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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 m
by 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 agoI 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 agoebay seems relatively competitive with aliexpress, sometimes even cheaper. amazon everything seems to cost much more
- lotsofpulp 2y agoAmazon 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 agoI 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)