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S B.

Contributor Level

Total Points
170

2 Reviews by S

  • Webstore

11/12/18

Yes I can see the wonderful reviews for this website... I am now under the impression that they are all fake. You have to pay a membership fee to join around $15. Then they offer you the chance to advertise in your city on their website for anyone who looks at the classifieds on their website in your area. I thought it was odd that when I asked for a major city in my state that it was automatically approved. How could it be that there isn't anyone else who already took this area? I then checked a lot of other major cities around the country only to find openings for advertising in all of them. Now to be clear they only allow 1 person to advertise in each city and the $5 is for the whole month. Which seems like an unbelievable deal right? Especially since you can link any website you want to this advertisement. Well unbelievable is right. I was down $20 and I hadn't even listed any products yet. Now if you run a retail company online you know the amount of work it takes to post all of your products on a new website. The amount of hours you put into it. Being that my sales on other sites are very high I thought this would be a great site to tack on for some extra revenue plus how cheap it was to advertise. So I do all the work and I wait... and wait... and wait. Nothing happens. Not even a single view on any of my products. These products are selling everywhere else but here not a single view? This is a scam site. They know they don't have any web traffic or any members so this is how they make their money. They wait for people to join so that they will make a minimum of $15 off of them and more if they fall for the advertising scheme they have in place. DONT FALL FOR IT! THIS IS A SCAM SITE!

  • Tophatter

10/11/18

I have been selling on Tophatter for over a year and let me tell you I am surprised they have any sellers left. I honestly can't figure out how anyone is making any money on this site. At first it was awesome. All together the fees were only about 10% but after a few radical changes, then changes back as they got too many seller complaints, they have just started a new fee policy which easily rivals the original radical changes they made. Now to have any product listed in an auction you have to pay a scheduling fee of around $1.50. I say around because they give you a suggested amount that should be paid if you want them to even consider entering your item into an auction. Then if your item doesn't sell, which happens a lot even if you have a great product listed as either there are too many products on each page to scroll through or there aren't enough buyers on the pages, you still have to pay that $1.50. Now if your item does sell you have to pay the $1.50 plus 12.9% of the winning bid with shipping included and an extra $0.30 on top of all that. Because most items sell for $10 or under I will work the math for you and this might also shed some light on why so many sellers are selling very VERY cheap items. If I sell an item that cost me $5 for $5 plus $5 for shipping the sale equals $10 which gives me a profit of $5. Then you take out all the fees... so 12.9% of $10 is $1.29 + $1.50 + 0.30 which equals $3.09. So my actual profit after all of this? $1.91. Now you also have to consider the cost of packaging supplies the drive to the post office etc. And again this is only if you sale your item. In the first 4 days of them implementing their new system I lost just under $200. Yes lost. As in I owe them this amount of money when I made $0. I was making a couple thousand a month before this new fee policy came to be. The reason? Because they don't tell you when they will list your item or how many times they will list it even if it doesn't sell say the first 3 times. You can put that item on hold, if you even catch this happening in time as most sellers sell hundreds of items, but the hold doesn't take affect until their system updates which can take hours. All the while you are losing a lot of money. They implied that you can set a budget for how much you want to spend for each category i. E. jewelry, toys, accessories etc. but again if the system picks one item and auctions if off over and over again it will eat your entire budget and you wont make a single sale. Before this drastic change the system would put up your items in auction with no fee if it didn't sell and if it didn't sell say twice your item would not be put up for auction again. It would also tell you what to improve on that listing if you wanted to try and have it auctioned again. Beyond that there is also another lovely new fee policy which states if an item is returned or delivered broken you not only have to refund the buyer but you also still have to pay all the fees. That means in the above example you would lose $8.09 which is the cost of the product plus all the fees. Now if the package was really delivered broken I could understand this, however buyers have learned that they only need to say an item was delivered broken and without showing any proof they will automatically get refunded with no questions asked. This happens A LOT. So I hope this sheds some light on Tophatters seller fees and why sellers are selling $1 items for as much as they can get. Also it should be noted that if you do buy an item and it is super cheap and you list that as the reason for the return, which again happens a lot to the buyers due to the fees sellers have to pay, you can't get a refund unless you ship it back to wherever it came from - China in most cases - with a tracking number. That postage that you have to pay to ship with a tracking number out of pocket is guaranteed to be way more that you paid for the cheap item so you won't return it. Before these changes to the fees most sellers were legitimate, like me, and sold some really great items. Now, well it is about how can you trick someone into buying your very cheap item for a lot of money... or just trying to not owe Topphatter any money... which isn't likely... in either case.

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Angelique C. – Tophatter Rep

Hi there,

Thank you for sharing your experience.

I see that we have already responded to your review on Trustpilot.

I'm very sorry to hear that selling on Tophatter hasn't met your expectations. I recommend reaching out to our seller support team with any questions or concerns here http://tinyurl.com/y98le9ao

In terms of our return policy. Tophatter will always process refunds for buyers upon receiving a valid tracking number from them indicating that the order has been returned to the seller. Tophatter offers Buyer Protection in the form of a 30-day Easy Return policy that will either: 1.) refund the buyer without return needed, 2.) provide the buyer with a prepaid return label, or 3.) present the buyer with the seller's address to return the item, paying for their own return postage with valid tracking number.

Kind Regards,
Angelique

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