayPal still refunds the money.
In short, PayPal provides a decent (if imperfect) safety net for buyers but not so much for sellers compared with the alternatives.
The definition of "monopoly" is not "large and popular". There are thousands of online auction sites. There are no barriers to entry into the online auction field. EBay has one of the most formidable barriers to entry there is, namely network effects. Sellers go to eBay because that is where the buyers are and vice-versa. The barriers to entry if you want to compete with eBay are HUGE. Amazon.com and Yahoo both tried and failed miserably to make a dent in eBay's auction business and they have all the capital and IT talent necessary already. Like it or not, eBay has a de-facto monopoly on online auctions to the same extent Microsoft has one on operating systems.
The only downside is those other sites don't have as many users as eBay, but there are ways around that if you really dislike eBay. That's pretty much the one disadvantage that actually matters. The ENTIRE point of a marketplace is to bring buyers and sellers together. No one brings more buyers and sellers together than eBay - in fact there isn't even a close second. As someone who has conducted over 10,000 online auctions let me tell you, if you want to use any site other than eBay except for very specialized items (like guns) even if you sell your item at all off eBay you aren't likely to get a good price or many interested buyers.
I tried speaking to multiple persons at Paypal, stated my case politely etc. That was your mistake I'm guessing - talking to PayPal "representatives". If you want a refund through PayPal, generally as a buyer you want to avoid talking to anyone at the company. Use their online dispute resolution and you'll get your money back in the vast majority of cases. I've occasionally heard of people being asked for verification like yours but having been through the process myself hundreds of times, trust me it's rare.
Meanwhile the seller left bad feedback for me even though I had paid on time, threatened to involve the police and take me to court for defamation because I left bad feedback for him. It's all talk especially if the item is $30. No seller has the time and money to waste on legal fees over a $30 item. Rude but an empty threat. However if you demand a refund or leave negative feedback you should pretty much expect retaliation of some kind unfortunately. Generally I recommend that if people get their money back, leave it at that unless you were REALLY screwed over.
I had another item worth about $450 turn up despite the address being incorrect. When I queried the seller on why the address was incorrect, and whether there was some record on Ebay/Paypal that I needed to amend the seller got very defensive and wanted to know why I cared since I got the item and what kind of trouble I wanted to make. Yeah sometimes you run into an asshole. It happens unfortunately. All I can say is try to be sweet as pie and that usually helps. Sellers usually deal with a LOT of customers and many are really rude. If you start off the least bit confrontational odds are you'll immediately make them defensive and that's rarely good.
I also had a relative recieve pirated DVDs as a buyer through Ebay. Remember that eBay is the largest fencing operation in the world. Be VERY careful about anything that can be duplicated easily, especially from sellers without a LONG track record of good service.
You mean you were weren't offering a full refund, or you weren't offering returns? Dude, What kind of sham operation were you running? There are lots of cases where no returns is appropriate and there is NOTHING ethically wrong with a no returns policy as long as it is disclosed up front. No one HAS to buy from you and with a no returns policy you should expect to get less money given the risk the buyer is taking. Lots of real world vendors do it every day. If you don't like the policy, don't buy from that vendor.
Certain types of clothing is an obvious case where a no refund policy (think used underwear... ick) is highly appropriate. Likewise second hand, already opened software or music is another. There are also situations like selling items on consignment where it is impractical to offer a return policy due to insufficient margins. But even beyond all that, if a vendor wants to sell something with a no return policy that is their right just as it is your right not to buy from them.
Nobody expects you to be walmart (though many Americans think that?) and take broken crap back, but if the item hasn't even been opened, you should be taking it back and deducting the shipping fee. Actually buyers DO expect you to be Wal*Mart and that's the problem. If the seller actually got the shipping fee back on returns that would be fine but with PayPal they do not. PayPal does NOT refund shipping EVER. As a seller I am NOT willing to eat a $10 to $100 shipping fee (depending on the item being shipped) just so someone can on a whim decide they don't like something. That's a fast way to lose a ton of money. Furthermore I've experience countless cases where someone shipped back merchandise they broke (not the carrier) and PayPal gave them their money back without the slightest effort to verify the condition of the merchandise. Wal*Mart makes billions and can afford to accept returns for any reason. That rarely describes sellers on eBay.
"Bad buying experience" is caused entirely by sellers who want an easy way to ditch customer service in favor of keeping more of the profit Try actually running a real business someday before making such a ridiculous statement. "More profit"? Try ANY profit. It is extremely difficult to make ANY profit selling on eBay. A no questions asked return policy on top of 7-10% eBay/PayPal fees and non-reimbursed shipping costs is a good way to go out of business fast. Furthermore there are at LEAST as many scummy buyers as there are scummy sellers on eBay. I've seen every scam in the book first hand as a seller and you're going to tell me it's all the sellers fault? You have no idea what you are talking about.
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That said, I would like tagging to not ALWAYS work on a per conversation basis. I don't mind if that is the defaults but I'd like to be able to make other choices when it makes sense. I agree there are times when it's not the most appropriate basis for sorting mail and I would like to be able to choose.
You have something seriously wrong in that case. No, that's why I don't have hard drives dying from surges anymore. I learned my lesson long ago after I fried one too many bits of electronics. I've lived in too many areas with dodgy power to trust what comes out of the wall anymore. Now my main problems are static and shock from the odd bit of dropped equipment.
Though I did once have a UPS and the attached computers fry due to a nearby lightning strike. Get 1.21gigawats across a UPS and it doesn't matter what you've got protecting it.
And no, it isn't common in most of the english speaking world - hence the joke. It certainly is never used here in the US nor, to the best of my knowledge, in Canada either. I'm pretty sure I've never heard anyone from the UK or India use the word either though I've spent considerably less time there. Might be common among the Aussies and Kiwis but I wouldn't know.
And yes I use battery backups on every computer I own plus have filtering gear on every ethernet and phone cable too. I don't trust power quality or reliability at all. You must be using some pretty dodgy power supplies. I usually put PC Power and Cooling supplies - generally regarded as among the best - in most of my machines. Still lose hard drives and occasionally other gear from time to time. They should die, absorbing the surge rather than letting it through. Perhaps in theory but the real world doesn't work like that. Frankly most power supplies are poorly made, under-engineered pieces of crap anyway. Writes to a hard drive dont matter in the slightest.
They are the same as reads in terms of wear and tear. Exactly. You get twice as much wear whereas a SSD gets zero wear on a read operation. I'm joking but only a little. In either case with either device you are shortening the lifetime of the device. If you write to SSDs a lot then your looking at it having a very short life. This has been disputed ad-nauseum here and elsewhere. I'd prefer to see some actual real world data from folks who've used numerous SSD drives for extended periods. I have seen no compelling evidence that SSD drives are any less reliable or long lasting than platter drives. Not that I would really trust either one.
I've never had one die on me yet. You're either incredibly lucky, haven't owned many hard drives or lying. I'll presume you're honest (despite your handle) and the other two are equally likely in my opinion. Personally I've had at least 15 hard drives crap out on me over the years, not those of counting friends, family and coworkers which sends the number well into triple digits. And those are just those I've seen first hand. Add in the ones I know about at companies I've worked in and the number is in the thousands easily. Hard drives are amazing things but they should NEVER be thought of as reliable. In my experience they are the least reliable thing in the computer thanks to all the moving parts. Frankly it's amazing they work as well as they do. They've worked fabulously until now and there is no reason why they will die overnight. Sure there is. Power surges is the most obvious reason - I've lost several to those. Sometimes hard drives give warnings such as poor performance or weird noises but more often they just break all of a sudden without any warning. Even software to detect drive failures when available is unreliable in detecting imminent failures. And you want to *reduce* writes to SSDs, not increase them. You want to reduce writes to hard drives too. What's your point?
Your counter argument is that buyers usually send money first so they are being screwed even though they can almost always get it back if they use PayPal which most of them do. I'm done with this discussion as it's clear you have no experience and certainly no credible arguments. But typical individual buyers have feedback numbers under 100. So what? There are NO meaningful consequences to a single negative feedback for a buyer unless they have essentially zero feedback. Plus when sellers have less than 100 feedbacks (and ALL of then do/did at one point) they get threatened constantly and there ARE serious consequences for sellers. That's a useless argument and a perfect example of how eBay's feedback system is flawed and nearly useless. The way sellers were using the feedback system was outrageous Buyers behave no better and abuse feedback every bit as much. The answer is to really change the feedback system to something useful, not unbalance it against the sellers.
Go try to sell some stuff on eBay. Seriously. Go conduct 100 auctions with something that has some real value. Then come back and we can have this discussion. Until then you are simply trolling about things you don't understand and haven't experienced.
Of course a seller would be a grade-A moron to ship an item before receiving payment since eBay CANNOT legally compel transfer of funds for payment. Which is why eBay gives such generous refund terms (which through PayPal they CAN compel) and recommends against sending hard to recover payment methods such as money orders. That's not eBay favoring sellers, that's sellers not being retarded. Why don't you go and ask Amazon or Wal*Mart to give you something before paying sometime. I'm sure they'll be happy to oblige you. Only a retard would imply that eBay sellers are favored because they don't behave like complete fools.
As for checking for fraudulent payments, there is no way for eBay sellers to check for a stolen credit card. Sellers just have to hope the credit card company finds out and cancels it before payment occurs. If you accept that form of payment (through PayPal or directly) as a vendor you will have a hard time recovering your money from fraudulent transactions. Happened to me numerous times. This let sellers use the feedback system in very vindictive ways, even though it is the individual buyer who relies on that positive feedback more. Get a clue. Sellers are HIGHLY protective of their feedback ratings for some very good reasons. A low positive rating directly affects how much they get for their auctions and can even get them kicked out of the power seller program or off eBay. Worst thing that happens to a buyer from negative feedback is that they might be looked at more carefully when buying high priced stuff which they should damn well expect. Only the retarded ones get kicked off due to too many negative feedbacks. Anyway, sounds like your beef is more with Paypal than with eBay (although there is a fine line between the two). I have no beef with either and continue to use both services to this day. I'm simply extremely well aware of the flaws in the service and no longer sell on eBay because the economics of it don't work. Furthermore there is NO line between the two since PayPal is a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay. Furthermore well over 90% of payments for items sold on eBay come through PayPal. Sellers who don't use it won't sell much on eBay. The two are inextricably linked so PayPal policies effectively ARE eBay policies and vice-versa when selling on eBay.
Doesn't work for sellers because even if they send an empty box, the buyer can just ship an empty box right back and get a refund if they paid with PayPal and PayPal will provide buyer protection up to a certain dollar value.
As I've said elsewhere, the only way PayPal's policies would make sense is if they actually had some sort of affordable escrow service. But that will never happen because eBay doesn't want the liability or the expense. As it is, PayPal is in the enviable position of being an unregulated bank with a marketplace (eBay) essentially to themselves.
In my opinion the only ones making money on eBay IS eBay... and some thieves.
In short, PayPal provides a decent (if imperfect) safety net for buyers but not so much for sellers compared with the alternatives.
Certain types of clothing is an obvious case where a no refund policy (think used underwear... ick) is highly appropriate. Likewise second hand, already opened software or music is another. There are also situations like selling items on consignment where it is impractical to offer a return policy due to insufficient margins. But even beyond all that, if a vendor wants to sell something with a no return policy that is their right just as it is your right not to buy from them. Nobody expects you to be walmart (though many Americans think that?) and take broken crap back, but if the item hasn't even been opened, you should be taking it back and deducting the shipping fee. Actually buyers DO expect you to be Wal*Mart and that's the problem. If the seller actually got the shipping fee back on returns that would be fine but with PayPal they do not. PayPal does NOT refund shipping EVER. As a seller I am NOT willing to eat a $10 to $100 shipping fee (depending on the item being shipped) just so someone can on a whim decide they don't like something. That's a fast way to lose a ton of money. Furthermore I've experience countless cases where someone shipped back merchandise they broke (not the carrier) and PayPal gave them their money back without the slightest effort to verify the condition of the merchandise. Wal*Mart makes billions and can afford to accept returns for any reason. That rarely describes sellers on eBay. "Bad buying experience" is caused entirely by sellers who want an easy way to ditch customer service in favor of keeping more of the profit Try actually running a real business someday before making such a ridiculous statement. "More profit"? Try ANY profit. It is extremely difficult to make ANY profit selling on eBay. A no questions asked return policy on top of 7-10% eBay/PayPal fees and non-reimbursed shipping costs is a good way to go out of business fast. Furthermore there are at LEAST as many scummy buyers as there are scummy sellers on eBay. I've seen every scam in the book first hand as a seller and you're going to tell me it's all the sellers fault? You have no idea what you are talking about.