2 ms·

How is ebay better? The only counterfeit item I have bought on either site was a dell laptop charger on ebay a few years ago. It used to overheat and stopped w

How is ebay better? The only counterfeit item I have bought on either site was a dell laptop charger on ebay a few years ago. It used to overheat and stopped working after only a few weeks use. Another time a product was never shipped and I had to go through the paypal dispute resolution process which worked fine if a little slowly. I'd have thought ebay would suffer from the same problems as amazon with counterfeit products and fake reviews and then it also has the whole shill bids problem. I moved over to amazon for almost all my online shopping and so far have not had a problem though I appreciate that may just be luck on my part.

res0nat0r 9y ago
I'm not sure how / what these folks who keep apparently getting scammed are buying, but I have ~200 books purchased in my history with 3/4 of them most likely used, and none have been fakes. I constantly buy / add to my wishlist older hardcover books I'm interested in reading and will come back and check when the used price is low and buy either Like New / Very Good / Good and have been satisfied with the results. Nothing like getting a 800+ page hardcover book with barely any use delivered to your door for 6-10$. If one is worried about quality don't by anything used that is less than Very Good IMO.
brudgers 9y ago
I don't disagree that a person can buy shoddy goods on either site. The difference for me is that as a marketplace, Ebay is more transparent. The article points out a specific instance of Amazon's opacity where the buyer has no information about the actual seller. Maybe the merchant is Amazon itself and hence a fairly reliable seller. Maybe the merchant is some other less reliable seller. Maybe the the merchant has the item in stock. Maybe it does not. Maybe the price shown is in the buyer's interest. Maybe it is not the same as someone else might see. The difference for me, is that in general Ebay has structured its business so as to create little incentive for manipulating individual transactions in an extractive way. As a marketplace, Ebay tends to provide consistent and reliable information to buyers (as well as sellers) regarding price and the transaction history of the counter party. Now all this is with the caveat that I generally use Ebay as a replacement for Amazon and therefore am not heavily invested in the auction process. Usually the only time a enter an Ebay auction over buy-it-now is when the auction is ending soon and there's not much bid activity and the item is on the long tail...I don't use usually use Ebay to buy high demand or high ticket items via auction. But again, for me it is that I find Amazon's purchase process is often untrustworthy. Essentially, Amazon's search is broken when measured against my economic interests (and great when measured against Amazon's). In short, Amazon has become an adversarial marketplace where my adversary is the house. Ebay's auctions are adversarial, but I'm not up against the platform and the economics of the transaction for me do not depend on how the platform leaks information...and there are few incentives for Ebay to evolve in that way and many incentives for Amazon to do so.

res0nat0r 9y ago

I'm not sure how / what these folks who keep apparently getting scammed are buying, but I have ~200 books purchased in my history with 3/4 of them most likely used, and none have been fakes. I constantly buy / add to my wishlist older hardcover books I'm interested in reading and will come back and check when the used price is low and buy either Like New / Very Good / Good and have been satisfied with the results. Nothing like getting a 800+ page hardcover book with barely any use delivered to your door for 6-10$. If one is worried about quality don't by anything used that is less than Very Good IMO.

brudgers 9y ago

I don't disagree that a person can buy shoddy goods on either site. The difference for me is that as a marketplace, Ebay is more transparent. The article points out a specific instance of Amazon's opacity where the buyer has no information about the actual seller. Maybe the merchant is Amazon itself and hence a fairly reliable seller. Maybe the merchant is some other less reliable seller. Maybe the the merchant has the item in stock. Maybe it does not. Maybe the price shown is in the buyer's interest. Maybe it is not the same as someone else might see. The difference for me, is that in general Ebay has structured its business so as to create little incentive for manipulating individual transactions in an extractive way. As a marketplace, Ebay tends to provide consistent and reliable information to buyers (as well as sellers) regarding price and the transaction history of the counter party. Now all this is with the caveat that I generally use Ebay as a replacement for Amazon and therefore am not heavily invested in the auction process. Usually the only time a enter an Ebay auction over buy-it-now is when the auction is ending soon and there's not much bid activity and the item is on the long tail...I don't use usually use Ebay to buy high demand or high ticket items via auction. But again, for me it is that I find Amazon's purchase process is often untrustworthy. Essentially, Amazon's search is broken when measured against my economic interests (and great when measured against Amazon's). In short, Amazon has become an adversarial marketplace where my adversary is the house. Ebay's auctions are adversarial, but I'm not up against the platform and the economics of the transaction for me do not depend on how the platform leaks information...and there are few incentives for Ebay to evolve in that way and many incentives for Amazon to do so.