6 ms·

It is now completely impossible to sell a laptop on eBay

49 points by technoguyrob 18y ago

Some interesting remarks on Reddit as well: http://reddit.com/info/6inwx/comments/

vaksel 18y ago
Craigslist should be thanking eBay, because all the scams and fraud on it have made all the people weary of shipping things, So local classifieds thrive.
dpapathanasiou 18y ago
So, EBay is broken (at least when it comes to computers & electronics). There must be a startup opportunity there.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- technoguyrob 18y ago
  Essentially, the problem is a credentials issue. If you can distinguish "serious" buyers from the "scammers," then you're set. I've done a little freelancing on elance.com, and the way they handle this problem is that they charge a small amount to make bids. Of course, this is somewhat different since one is bidding for jobs and not items (receiving money, not giving it), but it's still not very helpful, since I doubt anyone would pay even a nominal fee to make bids for buying items. Craiglist's solution to this problem is to limit buyers and sellers to their respective local geographic areas, which turns out to be pretty effective, but can oftentimes constrain market opportunities (and of course, there's no built-in auctioning capabilities). I remember one post on YC a while back was about generating post modernism essays in response to spam emails to the point where a spammer could not possibly sift through all of them in a reasonable amount of time (and the "English" nature of the essays would make them hard to distinguish from real responses). This would make spamming unprofitable. Perhaps this can somehow be generalized to problems like s(c|p)ammers on eBay.
  - bigtoga 18y ago
    And hell, if you could solve that problem, you'd have a legitimate PayPal alternative as well.
  - dpapathanasiou 18y ago
    Essentially, the problem is a credentials issue. If you can distinguish "serious" buyers from the "scammers," then you're set. Maybe... but I can't help but note that anonymous cash transactions do happen all the time successfully (albeit in person, at shops). So perhaps credentialed id is not the answer, especially since, on the web it's easy to go back and create a new account at any time. I doubt anyone would pay even a nominal fee to make bids for buying items Maybe listing fees (whether paid by buyer or seller) is the wrong business model. Anyway, it's worth a rethink along the lines of "can you redefine the problem?"
    - bigtoga 18y ago
      * Maybe listing fees (whether paid by buyer or seller) is the wrong business model. That's called craigslist...
    - jhscott 18y ago
      Note that /cash/ is crucial when talking about a anonymous transaction. In a cash transaction, after a sale completes, the honest seller has essentially no exposure beyond, say, a warranty return. If you payment is instead made in some way (credit card, paypal, etc) where the seller is on the hook for fraud, things start to suck hard. Unfortunately, no governments/banks like totally anon ecash, for national security reasons (e.g., funding terrorism). There are certainly ways to make credentials that are not easily recreated. One example, although perhaps not the best, is to send a text message to a cellphone number.
    - wanorris 18y ago
      > Anyway, it's worth a rethink along the lines of "can you redefine the problem?" What if you built an Ebay from scratch around a secure financial escrow service? Perhaps you could place a hold upon a credit card at the time a bid was placed, release that hold as soon as they lose the auction, and charge the credit card as soon as they win the auction. Don't charge a transaction fee (or charge as small a fee as possible) -- just hold the cash in escrow until the buyer verifies that he has received the product as agreed. If the buyer tells you he has not received the item or that it is not as agreed, you perform some kind of resolution. If no feedback at all is received from the buyer in X days, you pay the seller anyway. I don't know whether buyers and sellers would love these terms, but they should be securable, and if Ebay is becoming inoperable, maybe they would work.
- mixmax 18y ago
  The problem with starting another Ebay is Metcalfes law that states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system. They have a lot of users, and thus their network is valuable - even if you try to sell Nigerian stamps from 1800 there will probably be a bidder. A startup will have big trouble getting the first million users, simply because there aren't already a million users. It's a catch 22 situation. The same is btw. true for facebook, etc. Their value is not in their technology but in their size.
  - dpapathanasiou 18y ago
    True, attracting enough buyers and sellers will be a challenge, even if a scam-free model is invented. This actually reminds me of the story of the Arizona Stock Exchange, which was technically a better model for selling stocks, but couldn't convince enough traders from NYSE and Nasdaq to give it a try (http://www.businessweek.com/1997/09/b3516129.htm http://www.businessweek.com/1997/09/b3516129.htm).
- xirium 18y ago
  See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95288 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95288 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152019 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152019
dangoldin 18y ago
Haha. The article is hilarious. Definitely a good afternoon chuckle.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
borga 18y ago
welcome to human society.
thingsilearned 18y ago
Another data point. I just sold mine a year ago and had no problems. I bought a laptop and 3 months later got a work laptop negating my need for the other. Sold it on ebay at a loss of just 50 bucks from the original price. Yet another reason to buy a mac. The resale value remains really high.
weegee 18y ago
how do you sell your laptop on ebay? just list it as a single-priced auction, set shipping to USA only, reject any bidders that don't have a paypal account, etc. anyone who can't sell something on ebay without running into trouble like this is an idiot.
- rms 18y ago
  or you can do a buy it now that only counts if they actually follow through and pay
  - weegee 18y ago
    try the "immediate payment required" in that case. it's a good feature that I've used many times.
wensing 18y ago
I've sold two Mac laptops on eBay--one 12" Powerbook G4 and the other a 13" Macbook (white). The 12" sold within 24 hours (August 2006) for $500 (!). The 13" sold within three days for $900 (I paid $1200 and it was 1 year old, refurbished). The 13" did come with some other goodies, like Parallels and Win XP Pro, however.
tx 18y ago
Ha... I never used EBay in the intended way: when bying I always do searches for local items only, and just pick things up with cash. For selling I always use Craigslist.
martin 18y ago
I sold my laptop on eBay about a year and a half ago. The winning bidder had a 100+ feedback rating, so I thought everything was fine, but then I get the email that he wants me to ship it to Nigeria. I contacted eBay via their chat support, and they were actually not that lame -- they agreed that obviously one of these scumbags had pwned a legitimate account, and refunded my money. When I relisted it, it sold without incident.
Tichy 18y ago
Shorten more, please
babul 18y ago
eBay is a rule unto itself. They love buyers and do not care much about sellers. I used to be a powerseller but stopped as I was fed up of people lying on eBay, especially buyers who received goods and complained to eBay they did not. In many cases I provided the shipping tracking numbers and eBay+PayPal could see the items were sent and recieved by the buyers but still they would refund buyers so sellers lose out. They do this as it is easier to push around a seller (eBay tell you that you have to take the buyer to court but then will refuse to give you the buyers details) than a buyer (who can simply tell their credit card company to sort it out).
babul 18y ago
See http://www.paypalsucks.com http://www.paypalsucks.com for the horror stories I and many others have suffered at eBay/PayPal.

49 points by technoguyrob 18y ago

Some interesting remarks on Reddit as well: http://reddit.com/info/6inwx/comments/

Craigslist should be thanking eBay, because all the scams and fraud on it have made all the people weary of shipping things, So local classifieds thrive.

dpapathanasiou 18y ago

So, EBay is broken (at least when it comes to computers & electronics). There must be a startup opportunity there.

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
technoguyrob 18y ago
Essentially, the problem is a credentials issue. If you can distinguish "serious" buyers from the "scammers," then you're set. I've done a little freelancing on elance.com, and the way they handle this problem is that they charge a small amount to make bids. Of course, this is somewhat different since one is bidding for jobs and not items (receiving money, not giving it), but it's still not very helpful, since I doubt anyone would pay even a nominal fee to make bids for buying items. Craiglist's solution to this problem is to limit buyers and sellers to their respective local geographic areas, which turns out to be pretty effective, but can oftentimes constrain market opportunities (and of course, there's no built-in auctioning capabilities). I remember one post on YC a while back was about generating post modernism essays in response to spam emails to the point where a spammer could not possibly sift through all of them in a reasonable amount of time (and the "English" nature of the essays would make them hard to distinguish from real responses). This would make spamming unprofitable. Perhaps this can somehow be generalized to problems like s(c|p)ammers on eBay.
- bigtoga 18y ago
  And hell, if you could solve that problem, you'd have a legitimate PayPal alternative as well.
- dpapathanasiou 18y ago
  Essentially, the problem is a credentials issue. If you can distinguish "serious" buyers from the "scammers," then you're set. Maybe... but I can't help but note that anonymous cash transactions do happen all the time successfully (albeit in person, at shops). So perhaps credentialed id is not the answer, especially since, on the web it's easy to go back and create a new account at any time. I doubt anyone would pay even a nominal fee to make bids for buying items Maybe listing fees (whether paid by buyer or seller) is the wrong business model. Anyway, it's worth a rethink along the lines of "can you redefine the problem?"
  - bigtoga 18y ago
    * Maybe listing fees (whether paid by buyer or seller) is the wrong business model. That's called craigslist...
  - jhscott 18y ago
    Note that /cash/ is crucial when talking about a anonymous transaction. In a cash transaction, after a sale completes, the honest seller has essentially no exposure beyond, say, a warranty return. If you payment is instead made in some way (credit card, paypal, etc) where the seller is on the hook for fraud, things start to suck hard. Unfortunately, no governments/banks like totally anon ecash, for national security reasons (e.g., funding terrorism). There are certainly ways to make credentials that are not easily recreated. One example, although perhaps not the best, is to send a text message to a cellphone number.
  - wanorris 18y ago
    > Anyway, it's worth a rethink along the lines of "can you redefine the problem?" What if you built an Ebay from scratch around a secure financial escrow service? Perhaps you could place a hold upon a credit card at the time a bid was placed, release that hold as soon as they lose the auction, and charge the credit card as soon as they win the auction. Don't charge a transaction fee (or charge as small a fee as possible) -- just hold the cash in escrow until the buyer verifies that he has received the product as agreed. If the buyer tells you he has not received the item or that it is not as agreed, you perform some kind of resolution. If no feedback at all is received from the buyer in X days, you pay the seller anyway. I don't know whether buyers and sellers would love these terms, but they should be securable, and if Ebay is becoming inoperable, maybe they would work.
mixmax 18y ago
The problem with starting another Ebay is Metcalfes law that states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system. They have a lot of users, and thus their network is valuable - even if you try to sell Nigerian stamps from 1800 there will probably be a bidder. A startup will have big trouble getting the first million users, simply because there aren't already a million users. It's a catch 22 situation. The same is btw. true for facebook, etc. Their value is not in their technology but in their size.
- dpapathanasiou 18y ago
  True, attracting enough buyers and sellers will be a challenge, even if a scam-free model is invented. This actually reminds me of the story of the Arizona Stock Exchange, which was technically a better model for selling stocks, but couldn't convince enough traders from NYSE and Nasdaq to give it a try (http://www.businessweek.com/1997/09/b3516129.htm http://www.businessweek.com/1997/09/b3516129.htm).
xirium 18y ago
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95288 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95288 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152019 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152019

dangoldin 18y ago

Haha. The article is hilarious. Definitely a good afternoon chuckle.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

borga 18y ago

welcome to human society.

thingsilearned 18y ago

Another data point. I just sold mine a year ago and had no problems. I bought a laptop and 3 months later got a work laptop negating my need for the other. Sold it on ebay at a loss of just 50 bucks from the original price. Yet another reason to buy a mac. The resale value remains really high.

weegee 18y ago

how do you sell your laptop on ebay? just list it as a single-priced auction, set shipping to USA only, reject any bidders that don't have a paypal account, etc. anyone who can't sell something on ebay without running into trouble like this is an idiot.

rms 18y ago
or you can do a buy it now that only counts if they actually follow through and pay
- weegee 18y ago
  try the "immediate payment required" in that case. it's a good feature that I've used many times.

wensing 18y ago

I've sold two Mac laptops on eBay--one 12" Powerbook G4 and the other a 13" Macbook (white). The 12" sold within 24 hours (August 2006) for $500 (!). The 13" sold within three days for $900 (I paid $1200 and it was 1 year old, refurbished). The 13" did come with some other goodies, like Parallels and Win XP Pro, however.

tx 18y ago

Ha... I never used EBay in the intended way: when bying I always do searches for local items only, and just pick things up with cash. For selling I always use Craigslist.

martin 18y ago

I sold my laptop on eBay about a year and a half ago. The winning bidder had a 100+ feedback rating, so I thought everything was fine, but then I get the email that he wants me to ship it to Nigeria. I contacted eBay via their chat support, and they were actually not that lame -- they agreed that obviously one of these scumbags had pwned a legitimate account, and refunded my money. When I relisted it, it sold without incident.

Tichy 18y ago

Shorten more, please

babul 18y ago

eBay is a rule unto itself. They love buyers and do not care much about sellers. I used to be a powerseller but stopped as I was fed up of people lying on eBay, especially buyers who received goods and complained to eBay they did not. In many cases I provided the shipping tracking numbers and eBay+PayPal could see the items were sent and recieved by the buyers but still they would refund buyers so sellers lose out. They do this as it is easier to push around a seller (eBay tell you that you have to take the buyer to court but then will refuse to give you the buyers details) than a buyer (who can simply tell their credit card company to sort it out).

babul 18y ago

See http://www.paypalsucks.com http://www.paypalsucks.com for the horror stories I and many others have suffered at eBay/PayPal.