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?"

Comments

eBay is not a catalog nor a retail outlet.

[bryanp]

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.

Re:eBay is not a catalog nor a retail outlet.

[Amiga Lover]

What's the problem with sniping? You're given X amount of time to put in a maximum bid you'll pay. If someone else wants to pay more, they'll pay more be it by sniping or not.

Say you want to buy a monitor. what's the most you'd pay for it? let's say $100. If someone snipes you at $101 that's not unfair. You didn't want to pay over $100.

If someone at the last minute pushes the bid up from $50 to $95, and you still have $100 as your top bid, it's not like they're suddenly stealing $45 from you. You wanted to pay $100, you won it for less.

The only problem I see is people addicted to the dramatics of bidding, by pushing up the price 50c at a time. If that game is part of the fun then... uhhh I guess it's what works for you, personally I use eBay to just buy things.

Bid your max bid first and leave it. everything is fair afterwards.

Re:eBay is not a catalog nor a retail outlet.

[Ulven]

So if you only want to pay $50, only bid $50.

If someone else comes along at the end of the auction, sees the item and is prepared to pay $95, then you have to top that or lose the item.

It's the way it works. Just because something has been at $50 so far doesn't mean it'll sell for that.

If you think it's worth $50, then bid $50. If you think it's woth $50, but bid $100, and then someone else bids $95, you weren't 'trapped' into paying $95, you said you'd pay upto $100. You got it for less, so what's the fuss?

Re:eBay is not a catalog nor a retail outlet.

[bstone]

suffice to say money was returned and stall keepers dealt with.

Pretty much like eBay deals with sellers who act irresponsibly.

Actually, with feedback and eBay policing both the buyers and sellers, it's a whole lot better buying on eBay than at a flea market, but the general business model is similar.

I've been burned a couple of times on eBay, and both of those sellers are now banned. It's a risk that I'm willing to take because I've saved tons of $$$$ and been able to easily buy products that are difficult to find elsewhere.

New oven ... got one with a small scratch in the corner that I can hardly see ... $600 less than buying it locally. New cook top ... customer return for a small scratch in the glass (like I'm not going to scratch it the first time I use it) ... $500 savings. Items like this are way too difficult to find without the marketplace that eBay provides.

And ... people have been happy with my junk, too.

Trying to compare the service that eBay provides with that of a retailer like Sears is disingenuous. On eBay, I'm dealing with the actual seller, and eBay does provide lots of help if there is a problem.

Can the business model be sustained?

[ites]

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.

What can they do about it?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What can they do about it?

[theLOUDroom]

What exactly is ebay supposed to do about it?

Seriously - what can ebay do about problem buyers and sellers?

Well, for starters they could offer an escrow service.

Seriously, I am amazed that they don't. When I first heard about ebay and its popularity I thought:
"Hmmm, they must have some sort of escrow service set up.....there's no way people would be stupid enough to send money to a random, semi-anonymous person on the internet and HOPE they get somthing back."
Turns out I was wrong and both ebay and paypal prove it.
On any given day you can go on ebay and find more fraudulent auctions than you can shake a stick at, and paypal, being expempt from banking regulations is a VERY risky place to keep or transfer money. By not being a bank they are exempt from rules about how much cash they must keep on hand to cover the "balances" in their accounts, making them the perfect target for a bank run the minute there is significant doubt about their stability.

If you want to be better than ebay, here's what you need to do:

1. Screen ALL autions and actually enforce your rules. At a minimum, there should be a clearly labeled button for "Report this aution to an administrator" and when I press it, someone should actually do something.
2. Offer an optional escrow service that the buyer pays for, and the seller CANNOT opt out of.
3. Provide real support in the event of a problem

I haven't touched on #1 before, but it's really important. Try going on ebay right now and searching for "RX-7" (the car I own). See all the keyword spamming that goes on? That makes it a real bitch for me to try and find ACTUAL PARTS FOR AN RX-7. Combine that with the lack of protection when I actually DO find something, and I just say "fuck it, I'll get my stuff elsewhere". So far, I have yet to buy a single thing off ebay.

What I would like to see, is a human moderated electronic aution site, with a built-in escrow service.
Yes, that would cost more, but I'd be willing to pay. Especially for an escrow service.
Here's how you do the escrow service:
There is a box I can check when I bid. When I check this box, you charge me an extra $5 for the service. If something goes wrong, you get an ACTUAL HUMAN involved and resolve things quickly.

I may be missing something, but...

[quarkoid]

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.

Hilarious

[gowen]

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).

Re:Hilarious

[Wister285]

I completely agree. Ebay has a nearly perfect business model since all they have to do is make sure that their website is working and has enough bandwidth at all times. Although they do provide a buyer with some protection, PayPal helps out even more. The rest is left up to the consumer, who usually needs to practice commonsense anyway.

Ebay's low risk, low captial method got it to where it is today. Slashdot's overly cynical nature is unnecessay. Ebay works and its great.

Incorruptible

[CleverNickedName]

...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.

business reality

[iggymanz]

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.

I dunno.

[Gary Yogurt]

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.

Re:Not if someone better comes along

[I8TheWorm]

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.

Typical: reporter misses the point

[Shoten]

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.

Re:no more e-bay for me

[Kombat]

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.

Typical issue for me...

[Paulrothrock]

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.