7 ms·

I cant believe ebay hasnt been disrupted yet...

by anonu 2y ago

lotsofpulp 2y ago
eBay is interesting. It has consistently high profit margins, but no upward movement in revenue or profit, which peaked over a decade ago, and its returns heavily lag SP500. I’m guessing investors don’t see much opportunity for growth in the online auction business to make it worth dumping a bunch of money just to take market share from eBay.
- steveBK123 2y ago
  eBay I think had their growth capped once you had Etsy, Amazon FBA, and other options on the field. Your average normie has no interest in the hassle of selling their used stuff (which has, if anything, got harder in my 25ish years using eBay), nor of buying random used staff from anonymous individual sellers. Etsy covers the arts & crafts coded goods (though much is now China dropship). Amazon allows the big merchants to sell to normies who just want to click "buy" without thinking about seller rating risk, when something will arrive, etc. Basically most people have no idea they are buying from not-Amazon, because it says amazon.com and that's good enough. eBay never had the smarts to create that user experience.
  - woleium 2y ago
    Amazon fulfillment, That’s the killer. Why bother with another marketplace when vertically integrated Amazon does it all
    - potato3732842 2y ago
      Because you're a used <pick niche> dealer or a dealer of something that is on the large end of what you can send in "normal" mail. Tires come to mind, even on Amazon very few of them are actually FBA.
- alexey-salmin 2y ago
  > online auction business Do they even do it nowadays? I was under impression it turned into an ordinary marketplace, probably with a bit more focus towards small/private sellers.
  - hnlmorg 2y ago
    Yeah of course they do. And it’s still used by people looking to get deals.
- toast0 2y ago
  From my perspective, eBay has a solid niche of older items, and they tried to break into the buy new items market too, but the hassles of selling mean for the most part only scalpers sell new items on eBay. Although there's some niches where it's not unusual: new auto parts seem common, I guess it's easier for a dealer parts counter to run an eBay store than otherwise.
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    I find that for a lot of "cheap junk from China" gets cheaper when you eBay it directly from China and cut out the cost of the Amazon middle man. Recently I bought a chainsaw tool on eBay from China as I didn't want to buy a 6-pack for $10. I was able to buy a couple for about $0.20 more per unit. Sure, higher unit price and they'll be here slower but it's several $6ish saved.
    - asddubs 2y ago
      ebay seems relatively competitive with aliexpress, sometimes even cheaper. amazon everything seems to cost much more
      - lotsofpulp 2y ago
        Amazon has free returns on almost everything, so if comparing prices for the same item, the cost of free returns has to be added.
  - pjdesno 2y ago
    I mostly use eBay for buying computer and bike parts - e.g. my most recent purchase on my work (tax-exempt) account was a batch of a specific model of 40Gbit NIC, and a specific type of bike seat post on my personal account. The eBay search function isn't great, but it's vastly better than Amazon, where search results are polluted by large numbers of garbage sponsored results - this may be related to its success in these niches. (although in my case it's partly because I can avoid paying for Amazon Prime, and still choose things based on prices that include shipping)
kgilpin 2y ago
In my kids’ generation (college aged) they all use Facebook Marketplace.
- rcpt 2y ago
  Local classifieds are great if you live in a dense area. But I've tried using them when visiting rural family and there's absolutely nothing for sale.
- segmondy 2y ago
  ebay is still useful for obscure stuff. if you want to buy used servers, GPU, electronics, car parts, etc. I don't think ebay and FB MP really overlapped, MP ate craigslist. The closest thing to eating ebay is Aliexpress.
  - Beijinger 2y ago
    I found ebay more reliable, interesting and smoother than Amazon. Amazon screwed me over for 40 USD now they are nagging that I should sign up for "Prime" (I ordered a bunch of stuff, maybe 800 USD. They decided the order is fraudulent, and canceled it, without ever telling me. When I moved into my new place, there was nothing. No sheets, no nothing from Amazon. That this order was "canceled" without any email seemed to puzzle Amazon support. They told me in the chat to reorder with fasted shipping, and that they would reimburse the shipping. Of course, they did not. And the chat protocols clearly stating Amazon would reimburse the express shipping were a "misunderstanding".
    - nosioptar 2y ago
      Last time I ordered from amazon, I repeatedly declined prime. My bank called me the next day about a suspicious charge for a year of prime. I had to cancel my card and get a new one. The banker told me they'd had dozens of similar problems where amazon was charging people for stuff they never ordered. When I got the package a few days later, the $150+ set of cello strings I ordered, sold and shipped by amazon, were counterfeits (and damaged due to improper packing, not that it mattered). I had to do a charge back to get my money back.
gosub100 2y ago
They cleaned up their act substantially in the past 3-4 years. There are still scammers, of course, but they seem to be taking action that favors buyers as well. I just don't see how they can protect everyone from all the various scams. If they accept all the risk, it will be exploited by scammers.
- steveBK123 2y ago
  It was always fairly pro-buyer, but it's moved so much more in that direction it's somewhat hazardous to use as a seller. For a lot of stuff, as a seller, I'll just trade-in or use random hobbyist forum buy&sell sections which ad-hoc reputation systems.
  - gosub100 2y ago
    FWIW I don't hear of nearly any of the horror stories I used to. From my recollection, 2011 was about the peak of it, where buyers were claiming to never get their stuff, getting liberal refunds at the expense of the sellers. Sellers were getting their accounts locked by Paypal, sometimes with tens-of-thousands of dollars at stake, only to get it back 6 months later if they begged and screamed. I opened a seller account in about 2020 to unload some server gear and almost got scammed, but I googled the buyers name and saw he was accused of fraud by several other people. I re-routed the package and although I didn't get reimbursed for that fee, ebay made me right and paypal (I think) gave me a small credit. They even had a phone call with me which seemed like they actually investigated it (I dont remember many details, it was 1 transaction 5 years ago). There's just no way that any online auction can control fraud. I was on ebay yesterday as a buyer, looking for a tape backup drive. The seller clearly had been burned and (bitterly) warned that the sale was final, because previously he had sold a working drive which was parted out, replaced with broken parts (heads) and returned as defective. there's no way a third party can protect against it because either way the fraudster wins. 1) sell a bad drive, claim it was good, but accuse the buyer of fraud. Or 2) buy a good drive, swap it out with bad parts and return it. how could anyone (like ebay) solve this problem?
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    That's the point. They want to drive off amateurs who are trying to liquidate dads old tools in favor of the guys who are doing that stuff in professional volumes and the professional dealers and importers who are buying lots of stuff and breaking them up for retail sale and "real businesses" who run an eBay store alongside their other ecommerce stuff. They were pretty transparent about their motives IIRC.
nyjah 2y ago
eBay has had to reinvent itself. For me, I don’t trust eBay for legit merchandise, I sorta assume it’s knockoffs now, probably wrong. I’ve never used them but I was under the assumption that offer up and what not are popping off as eBay disrupters.
stemlord 2y ago
Honestly ebay is currently a notch better than amazon, IME
m463 2y ago
they actually were disrupted -- craigslist
- Spooky23 2y ago
  Is Craigslist still a thing? In my area, was the vice city classifieds. The hookers are gone, but so much obviously stolen stuff was posted there.
  - V99 2y ago
    It is somewhat surprisingly (still) a $500m+ revenue[1] company, with very minimal employees and expenses. They're printing money on house and car listing fees. 1: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/craigslist-revenue-rebounds-traffic-slide-continues-301477660.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/craigslist-revenue-...
  - red-iron-pine 2y ago
    still had good successes with CL as far back as 2019 for selling a car, and picking up used servers. that said, general consensus at least where I am in WA and Canada is FB Marketplace is the new CL. which is a same because FB sucks
- throwaway290 2y ago
  You can't be "disrupted" by something that existed before you...
doublepg23 2y ago
I quite like places like /r/HardwareSwap or the like.
amatecha 2y ago
I just use Craigslist. Yeah, that greatly limits the pool, but eBay is scummy and so is FB.
varsketiz 2y ago
For those in europe - check out vinted.com
- globular-toast 2y ago
  Vinted seems popular amongst people who never used eBay for buying and selling commodities like clothes. Is it any good for selling higher value specialist stuff like electronics, musical instruments etc?
  - seszett 2y ago
    For higher value goods people usually prefer others, I think Backmarket.com is one of the main ones (it's definitely the main option for electronics in France) but there's also Refurbed (know it from Belgium but I think it's German) or Rebuy (know it from the Netherlands but it's German as well) for example. Each of those three claims to be the largest one in some metric.
  - JansjoFromIkea 2y ago
    in my experience it's good for buying them (i.e. people not knowing items will go for multiples of what they've listed on ebay)
- alias_neo 2y ago
  My wife uses Vinted (UK) for selling hers and the kids clothes, usually single-to-double digit values at most (or she uses Oleo to just give it away). It works _fairly_ well from what I've heard, but she does have the occasional issue with people complaining about things and sending them back for obtuse reasons, often hardly worth it because the value was so low, the cost of the shipping there and back eclipsed the value of the item. I wonder at times whether this is their game, hoping people will just tell them not to bother sending it back and they get a refund anyway. As for ebay, I stopped selling anything on there years ago, well over a decade, when someone tried to scam me out of a laptop but failed. If something is valuable enough for me to sell, I sure as shit am not selling it on eBay. More often than not, I give away my valuable tech that I'm done with, because I'd rather get nothing for it, and give it to someone who'll appreciate it than risk being scammed by some scumbag. This way, friends and family get my hand-me-down PCs, laptops, phones, etc for nothing and they're still, by the time I'm done with them far better than something they'd buy with their budgets. When I buy something, I factor its lifetime in my possession into it's cost, I effectively expect £0 value left in it when I'm done or I don't buy it; everybody wins.
rvba 2y ago
Ebay entered polish market and lost to allegro. Then ebay basically quit. As far as I remember ebay hand waved at everything, especially scam. Allegro is getting enshitiffied nowadays since it was bought by VC.

I cant believe ebay hasnt been disrupted yet...

by anonu 2y ago

I cant believe ebay hasnt been disrupted yet...

eBay is interesting. It has consistently high profit margins, but no upward movement in revenue or profit, which peaked over a decade ago, and its returns heavily lag SP500. I’m guessing investors don’t see much opportunity for growth in the online auction business to make it worth dumping a bunch of money just to take market share from eBay.

steveBK123 2y ago
eBay I think had their growth capped once you had Etsy, Amazon FBA, and other options on the field. Your average normie has no interest in the hassle of selling their used stuff (which has, if anything, got harder in my 25ish years using eBay), nor of buying random used staff from anonymous individual sellers. Etsy covers the arts & crafts coded goods (though much is now China dropship). Amazon allows the big merchants to sell to normies who just want to click "buy" without thinking about seller rating risk, when something will arrive, etc. Basically most people have no idea they are buying from not-Amazon, because it says amazon.com and that's good enough. eBay never had the smarts to create that user experience.
- woleium 2y ago
  Amazon fulfillment, That’s the killer. Why bother with another marketplace when vertically integrated Amazon does it all
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    Because you're a used <pick niche> dealer or a dealer of something that is on the large end of what you can send in "normal" mail. Tires come to mind, even on Amazon very few of them are actually FBA.
alexey-salmin 2y ago
> online auction business Do they even do it nowadays? I was under impression it turned into an ordinary marketplace, probably with a bit more focus towards small/private sellers.
- hnlmorg 2y ago
  Yeah of course they do. And it’s still used by people looking to get deals.
toast0 2y ago
From my perspective, eBay has a solid niche of older items, and they tried to break into the buy new items market too, but the hassles of selling mean for the most part only scalpers sell new items on eBay. Although there's some niches where it's not unusual: new auto parts seem common, I guess it's easier for a dealer parts counter to run an eBay store than otherwise.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  I find that for a lot of "cheap junk from China" gets cheaper when you eBay it directly from China and cut out the cost of the Amazon middle man. Recently I bought a chainsaw tool on eBay from China as I didn't want to buy a 6-pack for $10. I was able to buy a couple for about $0.20 more per unit. Sure, higher unit price and they'll be here slower but it's several $6ish saved.
  - asddubs 2y ago
    ebay seems relatively competitive with aliexpress, sometimes even cheaper. amazon everything seems to cost much more
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      Amazon has free returns on almost everything, so if comparing prices for the same item, the cost of free returns has to be added.
- pjdesno 2y ago
  I mostly use eBay for buying computer and bike parts - e.g. my most recent purchase on my work (tax-exempt) account was a batch of a specific model of 40Gbit NIC, and a specific type of bike seat post on my personal account. The eBay search function isn't great, but it's vastly better than Amazon, where search results are polluted by large numbers of garbage sponsored results - this may be related to its success in these niches. (although in my case it's partly because I can avoid paying for Amazon Prime, and still choose things based on prices that include shipping)

kgilpin 2y ago

In my kids’ generation (college aged) they all use Facebook Marketplace.

rcpt 2y ago
Local classifieds are great if you live in a dense area. But I've tried using them when visiting rural family and there's absolutely nothing for sale.
segmondy 2y ago
ebay is still useful for obscure stuff. if you want to buy used servers, GPU, electronics, car parts, etc. I don't think ebay and FB MP really overlapped, MP ate craigslist. The closest thing to eating ebay is Aliexpress.
- Beijinger 2y ago
  I found ebay more reliable, interesting and smoother than Amazon. Amazon screwed me over for 40 USD now they are nagging that I should sign up for "Prime" (I ordered a bunch of stuff, maybe 800 USD. They decided the order is fraudulent, and canceled it, without ever telling me. When I moved into my new place, there was nothing. No sheets, no nothing from Amazon. That this order was "canceled" without any email seemed to puzzle Amazon support. They told me in the chat to reorder with fasted shipping, and that they would reimburse the shipping. Of course, they did not. And the chat protocols clearly stating Amazon would reimburse the express shipping were a "misunderstanding".
  - nosioptar 2y ago
    Last time I ordered from amazon, I repeatedly declined prime. My bank called me the next day about a suspicious charge for a year of prime. I had to cancel my card and get a new one. The banker told me they'd had dozens of similar problems where amazon was charging people for stuff they never ordered. When I got the package a few days later, the $150+ set of cello strings I ordered, sold and shipped by amazon, were counterfeits (and damaged due to improper packing, not that it mattered). I had to do a charge back to get my money back.

gosub100 2y ago

They cleaned up their act substantially in the past 3-4 years. There are still scammers, of course, but they seem to be taking action that favors buyers as well. I just don't see how they can protect everyone from all the various scams. If they accept all the risk, it will be exploited by scammers.

steveBK123 2y ago
It was always fairly pro-buyer, but it's moved so much more in that direction it's somewhat hazardous to use as a seller. For a lot of stuff, as a seller, I'll just trade-in or use random hobbyist forum buy&sell sections which ad-hoc reputation systems.
- gosub100 2y ago
  FWIW I don't hear of nearly any of the horror stories I used to. From my recollection, 2011 was about the peak of it, where buyers were claiming to never get their stuff, getting liberal refunds at the expense of the sellers. Sellers were getting their accounts locked by Paypal, sometimes with tens-of-thousands of dollars at stake, only to get it back 6 months later if they begged and screamed. I opened a seller account in about 2020 to unload some server gear and almost got scammed, but I googled the buyers name and saw he was accused of fraud by several other people. I re-routed the package and although I didn't get reimbursed for that fee, ebay made me right and paypal (I think) gave me a small credit. They even had a phone call with me which seemed like they actually investigated it (I dont remember many details, it was 1 transaction 5 years ago). There's just no way that any online auction can control fraud. I was on ebay yesterday as a buyer, looking for a tape backup drive. The seller clearly had been burned and (bitterly) warned that the sale was final, because previously he had sold a working drive which was parted out, replaced with broken parts (heads) and returned as defective. there's no way a third party can protect against it because either way the fraudster wins. 1) sell a bad drive, claim it was good, but accuse the buyer of fraud. Or 2) buy a good drive, swap it out with bad parts and return it. how could anyone (like ebay) solve this problem?
- potato3732842 2y ago
  That's the point. They want to drive off amateurs who are trying to liquidate dads old tools in favor of the guys who are doing that stuff in professional volumes and the professional dealers and importers who are buying lots of stuff and breaking them up for retail sale and "real businesses" who run an eBay store alongside their other ecommerce stuff. They were pretty transparent about their motives IIRC.

nyjah 2y ago

eBay has had to reinvent itself. For me, I don’t trust eBay for legit merchandise, I sorta assume it’s knockoffs now, probably wrong. I’ve never used them but I was under the assumption that offer up and what not are popping off as eBay disrupters.

stemlord 2y ago

Honestly ebay is currently a notch better than amazon, IME

m463 2y ago

they actually were disrupted -- craigslist

Spooky23 2y ago
Is Craigslist still a thing? In my area, was the vice city classifieds. The hookers are gone, but so much obviously stolen stuff was posted there.
- V99 2y ago
  It is somewhat surprisingly (still) a $500m+ revenue[1] company, with very minimal employees and expenses. They're printing money on house and car listing fees. 1: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/craigslist-revenue-rebounds-traffic-slide-continues-301477660.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/craigslist-revenue-...
- red-iron-pine 2y ago
  still had good successes with CL as far back as 2019 for selling a car, and picking up used servers. that said, general consensus at least where I am in WA and Canada is FB Marketplace is the new CL. which is a same because FB sucks
throwaway290 2y ago
You can't be "disrupted" by something that existed before you...

doublepg23 2y ago

I quite like places like /r/HardwareSwap or the like.

amatecha 2y ago

I just use Craigslist. Yeah, that greatly limits the pool, but eBay is scummy and so is FB.

varsketiz 2y ago

For those in europe - check out vinted.com

globular-toast 2y ago
Vinted seems popular amongst people who never used eBay for buying and selling commodities like clothes. Is it any good for selling higher value specialist stuff like electronics, musical instruments etc?
- seszett 2y ago
  For higher value goods people usually prefer others, I think Backmarket.com is one of the main ones (it's definitely the main option for electronics in France) but there's also Refurbed (know it from Belgium but I think it's German) or Rebuy (know it from the Netherlands but it's German as well) for example. Each of those three claims to be the largest one in some metric.
- JansjoFromIkea 2y ago
  in my experience it's good for buying them (i.e. people not knowing items will go for multiples of what they've listed on ebay)
alias_neo 2y ago
My wife uses Vinted (UK) for selling hers and the kids clothes, usually single-to-double digit values at most (or she uses Oleo to just give it away). It works _fairly_ well from what I've heard, but she does have the occasional issue with people complaining about things and sending them back for obtuse reasons, often hardly worth it because the value was so low, the cost of the shipping there and back eclipsed the value of the item. I wonder at times whether this is their game, hoping people will just tell them not to bother sending it back and they get a refund anyway. As for ebay, I stopped selling anything on there years ago, well over a decade, when someone tried to scam me out of a laptop but failed. If something is valuable enough for me to sell, I sure as shit am not selling it on eBay. More often than not, I give away my valuable tech that I'm done with, because I'd rather get nothing for it, and give it to someone who'll appreciate it than risk being scammed by some scumbag. This way, friends and family get my hand-me-down PCs, laptops, phones, etc for nothing and they're still, by the time I'm done with them far better than something they'd buy with their budgets. When I buy something, I factor its lifetime in my possession into it's cost, I effectively expect £0 value left in it when I'm done or I don't buy it; everybody wins.

rvba 2y ago

Ebay entered polish market and lost to allegro. Then ebay basically quit. As far as I remember ebay hand waved at everything, especially scam. Allegro is getting enshitiffied nowadays since it was bought by VC.