4 ms·
The odd thing is eBay's quality is now easier to assess than Amazon's.
by athenot 7y ago
The odd thing is eBay's quality is now easier to assess than Amazon's.
- ravenstine 7y agoAnd eBay is often way cheaper to boot.
- rootusrootus 7y agoI have not found this to be the case for almost anything I have bought. It is almost always more expensive on eBay now.
- okmokmz 7y agoAmazon used to regularly be one of the least expensive retailers I can find. Now I rarely find anything that is cheaper on amazon than elsewhere
- castlecrasher2 7y agodefinitely so for <$10 items, sometimes higher. Anything I've bought on eBay for <$10 is nearly always $10 or higher on Amazon
- isolli 7y agoHow do you assess quality on eBay, e.g. for cables?
- noonespecial 7y agoRead the seller's feedback.
- athenot 7y agoFor an active cable (lighning, etc.) look for new and look at the seller's feedback. Look at the other stuff they are selling. Is it junk, is it all off-brand? How long have they been selling? It's not fool-proof and I still find myself buying only cable brands I trust (I don't mind overpaying for peace of mind when it comes to that). But the likelyhood of fakes (imitations of legitimate brands) is much lower, in my opinion.
- CamperBob2 7y agoeBay's opaque feedback system and captive seller relationships aren't the answer. The core problem is that they don't make it easy to associate individual listings with specific feedback for those items. In combination with the increasing popularity of "private" items, this encourages exit scams, among other things. A seller might garner 100% positive feedback for selling 500 Beanie Babies or whatever at $0.25 each, marking all the listings "private," then switch to ripping people off for $25K on nonexistent cars or machine tools or whatever. eBay could easily fix this in the common case where bulk sales are involved simply by adding a "Show feedback for this item only" feature. But they care even less about providing effective search tools than Amazon does, which is really saying something. Regardless of the question, the answer from the customer's point of view should involve more transparency rather than less. None of the major online retailers seem to agree, least of all eBay.
- okmokmz 7y agoThe feedback and reviews on eBay are far more useful and trustworthy than those on Amazon. I find that the bundling of unlike products together, and other tactics Amazon uses, makes their reviews essentially useless and definitely not an accurate way to assess product quality