Pullmann, WA 29/09/09
Dear Ebay customer of Orgonise Africa,
Some of you may wonder what's happening to us here on Ebay and so do we.
While I'm away travelling in the good ol US of A, we get hammered by all kinds of strange attacks. Of course they would do that when we are vulnerable and cannot fully react to control the situation.
Not only do we experience a sudden surge in chargebacks, that's people disputing their payments to us despite us having sent everything as agreed, now we also had a whole lot of products deleted by Ebay and were slammed with a negative "policy violation" tag. This lowers our search ranking and even comes with a prohibition to list new items for 7 days.
The background is this:
Karl Welz, who is probably the first person to use the term "Orgonite", has apparently trademarked that word some time in 2003 or 2004 LONG AFTER it had become COMMON USAGE in the international orgone community, or should I rather say "orgonite" community.
This was done without consulting any of the many users of this term and we think it would not have held up if any of us had been consulted.
Anyways, he's got "prima facie" rights now unless someone challenges him in court and the way Ebay operates is always "shoot first and ask questions later", especially when it comes to us.
The list of harrassments from Ebay/PayPal is so long, it defies belief.
We will of course monitor if other vendors using the term "orgonite" are equally affected.
In the meantime we will have to edit all our products and eliminate the term "orgonite" because fighting with Ebay is futile unless one is willing to go to court. (Which we may well do) It's a tough decision to be made wether we want to continue being here or not.
ebay represents less than 15% of our total business but we have seen it as an opportunity to make contact with new customers who would not have necessaryly found our website. Of course, if the cost of doing business here becomes prohibitive we'll have to strike our sails and go elswhere.
In the meanime I highly recommend you have a look at our main website for the whole product range until we have restored some order in our Ebay Shop. (Wou'll find it under Orgonise Africa on Google)
And finally let me say a word about shipping:
You know that we are in South Africa and not the US or UK. Shipping from SA takes quite a bit longer than inside the US for example. We try wherever there is a space for that to alert our customers to these given facts.
We use postal airmail for most smaller goods and postal surface mail for the big ones.
Surface mail is really slow. It can take up to 12 weeks (typically 4-8) to arrive but it's by far the cheapest option for bulky items like the XL-pyramids or CBs etc.
We give you the choice of expedited mail servive (EMS) which is much faster but also much more expensive.
Please, it is extremely unfair to go to PayPal and reverse payments out of impatience with slow shipping. We guarantee you the receipt of all items and have a 7 year track record of reliability outside Ebay and some 1 1/2 years inside Ebay with 99,4% customer approval.
Recently we suffered severe damage from frivolous payment reversals and it jeopardizes our continued presence here.
You choose of course what you want to do, but know that we are not going to take abuse lying down.
If you receive our goods and do not pay for them, that would constitute fraud even if PayPal allows you to do it. (and unfortunately they do, even after we provide them with all the tracking info. They really do that)
The contract is still between you and us. Please keep that in mind and in all cases where you are not sure (email notifications can get lost) contact us first. We are always there to resolve issues a much as physically possible.
See you around
Georg Ritschl
Orgonise Africa Ltd.
PS: here's some more on the trademark issue for you to contemplate:
From: publaw.com/fairusetrade.html
A trademark owner by choosing a descriptive term as its trademark must live with the result that an author remains free to write about or use the trademark in its “primary“ or descriptive sense. Legal doctrine defines fair use of a trademark as the “reasonable and good faith use of a descriptive term that is another’s trademark to describe rather than to identify the user’s goods, services or business“.’
From the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition:
Orgone
. . . In the psychoanalytical theory of Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), a vital energy or life force which supposedly informs the universe and can be collected and stored in an orgone accumulator or box for subsequent use in the treatment of mental and physical illnesses. Also attrib. . . .
—ite, suffix
. . . 2. b. Mineral. The systematic ending of the names of mineral species, comprising names of ancient
origin . . . and a vast number of modern names in which -ite is added to an element expressing colour, structure, physical characters or affinities, or to the name of a locality, discoverer, mineralogist, distinguished scientist, or other person whom the discoverer may have desired to commemorate. Examples are albite, azurite, melanite, dichroite, grphite, apatite, calcite, syenite, labradorite, leadhillite, humbodtite, wemerite, brewsterite, danaite, darwinite. Earlier names of minerals have in some cases been displaced by names in
-ite, and some names with other endings as -ane, -in, etc. have been conformed to the -ite type. . . .
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