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Is eBay Worse Than Early Sears Catalogs?
prostoalex writes "The New York Times claims eBay can learn a lot from the early Sears catalogs, which promised unconditional returns (postage paid by Sears) in case there is any dissatisfaction with the product even if the product behaves exactly as described. Apparently eBay is doing something right, but with no buyer protection, no seller authentication, and no desire to participate in seller-buyer conflicts, no return policy, can the business model be sustained?"
After being around this long, I have a hard time believing they're going anywhere soon. Their model can't be that bad.
The closest real life analogy would be the proprietor of an exhibition hall holding a flea market. If you buy something crappy at the flea market from Joe, the building's owners aren't the ones you have a problem with. All they did was rent space and maybe some tables to Joe so he could set up and sell his stuff.
If you can't deal with this, don't shop on ebay.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
Yes.
Ebay is not a retailer. It is a marketplace.
Marketplaces do not need to be perfect, they only need to be better than the alternative.
Ebay is so much better than the real-world alternatives - small ads in newspapers - that people are happy to accept its flaws.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
The changing policies are a sign of the times. Nowadays, what eBay does is considered OK. I find nothing wrong with what they do. I would not want to be at fault for some seller's junk, either. eBay still does what it did when it started - to use the old saying "one man's trash is another man's treasure"
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As someone who runs a large and successful (but non-commercial) auction site myself, I have to ask the following question:
What exactly is ebay supposed to do about it?
Seriously - what can ebay do about problem buyers and sellers? If a buyer or seller flakes out on the other party it's the buyer's word against the seller's. Putting aside the massive amount of man hours that would be needed to mediate disputes, how in the hell can you ever know which person is being honest or if they're both being honest and it was the shipper's fault or someone else's fault? At best, you're just listening to two people's stories and judging which one sounds more believable. That's a pretty poor solution if you ask me.
I mean... I know people complain about ebay and they complain about my site too. But just what exactly do people think we CAN do?! I'm not inside either person's head and I am just a distant third party to the transaction. I give people a forum through which to post, buy and sell with each other. That's all there is to it. I don't know them personally, I dont' process their money and I don't ship their item. How is the auction owner supposed to keep tabs on every aspect of every transaction with all of these parameters that are out of their control?
I'd love an answer, but I'll be fucked if I know.
It always seemed odd to me that Ebay wanted nothing to do with the insurance/escrow and buyer/seller protection processes, and allowed third parties to fill in that gap, while Ebay relies on the auction fees and listing fees, and on their massive volume to make a profit. They definitely should have provided a way from the start for a guarantee, but what are they gonna do for those jets and houses that come up for sale? That's probably what they were thinking -- since they can't really refund the money from super-large purchases, it's not really fair for everyone else. However, they could charge some percentage of the final auction price to provide a "guarantee" of sorts, which would be great.
stuff |
Yes.
It's an auction marketplace, for crying out loud. "eBay" doesn't sell product. Comparison with Sears is apples & mushrooms.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
I've bought plenty of stuff on eBay and sold odds and sods too. Like most people who've done more than a few trades, I've been caught out and I know that some people who've bought from me didn't read the item description properly.
However, how is this eBay's fault? Why should eBay be responsible for my failure to check out the items I'm buying or the buyer I'm buying from? Likewise, why should eBay care if my buyer didn't read the item description?
Nanny bloody society.
Nick.
Look. Ebay *is* working. I don't care if it doesn't work in theory, it *does* and *is* working in practice. Yes, theres fraud, but theres fraud on the highstreet too (where there is also mugging, street robbery and car jacking).
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
...promised unconditional returns (postage paid by Sears) in case there is any dissatisfaction with the product even if the product behaves exactly as described
So it was basically a free, rental-service for all goods? I can't see how that could be abused.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
hah! you mean eBay should be like the FAILED business models of UBid, etc. which carried the cost of storage & transactions itself? No, eBay would not survive; it is a forum for auctions, and the buyer & seller are responsible for their own ethics. If you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
Doesn't anyone read the comments about buyers and sellers? Isn't e-bay self policed by users sort of like...um, what was that site?
E-Bay has this great ability to avoid the fraud scandals that have hit their community. They always do a great job of getting the public to buy into the fact that they are just a marketplace, and nothing more. I am glad to see some changes coming in the AUTO's area though. It really doesn't suprise me, as the cars I'm sure make them a pretty penny in fee's.
All the while, ebay offers something no bricks and motar person to person broker can offer. (Is there even such a business!?)
Feedback.
It's priceless. Any of the larger sellers have loads of honest feeback from purchasers. You can guage your own risk. It a model that works well when you understand it. Not only does it help the buyer, but it motivates the seller knowing that public feedback about the transaction will be left by the buyer.
It's a system that works quite well, regarless of a lack of a bricks and motar parallel.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
I still can't establish if folk really are having trouble with paypal. Sure there are sites filled with complaints, but most of the complaints seem to be folk who had a weak password, saved their password in internet explorer and someone else used it, or small organsiations where they shared the password and someone with access cleaned out the account.
Paypal has made cheap processing of credit cards available to the masses, and an awful lot of folk are using it every day. Are the number of complaints really that high in comparrison to the level of use, or is it just that a high proportion of its users know how to make websites and complain loudly in their blogs?
I always thought of eBay as more of a venue than a store, sometimes it's a con's back alley and sometimes it's a friend's showroom. Either way the blindfold isn't removed when your package arrives, as described. (Or it's removed when you're alone in this metaphorical place and you start to wonder if anyone is still around.) I think people might be asking too much. I've only won about 35 auctions on eBay in four years, and I haven't been ripped off because I try really hard to research everything before bidding.
I mean, it's a bit like expecting the guy who owns the parking lot to pay for your broken flea market merchandise.
I'm surprised how e-bay can have such a crap, ugly interface and continue to operate as a successful company.
Marketing 101 my friend: eBay tries to reproduce a garage sale, therefore their interface is carefully designed to be slightly hard to use, to make people warm and fuzzy when they find what they're looking for, just like in a garage sale.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
In most cases one can get a better price and full CC protection with regular eShops (Hint: froogle.google.com)
I still can't establish if folk really are having trouble with paypal
I have used paypal for about 2 years now. I had one bad eBay transaction where the seller took the payment, then disappeared. Their e-mail address bounced, their number was disconnected, etc... Paypal "investigated" for less than two weeks, then gave me a full refund.
My father's paypal account was hacked by someone in Lithuania, who ordered a Raider's jacket. He was also given a full refund by paypal (turns out he was using a weak password).
I'd say given my experience with paypal that they're far from fraudulous, and will continue to use them. Much like eBay, their service beats the alternative by leaps and bounds.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
"If the seller had less than 100% positive feedback then shame on you for buying from them."
Highly unrealistic. Those with 100% feedback, it is safe to say, will not always have 100% feedback. You can't please everyone all the time!
Karma Schmarma
Not necessarily. There is accountability and responsibility in hosting as well as posting. Recently I had the pleasure of reporting the GNAA guy to his ISP's abuse department because he posted to the comment section of my website. Unlike Slashdot, I will not pay to host that kind of trash -- so I recorded his IP address and contacted his ISP (Keycom/Keysurf) as did another person interested in tracking down this asshole. I don't know if we nailed him, but we both did our part to help police the Internet.
Aside from that, anyone who has a website with a public comment section has the responsibility to remove content which violates the rights of others. In other words if I post hate speech (which is NOT protected "free speech") the owner or administrator of the website has a responsibility to take it down as it serves no possible good and serves to harm innocent parties.
Likewise an auction site should do its best to eliminate fradulent sellers, and to completely disregard PayPal, a service notorious for robbing its users. If you don't believe me, see www.paypalsucks.com and www.paypalsuit.com among others. I personally have lost money because PayPal decided that they needed to freeze my seller account even though there were no chargebacks or other similar activities pending on my account.
If eBay were a responsible business, it would be making a lot of changes. As Microsoft has proved, being the most popular exempts you temporarily from being responsible for your customers' safety. I bet -- and you can totally call me on this -- that Microsoft and eBay and many other online businesses will all go down within weeks or months of each other. Internet consumers (or perhaps credit card companies or banks) are going to demand merchant accountability very soon, and the crooks that run PayPal/eBay and other similarly don't-ask-don't-tell online businesses are going to be in a lot of hot water.
-JemAs in "We don't need no stinkin' rules" libertarians. Anyway, an iteresting test to see if libertarian rules and principles work in practice. I.e., can an unregulated market in effect regulate itself?
Aside from that, anyone who has a website with a public comment section has the responsibility to remove content which violates the rights of others. In other words if I post hate speech (which is NOT protected "free speech") the owner or administrator of the website has a responsibility to take it down as it serves no possible good and serves to harm innocent parties.
How exactly do hateful comments do harm to innocent parties? Sure, it's crap and a waste of bandwidth, but I don't see how the GNAA crap can be equated to, say, beating someone. Or even calling them something in person to their face. Also, the law dictates that if you police the content of your forums in some cases, you have a duty to do it in ALL cases. So if you take on the duty of deleting a few messages based on their content, you are going to be responsible for ALL the messages on it. This may be fine if you get three or four messages a day, but a real busy forum with dozens, hundreds or thousands of posts every day is impossible to do this with.
As for doing your best to eliminate fraudulent sellers... Well, that's easier said than done. To start with, how do you prove that someone is a fraud when you aren't the buyer or seller in the transaction and you had nothing to do with the transfer of the money or the item? If I tell a friend "I know this guy who's selling a car" and I tell this guy who's selling a car "I know a guy wh's looking for a car" and they get together and are unhappy with their transaction later - how am I to know what happened and who is right or wrong or if there was fraud involved or not? I mean.. you're asking ebay to take responsibility for something that they can't possibly prove or disprove. And what happens when you start kicking users who aren't really frauds? Or if someone complains about another user and you kick them only to find out you kicked the wrong one based on information from the other person?
Really.. it is FAR EASIER said than done, man...
That's a Big Difference.
eBay is basically the crap you don't want or need anymore or the stuff you stole that you're trying to get rid of. So we all lower our own expectations accordinginly.
Kinda like TigerDirect.com which is the last refuge for old/used/returned/opened equipment sold as new or something quite like that and you wouldn't really know it's crap until you read the fine print.
Anyway, eBay would be a lot better without PayPal which is really just a polite way to steal from you. They take a system that basically works well; credit card sales, and they insinuate themselves into the middle of each transaction in order to suck a few more dollars out of you. Which truly sucks.
Ah well you people made eBay what it is today. Enjoy.
The reporter entirely fails to grasp the most fundamental truth about eBay: eBay was started because Pierre Omidyar believed existing channels for sales transactions among individuals were entirely lacking. And it grew tremendously because he was absolutely right. The last thing in the world eBay wants to do is mimic existing systems. The point of eBay is to let an evolutionary process work things out. This is how PayPal came into existence, which has turned out to be a whole other solution that was only necessitated and made possible by eBay's choice to not address any but the most basic needs of their constituents; this is the whole point of why eBay works as it does. They don't presume to think they have all the answers as to what will work best, and instead trust the user base to help sort it out.
Also worth noting is that ordering from a catalog a hundred years ago is nothing like these days, with lesser amounts of technical information, practically no standards, and nothing but hand-drawn pictures to go by for illustrations. These days, you can be a lot more certain of what you're buying than you were then, and there is no longer any need to overcome the resistance to ordering sight unseen, as was the case then.
Oh, one other thing. The NYT reporter should have a look at what has become of Sears these days when considering how wise it would be to emulate them.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Paypalsucks.com is a scam as well.
Go to the site. Notice the banner ads? They are for competing services to paypal. PAYPAL'S COMPETITION sponsor the site!!
I feel MUCH safer with Paypal than I do with my bank. eBay depends greatly on good press. The days where "bad press" news items come out about eBay - the stock usually takes a 2-3 point hit. Paypal/ebay have stockholder's to please and analysts to appease with tight security. Is it perfect? No. Is it better than average? A resounding: YES!
Read this article on my website about Paypal and PayPalSucks.com where I corresponded with the webmaster.
What is most ironic - is that scammers use paypalsucks.com as a way to say they aren't a scammer! Saying:
"I don't use Paypal - see this website for why"
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Not everyobody has a "staff" or unlimited funds to hire one.
As for the hate speech.. That's a little harsh. I hate a racist, sexist or homophobe as much as anyone else, but they're certainly free to think and speak the way they do. I would and do remove such speech from my site when I see it (rare) but I do that because it's a personal choice - not because I think they should not be legally allowed to spew the shit they do.
Do you consider comments like "all sex is rape" from Patricia Ireland to be hateful? How about the thinks Farakhan says, the things Jesse Jackson *does* and a lot of similar situations? Or is it only hate if it comes from a white male?
Anyway - I hope you aren't suggesting that just because it harms society (in your opinion) that it shouldn't be allowed anywhere. In fact, I would suggest that it is enlightening to see or hear how hateful and ignorant some people can be. I have had almost no exposure to racism in my life, until I had a twenty year old roommate who constantly said crude and hateful things about black people. After a couple months of this, I kicked her out. It was clearly more important to her to be homeless and *vocally* racist than to keep her mouth shut and have a place to live.
But that was a personal choice. I don't care to be around racists. I don't want family, friends or acquaintances who are racist and I will end a relationship with them based on that behavior. But that is my personal right to not deal with those kind of people. I have a right to not allow you to speak that way in my home or to not be around you when you act that way elsewhere - but nobody has any right to stop you from acting or being that way in general. Nor should they.
Only use people with 100% feedback.
What about people who get ripped off, then leave the seller a negative feedback, to which the seller retaliates and leaves them negative feedback? Then the buyer has a negative feedback on his record, and for what? For complaining about getting ripped off?
Your "100%" threshold seems a little high to me. It discourages people from ruffling feathers and leaving negative feedback in legitimate cases, for fear of tarnishing their own history to anything less than the flawless that buyers like you demand.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
A year or two ago, I could actually find things on ebay that I was looking for. Hell, no matter what it was, I could find it.
Now, any search just turns up a million hits for people who aren't using ebay for what it was good for, but are instead using it to sell ultra-low quality crap they bought in large volumes.
searching is rougher too - I go to look for anyone with weights for sale in upstate NY, and have to go through a billion diet pill and video things just to find the one item that almost is what I was looking for.
Do I buy it? No...the fact that ebay has a rep for scammers and ripoffs now does help make that decision, too. More and more, that's their rep.
I wish there was a way to filter out professional ebayers...
Apples aren't near as easy to peel as oranges...
I have the unfortunate ability to see both sides of an issue, leading to me losing every argument I've ever been in. So here's my take.
All of my transactions on eBay have been efficient and hassle free, even when buying big-ticket items (like a trombone). My dad, however, got burned once and will never use eBay again. So it is in eBay's best interest to make sure that sellers' and buyers' disputes are resolved amicably. And I can't see why they haven't been involved because they (and PayPal) have records of the transactions.
However, I can see that eBay is merely a vector for the transactions, and that they don't have any fault in letting asshats get money out of unsuspecting people. And eBay, being a publicly traded company, has an obligation to its investors to make as much money as possible. Enforcement or arbitration would seriously eat into profits
So a risk/benefit analysis is in order; see if it's more profitable to create a safe environment for both buyers and sellers, or to ignore it and avoid the cost of that service. Or wait for it to get so bad that the government regulates it and everyone ends up paying for their laziness and greed, like a lot of companies.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Ah yes, a large corporation is profiting. Call in the cavalry! They must be partaking in uncouth business practics...!
:p
:)
Or not.
I've been a member of eBay since early 1998. I've seen the company grow beyond anything I'd ever expected... and it changes OFTEN. Even today, the terms and agreements are constantly being rewritten, because eBay seems to be a company that learns from its mistakes.
Does anyone else remember when the feedback forum used to be a free-for-all? Until a few years ago, you didn't even have to have proof of a completed auction before you could leave feedback for someone! That, of course, has been fixed, and better user verification has been implemented, and lots of other things have been fixed... and will surely continue to be fixed.
Some great insight can be found here - http://pages.ebay.com/community/boards/index.html -- You can read about scams that the community is aware of, sometimes you can read about interesting...idiots being scammed... it's a great way to learn how not to be by the example of others.
Remember, the best defense is knowledge. I still boast a 100% feedback rating, and I've bought and sold many high-dollar items. I'll be back here to eat my hat the day I get burned, but as long as I extensively research the sellers I'm buying stuff from (for example, looking at the seller's bidding and selling history, both past and present) I feel it may be a while.
Corruption will exist anywhere if you look hard enough. In a community with millions of users and tens of millions of auctions running at any given time, it won't be hard to find. Such is life.
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Western Union, a popular Sears payment system, was never a wholly owned ripoff subsidiary.
--
make install -not war
Even though eBay is the defacto marketplace for selling personal items online, bad service or lack of accountability will eventually erode its business. No business regardless of size or market share is immune from disatisfied customers, especially in such a liquid communal market as eBay - word travels fast.
It's been my experience, and I can see this in my friends who've used eBay that there's a lifespan to using eBay which pretty much follows the bell curve. The steps are basically:
1. Initial awe and amazement
2. Lots of impulse purchases
3. "Hey, I can make great money selling crap"
4. "Hey, I can make great money beating the system"
5. A couple bad experiences either buying or selling
7. Losing interest in buying
8. No items left to sell/effort too large for profits
9. Disillusionment with high eBay fees
10. One really bad experience buying (less so selling)
11. Beginning to hate eBay's policies
12. Realizing anything you want costs more on eBay
13. Almost never using eBay
It's pretty clear to me where the curve starts plunging downward - whenever there's a need to use eBay or PayPal feedback/protection/or dispute resolution.
Eventually eBay will run out of customers to cycle through and another competitor will snap them up. Likely they'll just target experienced eBayers and provide them with a dispute resolution service that introduces accountability. If eBay wants to fix the curve they should do the same for themselves and keep their users for the long term.
Internet companies such as eBay are cutting into that ad business.
In what way exactly?
Uninformed writes, "No store in their right mind these days or a deep pockets will promise unconditional returns in case there is any dissatisfaction with the product even if the product behaves exactly as described."
Actually, that is NOT true. Most retailers WILL accept returns, usually up to 30 days after purchase, no questions asked. (Look at -- and keep! -- your receipt next time you go shopping.)
Why? Quite simple. They keep you as a customer.
The vast majority of customers are honest, and the stores know this. They accept the fact that there are always going to be people who abuse the system, and they also know that the abusers actually LOVE to play the game. The smart retailer tells the clerks to smile and give the customer their money back, so the abusive customer can't play the game.
There ARE some exceptions to this. Pretty much every store that sells big-screen TVs suspends the 30-day money-back guarantee a month before Super Bowl Sunday, for the obvious reason...