Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

Microsoft Office Alternative

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

If you need Microsoft Office, but either can’t afford or don’t want to pay for Office, take a look at OpenOffice. If you are sending files to others, remember to send it as a .doc or .rtf, so they can open it. OpenOffice even lets you convert to a pdf file.

Download it at OpenOffice.org

Google Docs also uses OpenOffice. Try it without downloading and installing it at docs.google.com


Ebay Set to Change Feedback Policy in May 2008

Friday, February 8th, 2008

I have been reading numerous articles and message boards about eBay’s proposed changed to the feedback system. In the future, sellers will not be able to leave negative or neutral feedback to buyers.

I am both an occasional buyer and seller on ebay with a rating of 98.9%. It would be 100%, but a woman who I sold a book of building plans to felt that the book wasn’t what was listed in the auction. I sold a few other copies of the same book to about nine other people. Nobody every complained all gave me positive feedback. The book was about $5.

She never contacted me for any sort of resolution. Until that happened, I always gave feedback once I received payment.

So after that bad experience as a seller, I decided to only give positive feedback in kind.

While this decision is really not enough to stop me from selling on eBay. I will say that some increases in fees and a glut of people selling the same items I do, has made it hard to make a profit.

As a consumer, I have found it harder to find really good deals on used products.

For those reasons I have found myself spending less time on eBay.