Seems the cell phones we got for our girls last Christmas was the NON-COOL variety, so with the anniversary date soon approaching they’ve been pestering us for new ones. When the account is a year old we’re supposed to get a free upgrade of hardware (cell phone)… well that is what the customer support agent told me the last time I called in to dispute a charge on the account.

What she failed to mention is that since it’s a family account with 4 phones, only 1 of the phones on the account will qualify for a free upgrade. However, it will be a higher value upgrade.  What good will that do me? 1 out of the 3! I can already hear it now… “how come ‘name’ gets the upgrade?” “I guess you like ‘name’ more than us”. We only found out we could get 1 upgrade when we spoke with a sales agent at Costco.

This does sound like a challenge to me, so I think their customer support line will be getting a call from me to stress the point that originally we were told that the “account” qualifies for free upgrades after a year and the account does have 4 phones on it. I just love when sales people say it can’t be done!

The point of this post…

Since I now have to get 2 other COOL phones (Sony Ericsson w580 and the w580i), I’ve been looking on Ebay for deals on unlocked phones. Can you believe the amount of people working out of their homes making top dollar selling stuff on ebay? Next time you go to Ebay, click on the sellers profile (rating) you’ll see how many items they’ve sold in the past few months and how much the items were sold for. You get a clear picture very fast on the power of generating cash on Ebay.

BTW, is there anything you can’t buy on Ebay?

If there is one aspect to an Ebay transaction that I think many sellers can improve on is the time they take to respond to your questions, when they decided to actually respond. Both before and after the transaction. My beef is with after the transaction. So you go through that nervous 30 seconds before the auction ends, hoping that no one beats the last minute bid you placed. You get the “You’ve Won” email and head over to pay via Pay Pal. Your part is done. You won, you paid and now you sit waiting. Would it kill the seller to send you a message confirming that he/she received the payment and that your item will be processed and shipped? How about including any tracking info!

I hate sitting here having paid my hard-earned money,  hoping that I wasn’t scammed! Hey, you want to keep this customer happy? Keep me informed during the ENTIRE transaction. from the time I win your action to the time I received it.

Send the following emails:

- thanks for participating in my auction, you’ve won and we did receive payment.

- your items was shipped, here is the tracking info.

- did you receive the item? Please leave me your feedback.

I may even add you to my favorite seller list