If you are reading this then you have probably “googled” something like “cheap xbox live subscriptions”.  Well that is what I did and I came across a UK based site called live-codes.com.  At first I was a little dubious as I am with all things that appear to good to be true so I asked around and found no negative comments anywhere (there is a good reason for that).

Let me tell you what I know about the site.  They are a UK based Limited company with a genuine registered office (not just a mailbox).  They use Google checkout so you can rest assured that they are not going to run off with your money and their support staff were available to answer my email within minutes at 10.30pm.

I had done my digging and researched the company before purchasing and decided to take the plunge and purchased a 12 month X-Box live subscription card for the fantastic price of £28.99.  Google Checkout was an absolute pleasure to use as I already have a gmail account and felt the transaction went smoother than most other online payment gateways from the largest corporations.

So at 10:22 I completed the transaction and in the time it took to open a new tab and press home the code was sat in my inbox.  It wasnt just an email with the numbers typed in it was an actual scan of the subscription card, I’m guessing they do this to reduce the possibility of problems should anything go wrong.  So as you can imagine I am over the moon at the speed my card was delivered I then entered the code into my X-Box and within seconds my Live account was refreshed for another 12 months.  I was so happy with the transaction I thought it would be nice to email them via their contact us form and tell them how impressed I was.  Within 5 minutes a very helpful person from live-codes.com had responded.  It wasn’t an automated response but a real human who replied to my every single compliment, this is something that will keep me going back time and time again.

It is very rare for an online retailer to have such an affect on me, I am still gobsmacked at the speed and reliablity of the service I recieved!

Now I know what you are all thinking, £28.99 is not as cheap as some of the Power Sellers on the evil Ebay.  This can be true however I have been burnt in the past ordering from a very trusted UK power seller who had 100% feedback.  It is also worth remembering that Ebay have changed their protection policy, so no longer are digitaly delivered items such as subscription codes covered by their buyer protection scheme.  So if you get sold a code that doesnt work then you have no protection whatsoever and will end up having to pay double to get your fix of online gaming.  Im not saying that every seller on Ebay is going to rip you off but in the current economic climate can you afford to take that risk?

I will be using live-codes.com again and will be more than happy to recommend them to friends and family, I suggest you do the same.

This is a snippet of the email that I recieved from them tonight:

We like to operate where; if you are pleased with our service you spread the word to friends and where you found our site (i.e forum etc). The site is fully automated so as soon as the payment is clear codes are emailed out immediately 24/7. We only ever deal in scanned cards, this avoids any typing mistakes and we feel scanned images gives confidence to the customer.

I think I should also add that it is not only X-Box live subscriptions that they sell, they also have Microsoft Points, Nintendo Points & World of Warcraft subscriptions and add-ons.

Go and check them out I guarantee you will not be disappointed!

Just look at the times of these emails!

Link Dump
Links to various sites mentioned in this blog.

Live-Codes.com: http://www.live-codes.com/
Google Checkout: http://www.google.com/
Ebay: http://www.ebay.co.uk/

Copyright information:

A helping hand, Gaming stuff, Online shopping cheap, cheap subscriptions, codes, ebay, Gaming stuff, help, live, live-codes, microsft, microsoft, microsoft points, ms points, trustworthy, www.live-codes.com, xbox, xbox live

Have Ebay’s recent changes increased the chances of dvd, cd and game piracy?

Well they certainly haven’t helped the fight against piracy, read on for my reasons why.

I am an avid gamer who tries to purchase new titles on or around the release date, normally paying top dollar for them.  I will play the game to completion and then jump online with it and make the decision to keep it or trade it.  Once upon a time I would take it to my local game shop and get a fair trade in price and swap it for something else and would continue to do so until I get a game that I will want to keep.  Now the major stores (Game & Gamestation) have lowered the trade in value of games so dramatically it just isn’t worth it, let me give you an example:  Silent Hill Home Coming on the 360, 2 weeks after release date I tried to trade it in and was offered £7 by Game and £12 by Gamestation.  They were selling the game for £39.99 new and £35.99 pre-owned, my copy was in pristine condition and was only 2 weeks old!

So the only alternative to get some money back from my games would be to stick them on Ebay.  Most of my new games I will put on with a buy it now price but I used to pick up older titles and would sell them on when I played them to completion.  This is not financially viable since Ebay ammended its postage fee’s on CDs, games and DVDs.

Again let me give you an example, I bought Disney’s Car’s a couple of years ago for £30 brand new.  It has been played a few times but both disc and box are in immaculate condition.  If I wanted to trade it in I would get £3 for it which is not very fair considering I have seen a tatty version selling in Game for £20 PRE-OWNED!!  So I would normally put it on Ebay with a starting bid of 99p knowing that if it didn’t sell for more than £3 I have still gained more due to the low fee’s and postage costs.  Now they have forced all users to sell games without being able to charge p&p, which means if the game only sell’s for £1 I would not make any money from the sale at all and in fact it would cost me about 50p!!!  Can you imagine giving someone 50p to take a game from you!

Now this got me thinking, I am now less inclined to buy brand new games because there is every chance that 6 months down the line when its trade in value is only £5 I can’t put it on an online auction because it could end up costing me money!!!

There will be other people in this position who won’t just stop buying as many games, they could start downloading the titles.  I love to own the boxes so pirating the games just isn’t an option for me but it will be for some people.  This is why I think that Ebay is not helping the industry fight piracy!

Everything else, Gaming stuff, Online shopping copyright theft, ebay, fees, no postage, piracy, postage charges removed, ripoff, scam, scammy

 If you are anything like me, organising things is a must in all aspects of life.  I think this is why I love Ebay selling so much, there is a lot of sorting out to do and organisation is needed.  I decided to make an Ebay profit/loss spreadsheet recentlty, it is a very simple little thing that made me happy because I can track how much I’m making or losing on postage and packing.  I created it using Microsoft Office 2007 and it is compatible with all earlier versions of Office.

The spreadsheet allows you to add your item, sale price, estimated postage cost and actual postage cost.  It will calculate how much you have gained or lost on postage, it will also calculate your overall profit or loss.

To download the .zip version Click Here

To download the .xls file Click Here

Link Dump:
Links to various sites mentioned in this blog.

Microsoft
Office 2007
Ebay

A helping hand, Online shopping ebay, help, microsoft, spreadsheets, tutorials

Time for a little Ebay related stuff! (Updated)

I have recently developed a new love for the internet devil that is Ebay.  Having two young children who appear to be growing up at an almost unhuman rate I have quite a lot of stuff that they have outgrown, so I decided to stick it all on Ebay.

Whilst listing things on Ebay I noticed that the gallery listing charge had been removed so it now costs nothing to have an image along side your listing title in the search result pages.  Now this alone is all very nice but it still costs to have extra images within your listing, or does it.  After playing around with the html editor it would appear that the <img> tag has not been disabled, so providing you can host your images somewhere you can insert images within your listing and avoid paying the extra charges.

I am going to explain to you how you can use this to your advantage and make the best of this.  First you will need to upload your image(s) preferably to a site like Flickr.  Once the image is uploaded you need to get the true address of your image, there are a couple of ways you can do this but these are the easy options.  You can right click on the image then select “View Image” and copy the URL from the address bar.  Or you will need to press the “share it” link in the top right of Flickr and select Embed it then copy and paste the link it provides into a notepad, you will end up with something that looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/parassassin/2894613154/” title=”Ebay Description by parassassin, on Flickr”><img src=”http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3239/2894613154_31334664db.jpg” width=”500″ height=”313″ alt=”Ebay Description” /></a>

The true address for your image is highlighted in red it, just delete all the other text until you are left with:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3239/2894613154_31334664db.jpg

Click to see larger image.

Now it’s time to insert this URL into your ebay listing, now I could take you on a great html journey to explain everything you can do with it but for now Im just going to explain how to insert the image and float text next to it.  You will need to create your listing by choosing the Advanced Sell option, once you have completed all the fields you should begin your listing design.  First you should layout your listing as you would like it to appear by adding a title and/or a footer, once you have done this create a big space in the middle of your listing by pressing return a few times, you should end up with something that looks like the image displayed here.

Now you are ready to insert your image into your listing.  Click the html tab at the top of the editor, for someone who is new to html coding this may look a bit daunting but don’t worry as by creating a space in the middle of your listing you have created a reference point in the html code.  You should be able to see lots of <br> tags.  These are Line breaks, simply put they are the individual blank lines you created by pressing return.  Now it is time to add some html code to your image URL, I will be using some basic tags to get you started but these will do the trick quite nicely.  Below is the code you should enter in the middle of the <BR> tags in the Ebay editor, just don’t forget to add your image URL in between the inverted comma’s (” “)

<img src=”http://www.ENTER-YOUR-IMAGE-URL-HERE.COM” vspace=”6″ width=”200″ height=”200″ align=”left” border=”0″ hspace=”6″>

This will insert an image to the left of the page and will allow you to type to the right of it.  Once you have done this click the “Standard” tab on your Ebay editor and your image should be nicely displayed on the left of the page.  Then place your cursor to the right of your image an add your description, once you have done that you can remove the extra spaces above and below the image to tidy things up.  If you wish your image to display on the right just change “left to right”.  In fact every attribute can be changed in the above code to suit you.  After some playing around you will be creating Ebay listings full of images without paying the extra fee’s.

Link Dump
Links to various sites mentioned in this blog.

Flickr
Ebay

A helping hand, Online shopping beat ebay fees, ebay, flickr, help, tutorials