John L.

I work at a very flexible job where I have access to a PC, so I used to sometimes snipe eBay auctions manually. It was sort of thrilling, but I did get wrapped up in my work sometimes and forgot to snipe. Or at home my toddler sometimes pressed the off button on my PC 1 minute before an auction ended and it took 3 minutes to get it fired up again.

So eventually I thought there must be a service out there to do this automatically, and I found Gixen. I must have been using Gixen for about 4 or 5 years now. I use it through the company PC at my job, my desktop PC at home, and my Chromebook. It is just a website you access, not an app or installed software of any kind. I have never had any problem with it, I can't remember it ever failing to place my snipe, and it has saved me probably thousands of dollars while enabling me to get the stuff I want more reliably.

In fact I'd be reluctant to tell other people how great it works (and wise up my competition) except my eBay buying will probably be considerably reduced in the future anyway... partly because I already bought most everything I could ever want, and partly because of how we now have to pay sales tax on eBay, which is a bummer.

I have used PayPal hundreds of times to pay for things, and a couple dozen times to get paid for items I sold. It is convenient, and safer than using my debit card. Except for my Amazon Store Card, PayPal Credit is the only form of credit I use.

I do have complaints. It seems crazy how disjointed PayPal can be... just recently I was trying to make an extra payment from my bank into PayPal Credit to bring up my available credit to cover an eBay purchase I'd already committed to. First I was having trouble setting up the payment at all, but after about 12 hours the site was finally functioning and I got that done. But then the PayPal Credit page showed my payment as pending but the main PayPal summary did not show it at all. After another 12 hours it was pending on both pages. Another 12 hours and it was completed on the Credit page but still pending on the summary page and my available credit had not gone up on either. Meanwhile the eBay seller opens a non-payment case against me. Wow... in this age of light-speed electronic communication, how is this even possible? Maybe communication with my bank takes time, but how can the various elements within PayPal itself NOT all be updated simultaneously? It seems like you would have to go out of your way to build delays into the system to achieve this level of clunkiness.

Oh well, I finally got it paid and eBay closed the case against me without permanent injury.

I was checking out a mysterious phone message I had received and signed up for the 7 day free trial. Of course they show you some "terms" document that you have to say you read. Of course nobody actually reads all that mumbo-jumbo and we click to say we read it anyway. That is what I did, but unlike a lot of other people here, I was not born yesterday... I KNEW without a doubt that the terms would have me signed up for automatic paid renewal after the 7 day trial was up. Duh! Is that like a surprize? I mean, they are charging your bank account or credit card, right? How could they do that unless you gave them the account info to do it? What did you THINK they were going to do with your account info, genius?

Well I was on the computer at work and had to get back to my job so I thought I'd log in to their site from home to turn off the automatic renewal. And yes, I forgot, and they charged my account $20. I do not like this marketing technique, but never did I think that I had anything except my own forgetfulness to blame for losing that $20. I knew what was going to happen, and I screwed up and let it happen.

Well I did try to get my money's worth by looking up old Army buddies and former neighbors and classmates, etc. and I thought the service worked reasonably well. I looked up one former co-worker who I knew had a conviction for statutory rape, and the service did report that in at least vague terms. I think this is a mostly legit service using a slightly sleazy trick to make more money. Perhaps if they did not do the sleazy trick and had to rely on people who actually need to be subscribed to such a service on an ongoing basis then their customer base would be too tiny and they would go out of business and not be there at all when you or I did want them.

I ordered 2 of the heavy duty 3-leg metal end frame fittings for commercial grade swing sets. The cost was about $107 each, plus $60 for shipping for the bulky/heavy items. I could see from the photos that the welding looked pretty rough, but thought it would be worthwhile to buy them considering the time it would take to make them myself. Especially, I thought the paint on a commercial product would be far superior to any paint job I could do myself -- important on something that would be exposed to weather 365 days a year. I thought the items were listed in stock before I placed my order, but afterwards I found they were on backorder. They were on backorder for about 2 months, and BackyardCity.com never sent me one of those postcards giving you a chance to cancel your order... I thought it was federal law or something they had to send that if they could not ship in 30 days. Anyway, communication was about zero. I finally got my items, and the welding was just as amateurish as the photo had shown, or even worse. A very cold, crooked weld, like bubble gum stuck on the surface of the steel, with no penetration. Not strong at all, but probably adequate for the purpose. Man, I'm a machinist myself but in my area you can hardly walk down the street without tripping over unemployed welders with 10 times the ability of the joker who made these brackets... how such a person could get hired for a professional welding job is beyond me. Something I was not expecting at all is that both brackets are welded together crooked. The outer legs are a single piece of tubing bent like an uncrossed "A" shape, and the third leg is welded on about 5/8 of an inch off center from the apex of that. I'd literally be embarrassed to put these out in my yard. But what really disappointed me is that the paint job was badly damaged. The mouths of the legs (where my longer leg pipes would need to be inserted) were dented in in a couple places, and one of the places had evidently been hammered back out after painting and then the paint retouched with a completely different shade of green paint. There were other scratches and dings as well. I don't know how any reputable company could send out a product looking like this. It is absolute junk, in my eyes. Well I e-mailed BackyardCity.com and they answered and said I could ship these heavy items back across the country at my own expense for a refund. But considering what I have seen so far, I have no confidence that I'd ever get that refund. Rather than sink another $50 in shipping, plus hassles galore, I've decided just to cut my losses now and hope to sell these at a garage sale for $50. I know that call is based on instinct and past experiences with other companies rather than any actual failure to refund by Backyard City.com, but that is what I decided.