After 5+ years, tens of thousands of dollars of buying and selling gear, 320+ 5 star reviews, I was notified today my account is being permanent closed.
They’re saying it’s because I’ve tried to do some deals off site, to avoid taxes and fees. Sometimes I’ll ask if I can pick it up locally, and vice versa if I’m selling, but it still goes through reverb.
There have been a handful of times the person has offered to sell me something off reverb to avoid the fees, and vice versa. I assumed the messages were private, and that this is something done often between people even though it’s not allowed.
I thought wrong! I’m bummed, I rely on Reverb for a lot of my sales. Then again, it has fueled my gear addiction horribly.
I don’t have a point to all this, and I’m not saying they’re in the wrong. I’m just sad that it happened. I know they’ve made lots of money off me, just in the past month alone, and I hope I don’t have trouble buying and selling some gear moving forward.
Oh my. Thanks for letting us know. Not that that really helps you any. But yeah, nothing is private.
I don’t do any off Reverb sales tho. My biggest annoyance with them was after moving back to the UK from Europe I was not allowed to change my account to pounds. This meant I had to make micro adjustments everyday to keep rounded figures on the site. But I’m moving back to Europe soon, so maybe it’s a blessing in disguise 🥸
Biggest take-away from this is that nothing on the internet is never really truly private, unless you know for a fact that the software is E2E encrypted, and someone you personally know and trust has reviewed it. Which basically boils down to: “Don’t trust anything”
1 - I watched this video a while back where some dude, who might be a lot like you (320+sales), says he gave up on reverb because they’re jerks. short version in his case, picker buyers made a lot of grief for him, and reverb (like eBay) always sides with the buyer.
2 - assuming that not everyone has the means to stand up their own shop to complete with reverb, and you don’t like eBay, what’s to stop you from creating a new account, and changing some details? (understandably, your rating will be lost, which sucks).
I noticed that a guy selling a sweet Tanzbar Lite was also in Seattle so I instantly hit him up. I met with him and transacted. While I was driving home Reverb sent me an email saying that they were temporarily suspending my account because I was attempting to circumvent their system. Here’s the fun part: I got an email the next day from some sort of account manager type schmuck stating that I could get my account back if he liked the letter of apology which also contained the promise that I’d never do it again that I was about to send him enough. Intentionally worded shitty here to mimic the guy’s grammatical challenges and tone. I have no problem bullshitting the bullshitters so I did and they reinstated me.
That was almost three years ago. I’m really not a fan of buying or selling through reverb anymore. Paying local sales tax on out of state purchases is the leading driver though really. If I’m paying 10% sales tax on music gear it’ll be at Patchwerks or American Music.
yeah I believe this is the norm between them and eBay. surprised the OP got pulled entirely.
quite often I’m able to track down the Reverb seller outside of Reverb, but not always. sometimes their username is shared between there and MW for example. or they have it cross-listed on their local Craigslist… I’m pretty careful not to share email or forum usernames using Reverb, because I’m sure they have software parsing for those things. it used to be on eBay you could get around it with like “m _ y _ e _ m _ a _ i _ l @ y _ a _ h _ o _ o . c _ o _ m” or similar. I haven’t tried that, or had someone else try it, in years though. if I can’t meet the person locally, or know their name/history via a forum, or am able to do some private forum checkups on them, I prefer the protection I get from Reverb anyway. even if it costs a bit more.
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not, but there is some truth to this! Lol. It might be a blessing in disguise. I’ve bought and sold stuff through elektronauts before and it’s been nothing but good experiences and I can sell for less and pass the savings along!
Reverb has many convenient aspects about it, but I won’t miss the taxes or sales cut. I hated having to price expensive stuff much higher to make the sale worth it.
There was something kind of snarky about the email…
But I agree with Reverb here. You are using them to advertise or buy wares without giving them the money to survive/profit. It makes perfect sense to me. For what it’s worth, I always put things on here at a decent price first. Then if there are no takers, I will stick them on Reverb at a higher price to cover the fees. If someone then gets back to me on here later on, I cancel the Reverb listing. But I’m not getting leads from Reverb and then trying to “circumvent their system”. It’s all worked out so far.
I don’t disagree with Reverb. I just didn’t know it was like that. I was also not surprised to find out. The surprising part was that I had an email in my inbox before I even made it home.
wow. that’s bullshit. so many actual brick and mortar stores have all their gear listed on reverb and all of them… every one… sells gear in store that is listed on reverb and then deletes the reverb listing. when i worked at a synth shop we did that ALL THE TIME.
also, reverb even offers a shopify plug in so anything you list in shopify (entire inventory) is simultaneously listed on reverb. so if someone buys via your online store or in the actual store the shopify inventory and reverb inventory sync up. there’s no actual fee for selling something in store that’s also listed on reverb… if there was… no store would use reverb in this or take advantage of their plug in for shopify.
so, reverb is just being shitty and operating w/different sets of rules for different users.
i cancelled many reverb listing because we sold something in the store on our online store. they never said a thing about it.