7 ms·

I can't say I am surprised as they have spent the last half decade or more trying to reinvent themselves as some sort of Amazon marketplace for companies sellin

I can't say I am surprised as they have spent the last half decade or more trying to reinvent themselves as some sort of Amazon marketplace for companies selling new goods. Policies and rates have repeatedly penalised sellers ever harsher. It is now so buyer-centric that eBay is a safe place for buyers to experiment with their first fraud. In the process they have thrown away their reason for being and why they grew. At one point just about everyone I knew used to get rid of their spare tat on eBay and post a link. One or two had nice little hobby businesses selling collectables etc. Now I doubt many of them remember it exists. No one I know sells on it any more. I used to get rid of all my old IT kit on eBay, yet now I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot barge pole to sell anything. That is equally reflected in what's there when looking as a buyer - mostly company sales and endless cheap rubbish and far fewer private sales.

adamredwoods 8y ago
I enjoy using eBay. I can sometimes get faster and cheaper shipping than using Amazon. I have also bought all of my smartphones and laptops from here for the past 5 years. I wonder if this layoff has more to do with the online tax reform on small businesses.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  As a buyer it is often excellent, particularly as nearly all their policies now heavily favour the buyer. Buyers need sellers and those same policies have put off many (most?) of the private and small sellers. That's removed many of the products I liked to buy and the very reason I used to visit and browse regularly. It's still handy for toner, and a few other random purchases, I even bought my Macbook via eBay.
  - chemmail 8y ago
    ebay needs to realize their actual customers are the sellers.
    - HarryHirsch 8y ago
      That was their belief back then, under Meg Whitman. It didn't work too well for them, sales dropped because the site had a reputation for low-quality products and sellers who were plainly crooks. With Donahoe matters improved fairly rapidly. The NY Times had a series of articles back then about the struggles. This is one of them: https://theboard.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/25/going-going-gone-meg-whitman-leaves-ebay/ https://theboard.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/25/going-going-go...
      - mmt 8y ago
        There's no reason it needs to be just one or the other, especially considering a business based on network effect and, literally, market-making. > Ms. Whitman got in a few public tussles with the “community,” as eBay’s buyers and sellers are known. One came when she made an arrangement with Disney to give it special status on the site — its own Disney Auctions page. That violated Mr. Omidyar’s founding principle that eBay would be a global platform to which any buyer or seller could come as an equal. I hypothesize that the departure from this treatment of buyers and sellers as equals has eroded their uniquenes and therefore that part of its value. Presumably there's plenty of competition in both the buyer-first and seller-first e-commerce spaces.
        HillaryBriss 8y ago
        Gotta love Disney. In my humble experience with that company, it very often requests (and obtains) special treatment from business partners. It's magical.
  - cm2187 8y ago
    No there are also scammers targetting buyers. In my case some script outbidding everyone seconds before the end of an auction to reveal bid limits, cancelling the bid, and setting a new bid £1 below the bid limit to max out people’s bids. Ebay support clearly uninterested in curbing this (the account that did that cancelled many other bids in the days after I reported this, having never completed a single transaction). I think their are outright complicit. Ebay is a scammer nest and I will stay away from it.
- Kurtz79 8y ago
  For me it is the opposite, and I have been using eBay since the early days. I can get from Amazon stuff that is new, that I can return with minimal fuss, at my doorstep, often next day. Whatever savings I might get using the same item used on eBay do not compensate the time and mental strain of dealing with shipping delays, potential scammers, articles with defects "unmentioned" in the original description, non-existent warranty. Nowadays I use it only for very specific items that cannot be found on Amazon, or just to sell spare stuff (in the very rare occasions where it's worth it).
risotto_groupon 8y ago
eBay is just craigslist, but you have to hand over your money before you can tell whether they're a scammer.
- gowld 8y ago
  Nah, you have to hand over your goods before you can tell whether the buyer is a scammer.
  - xfer 8y ago
    How do you scam as a buyer, when you have to pay the money beforehand? Are you talking about stolen cards?
    - maddyboo 8y ago
      eBay/PayPal almost always sides with the buyer in disputes. It's relatively common for a buyer to purchase e.g. a DSLR and return it as "defective", mailing back a box of rocks to the seller.
      - brian_cunnie 8y ago
        I beg to differ. In my experience (a small sample set of 1), Ebay sided with me, the seller, and not the buyer. A gentleman from Italy purchased an old book I was selling. He disputed the transaction, saying the book had never arrived; however, the Italian post said they had delivered the book. eBay sided with me. I kept the seller's money.
        mehrdadn 8y ago
        I mean at that point when the post office agrees they had the package, they literally cannot logically blame you, because you could not have had any fault in this decision. What else were you supposed to do, fly over and hand it over to them in person? The onus can only logically be on the receiver to make sure they get the package the post office delivers, not on you. I understand the trouble starts when there's plausible deniability and no witness around. How do you prove they shipped rocks? How do they prove they didn't? At that point it really could be either person's fault, and their policy seems to be to blame it on the seller. That's what people mean when they say eBay "always" sides with the buyer. They don't mean that this is literally true even when it clearly doesn't make sense.
megaremote 8y ago
Right, but did the wreck everything by changing into a marketplace, or were they responding to the change they saw coming?
rootusrootus 8y ago
I totally agree. I have largely abandoned eBay, and I was an early adopter. Their policies are definitely buyer-centric, but the prices frankly are rarely that great, so when I am looking to buy something I can usually find it somewhere else cheaper with less hassle. When I want to sell something, I just put it on Facebook or Craigslist. Not great, but no worse than eBay and less likely to get scammed.
bobjordan 8y ago
We launched a new brand of cell phone mount products several months ago. We were set up and going on sales with Amazon in a trivial amount of time. Meanwhile, on Ebay. Tried to start a new account to match our brand name. Pretty much immediately banned, I think it was because I used a Chinese cell phone number in my contact info with the account, but not sure, as it was never actually clear why I was banned. Then, after about a week of back-and-forths proving I personally am an American and we were selling with an American corporation. Got the account reinstated. Finally, trying to list the products in coordination with our shopify store was a nightmare, the products wouldn't list, and as I recall we had another round of account troubles due to just trying to list our products. I finally said screw Ebay, I give up. Well, surprise. If you can't onboard sellers then good luck staying in business!
lph 8y ago
My wife used to run a small volume eBay shop, maybe 50 listings at a time. About once a month she would have to deal with outright fraud, and eBay almost always sided with the buyers. I'm talking about things like brand new items of clothing returned completely destroyed by the buyer---huge tears, burn marks, etc---and my wife would be forced to refund the purchase price and shipping costs. It certainly wasn't worth her time or all of the stress.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  eBay is rampant with fraud..I have a buddy that does a tremendous amount of of business there and the amount of crazy crap he puts up with is insane. "I just lost 2k today, well back to work" The scammers on eBay are bold because they know eBay doesn't care at all about the sellers.
  - cranjice 8y ago
    Not only that but they benefit from buyer fraud. I have experienced first hand refusal to refund selling fees (even after escalating the issue) after an item was fraudulently returned.
    - paulie_a 8y ago
      Interesting, I don't discount your experience, but with PayPal/eBay sides with the buyer, case closed. Their customer support to a seller might as out right have "fuck off" in their script.
- MaxBarraclough 8y ago
  I suppose part of the problem is that most of eBay is large-volume-low-price, so there's no chance at all of a law-enforcement solution to the fraud. It it practical to implement a We don't sell to brand-new accounts policy, as an eBay seller?
- verelo 8y ago
  I paid for my university tuition using eBay. I’d buy broken printers and repair them and sell them. Eventually someone started buying printers from me, claiming they were broken and getting refunds. They would open new accounts and do it under different names, to the point where one week over half my sales were all scammed in the same way. I was out 5 printers, and had no recourse. That ended a very successful 3 year venture.
amorphid 8y ago
For me, eBay is the 99 cent store of online shopping. I'm not interested in the auctions anymore, and if I am there to buy something, it's because I was trying to save a buck & it showed up as the cheapest place to buy something on Google Shopping.
- canada_dry 8y ago
  True. Come to think of it, I haven't participated in an auction for over 5 years. The thing I do like about ebay is they don't have the increasingly annoying dynamic pricing bullshit that Amazon is pulling. i.e. you see a price on Amazon that's great, by the time you've spoken to your better-half and gotten back to the computer... the price has gone up! Back to ebay though, I actually sold my car on ebay about 10 years ago... there's no way I'd attempt it these days!
  - bosdev 8y ago
    Try https://camelcamelcamel.com https://camelcamelcamel.com. It shows you the price history of Amazon items and can alert you when they fall.
  - withdavidli 8y ago
    not just amazon. here's a piece on using 3 people's different devices and price difference they get: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZVpbwz6kPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZVpbwz6kPk as for amazon price changes, i use the honey plugin, can see the past 120 day price history. surprised by how much it can fluctuate.
mattlondon 8y ago
+1 eBay used to be great when it was genuine people selling their spare stuff. I used to buy and sell a lot on eBay and it was great - picked up a lot of great secondhand stuff at decent prices, and found new homes for kit I didn't need any more. But for the past several years it seems to be dominated by "professional" sellers doing buy-it-now bulk-sells of new cheap stuff shipped directly from China/Hong Kong that takes 6-8 weeks to arrive then when it does it is often awful quality and/or not what was in the listing. This ruined it for me. There are a few decent secondhand sales still happening though - e.g. I got a really decent refurbished secondhand projector a year or two ago from a guy that specialised in projectors, and in the UK you can now collect your eBay orders from highstreet stores for free. It is just a shame that these genuine sellers are drowned out by the crap-pushers selling cheap tat.
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  > But for the past several years it seems to be dominated by "professional" sellers doing buy-it-now bulk-sells of new cheap stuff shipped directly from China/Hong Kong that takes 6-8 weeks to arrive then when it does it is often awful quality and/or not what was in the listing. This ruined it for me. It depends on what you're buying I think, and whether you actually care that it's a cheap knock-off... and whether you're willing to dispute it if it turns out to be genuinely awful. (Why wouldn't you?) In my case I bought a laptop keyboard at some point that I didn't really expect to find anywhere at a reasonable price, so I kind of expected what I got to be a cheap knock-off, and sure enough it was, and did have minor problems. But it wasn't a big deal; I used it and it did the job and I was happy. On the other hand, just 2-3 weeks ago I went looking for -- and found & bought -- a used version of a particular scanner I wanted at ~10% of the MSRP (which BTW still sells at near the MSRP right now if you find it new-ish), and it's been working just fine. It's just not the kind of thing that sellers sell in bulks... and I frankly don't expect I could even find a fake version of it no matter how hard I tried.
- glenneroo 8y ago
  Agree wholeheartedly. Unfortunately the prices don't seem to reflect the cheap "knock-off" products that are sold. I have since moved on to Wish and AliExpress, where the delivery times are also 4-6 weeks but the prices are 1/5-1/10th of eBay listings and the quality (in my personal experience) is at least on par or better, not to mention there is often a much larger selection. We are lucky in Austria though, for 2nd hand stuff we have willhaben.at which everyone uses and is basically a mix of eBay and Craigslist (which we officially have @ vienna.craigslist.at but after years is still mostly just spam listings and is therefore IMO unusable).

adamredwoods 8y ago

I enjoy using eBay. I can sometimes get faster and cheaper shipping than using Amazon. I have also bought all of my smartphones and laptops from here for the past 5 years. I wonder if this layoff has more to do with the online tax reform on small businesses.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
As a buyer it is often excellent, particularly as nearly all their policies now heavily favour the buyer. Buyers need sellers and those same policies have put off many (most?) of the private and small sellers. That's removed many of the products I liked to buy and the very reason I used to visit and browse regularly. It's still handy for toner, and a few other random purchases, I even bought my Macbook via eBay.
- chemmail 8y ago
  ebay needs to realize their actual customers are the sellers.
  - HarryHirsch 8y ago
    That was their belief back then, under Meg Whitman. It didn't work too well for them, sales dropped because the site had a reputation for low-quality products and sellers who were plainly crooks. With Donahoe matters improved fairly rapidly. The NY Times had a series of articles back then about the struggles. This is one of them: https://theboard.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/25/going-going-gone-meg-whitman-leaves-ebay/ https://theboard.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/25/going-going-go...
    - mmt 8y ago
      There's no reason it needs to be just one or the other, especially considering a business based on network effect and, literally, market-making. > Ms. Whitman got in a few public tussles with the “community,” as eBay’s buyers and sellers are known. One came when she made an arrangement with Disney to give it special status on the site — its own Disney Auctions page. That violated Mr. Omidyar’s founding principle that eBay would be a global platform to which any buyer or seller could come as an equal. I hypothesize that the departure from this treatment of buyers and sellers as equals has eroded their uniquenes and therefore that part of its value. Presumably there's plenty of competition in both the buyer-first and seller-first e-commerce spaces.
      - HillaryBriss 8y ago
        Gotta love Disney. In my humble experience with that company, it very often requests (and obtains) special treatment from business partners. It's magical.
- cm2187 8y ago
  No there are also scammers targetting buyers. In my case some script outbidding everyone seconds before the end of an auction to reveal bid limits, cancelling the bid, and setting a new bid £1 below the bid limit to max out people’s bids. Ebay support clearly uninterested in curbing this (the account that did that cancelled many other bids in the days after I reported this, having never completed a single transaction). I think their are outright complicit. Ebay is a scammer nest and I will stay away from it.
Kurtz79 8y ago
For me it is the opposite, and I have been using eBay since the early days. I can get from Amazon stuff that is new, that I can return with minimal fuss, at my doorstep, often next day. Whatever savings I might get using the same item used on eBay do not compensate the time and mental strain of dealing with shipping delays, potential scammers, articles with defects "unmentioned" in the original description, non-existent warranty. Nowadays I use it only for very specific items that cannot be found on Amazon, or just to sell spare stuff (in the very rare occasions where it's worth it).

risotto_groupon 8y ago

eBay is just craigslist, but you have to hand over your money before you can tell whether they're a scammer.

gowld 8y ago
Nah, you have to hand over your goods before you can tell whether the buyer is a scammer.
- xfer 8y ago
  How do you scam as a buyer, when you have to pay the money beforehand? Are you talking about stolen cards?
  - maddyboo 8y ago
    eBay/PayPal almost always sides with the buyer in disputes. It's relatively common for a buyer to purchase e.g. a DSLR and return it as "defective", mailing back a box of rocks to the seller.
    - brian_cunnie 8y ago
      I beg to differ. In my experience (a small sample set of 1), Ebay sided with me, the seller, and not the buyer. A gentleman from Italy purchased an old book I was selling. He disputed the transaction, saying the book had never arrived; however, the Italian post said they had delivered the book. eBay sided with me. I kept the seller's money.
      - mehrdadn 8y ago
        I mean at that point when the post office agrees they had the package, they literally cannot logically blame you, because you could not have had any fault in this decision. What else were you supposed to do, fly over and hand it over to them in person? The onus can only logically be on the receiver to make sure they get the package the post office delivers, not on you. I understand the trouble starts when there's plausible deniability and no witness around. How do you prove they shipped rocks? How do they prove they didn't? At that point it really could be either person's fault, and their policy seems to be to blame it on the seller. That's what people mean when they say eBay "always" sides with the buyer. They don't mean that this is literally true even when it clearly doesn't make sense.

megaremote 8y ago

Right, but did the wreck everything by changing into a marketplace, or were they responding to the change they saw coming?

rootusrootus 8y ago

I totally agree. I have largely abandoned eBay, and I was an early adopter. Their policies are definitely buyer-centric, but the prices frankly are rarely that great, so when I am looking to buy something I can usually find it somewhere else cheaper with less hassle. When I want to sell something, I just put it on Facebook or Craigslist. Not great, but no worse than eBay and less likely to get scammed.

bobjordan 8y ago

We launched a new brand of cell phone mount products several months ago. We were set up and going on sales with Amazon in a trivial amount of time. Meanwhile, on Ebay. Tried to start a new account to match our brand name. Pretty much immediately banned, I think it was because I used a Chinese cell phone number in my contact info with the account, but not sure, as it was never actually clear why I was banned. Then, after about a week of back-and-forths proving I personally am an American and we were selling with an American corporation. Got the account reinstated. Finally, trying to list the products in coordination with our shopify store was a nightmare, the products wouldn't list, and as I recall we had another round of account troubles due to just trying to list our products. I finally said screw Ebay, I give up. Well, surprise. If you can't onboard sellers then good luck staying in business!

lph 8y ago

My wife used to run a small volume eBay shop, maybe 50 listings at a time. About once a month she would have to deal with outright fraud, and eBay almost always sided with the buyers. I'm talking about things like brand new items of clothing returned completely destroyed by the buyer---huge tears, burn marks, etc---and my wife would be forced to refund the purchase price and shipping costs. It certainly wasn't worth her time or all of the stress.

paulie_a 8y ago
eBay is rampant with fraud..I have a buddy that does a tremendous amount of of business there and the amount of crazy crap he puts up with is insane. "I just lost 2k today, well back to work" The scammers on eBay are bold because they know eBay doesn't care at all about the sellers.
- cranjice 8y ago
  Not only that but they benefit from buyer fraud. I have experienced first hand refusal to refund selling fees (even after escalating the issue) after an item was fraudulently returned.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    Interesting, I don't discount your experience, but with PayPal/eBay sides with the buyer, case closed. Their customer support to a seller might as out right have "fuck off" in their script.
MaxBarraclough 8y ago
I suppose part of the problem is that most of eBay is large-volume-low-price, so there's no chance at all of a law-enforcement solution to the fraud. It it practical to implement a We don't sell to brand-new accounts policy, as an eBay seller?
verelo 8y ago
I paid for my university tuition using eBay. I’d buy broken printers and repair them and sell them. Eventually someone started buying printers from me, claiming they were broken and getting refunds. They would open new accounts and do it under different names, to the point where one week over half my sales were all scammed in the same way. I was out 5 printers, and had no recourse. That ended a very successful 3 year venture.

amorphid 8y ago

For me, eBay is the 99 cent store of online shopping. I'm not interested in the auctions anymore, and if I am there to buy something, it's because I was trying to save a buck & it showed up as the cheapest place to buy something on Google Shopping.

canada_dry 8y ago
True. Come to think of it, I haven't participated in an auction for over 5 years. The thing I do like about ebay is they don't have the increasingly annoying dynamic pricing bullshit that Amazon is pulling. i.e. you see a price on Amazon that's great, by the time you've spoken to your better-half and gotten back to the computer... the price has gone up! Back to ebay though, I actually sold my car on ebay about 10 years ago... there's no way I'd attempt it these days!
- bosdev 8y ago
  Try https://camelcamelcamel.com https://camelcamelcamel.com. It shows you the price history of Amazon items and can alert you when they fall.
- withdavidli 8y ago
  not just amazon. here's a piece on using 3 people's different devices and price difference they get: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZVpbwz6kPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZVpbwz6kPk as for amazon price changes, i use the honey plugin, can see the past 120 day price history. surprised by how much it can fluctuate.

mattlondon 8y ago

+1 eBay used to be great when it was genuine people selling their spare stuff. I used to buy and sell a lot on eBay and it was great - picked up a lot of great secondhand stuff at decent prices, and found new homes for kit I didn't need any more. But for the past several years it seems to be dominated by "professional" sellers doing buy-it-now bulk-sells of new cheap stuff shipped directly from China/Hong Kong that takes 6-8 weeks to arrive then when it does it is often awful quality and/or not what was in the listing. This ruined it for me. There are a few decent secondhand sales still happening though - e.g. I got a really decent refurbished secondhand projector a year or two ago from a guy that specialised in projectors, and in the UK you can now collect your eBay orders from highstreet stores for free. It is just a shame that these genuine sellers are drowned out by the crap-pushers selling cheap tat.

mehrdadn 8y ago
> But for the past several years it seems to be dominated by "professional" sellers doing buy-it-now bulk-sells of new cheap stuff shipped directly from China/Hong Kong that takes 6-8 weeks to arrive then when it does it is often awful quality and/or not what was in the listing. This ruined it for me. It depends on what you're buying I think, and whether you actually care that it's a cheap knock-off... and whether you're willing to dispute it if it turns out to be genuinely awful. (Why wouldn't you?) In my case I bought a laptop keyboard at some point that I didn't really expect to find anywhere at a reasonable price, so I kind of expected what I got to be a cheap knock-off, and sure enough it was, and did have minor problems. But it wasn't a big deal; I used it and it did the job and I was happy. On the other hand, just 2-3 weeks ago I went looking for -- and found & bought -- a used version of a particular scanner I wanted at ~10% of the MSRP (which BTW still sells at near the MSRP right now if you find it new-ish), and it's been working just fine. It's just not the kind of thing that sellers sell in bulks... and I frankly don't expect I could even find a fake version of it no matter how hard I tried.
glenneroo 8y ago
Agree wholeheartedly. Unfortunately the prices don't seem to reflect the cheap "knock-off" products that are sold. I have since moved on to Wish and AliExpress, where the delivery times are also 4-6 weeks but the prices are 1/5-1/10th of eBay listings and the quality (in my personal experience) is at least on par or better, not to mention there is often a much larger selection. We are lucky in Austria though, for 2nd hand stuff we have willhaben.at which everyone uses and is basically a mix of eBay and Craigslist (which we officially have @ vienna.craigslist.at but after years is still mostly just spam listings and is therefore IMO unusable).