Shopgoodwill Shill Bidding, No Consumer Protection, Outrageous Shipping Charges Internet

I can't speak for the seller locations that you deal with but the administrators of ShopGoodwill in Orange County track bidding by any IP address that has logged into a seller ID.

If you suspect shill bidding you can contact the site administrators and let them know at 714-640-8370, this is the customer support number directly to the site administrators. The administrators do take these accusations seriously and have repeatedly addressed them to sellers.

If you have questions about individual items please direct them to the seller that listed the item as the administrators can only help you with site issues and complaints against sellers.

As for the weights, we must put the estimated shipping weight at time of listing. Again for my location at times those weights are estimated high or low and we're always willing to work with the customer to make sure they aren't overpaying shipping costs.

Since all our calculations are done by the USPS.com shipping calculator I usually recommend that customers contact us (I handle all the customer service at the Greater New York and Northern New Jersey seller location) and let us pack it so we have exact weight prior to their making payment.

In cases where the cost-to-ship differs from the paid cost by over $1 the Shipping Lead will notify me and I will contact the customer and let them know as well as processing a refund for the overpaid fee amounts.

I must reiterate I can only speak for my particular seller location, but if an item is ever improperly described we consider it as misrepresented and take steps to either issue a paid return label and refund the item in full with shipping costs or give a partial refund if the customer still wants to keep the item.

The part where you say these items are all donated, that isn't exactly true. Many items are donated this is true, but Goodwills across the country also purchase items by the trailer to support our mission. As for the donated items they aren't exactly as free as you think, consider the salaries involved to get that item online and you'll start to get an idea of the overhead.

When an item is donated to a store that store has employees, often those who are involved in our programs, sorting through what comes in. Many things are placed on that stores shelves to sell and others are sent back to the main distribution warehouse at the corporate headquarters for the region if the store has too large a stock of that particular category.

Once they get to the distribution center they're further sorted there. Clothes are divided based on what is sellable and what is "scrap", scrap fabrics and clothes will be bailed and sold by the pound. Books are divided on a similar process and sold on eBay, Amazon, Alibris, or Half.com. Any books that are below our set criteria (our facility goes by minimum value of $1 and Amazon sales rank of 1,000,000 or higher) will be sold by the pound.

Most items that are below a certain dollar amount are rejected at our location, due to the fact that even spending 10 minutes to list the item would result in a net loss due to costs associated.

That's not even counting the expenses for the logistics of moving things from one store to the main warehouse and back out to other stores in other areas. When you break it down honestly a lot of the price of items, even those sold at high amounts, are going back into our programs just through that chain.

Some Goodwill locations will start all items at a certain level such as $4.99 no matter what the item is, in my opinion this is a good practice. My particular location is currently instructed to price the items we have online, and then list them at 50% of the price we find them for sale at in identical condition.

What this means is that if we get a computer monitor in that retails used for $649.99 (it's happened once, it was a monitor designed for the multi-input monitor walls) and we test the one we have and find it fully working we would list it starting at $300-$325 starting bid.

To list it any lower would cause the Retail side to start questioning us and get our Loss Prevention department involved due to "pricing things too low". Our facility still has a ways to go with working out the ideal on-line sales practice, but we're relatively newer and we're working on refining the policies while we're still lower volume than some of the other sellers on shopgoodwill.com.