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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?"
I had this near where I lived, and one of the traders was selling extremely dodgy zip drives (all broken). Refused to give a refund, and threatened to break my neck (in front of witnesses) if I didn't leave their stall. Suffice to say the buildings owners are granted the license to hold such market by the local Authority, and took much interest in the matter, suffice to say money was returned and stall keepers dealt with.
At the same time, however, Wall Street doesn't look at businesses in terms of natural progression - increase, plateau, decline. WS has an unrealistic expectation that companies will continue to have exponential (at at least unchanged linear) growth, which often causes companies to do things which hurt their long-term viability for the sake of short-term gains.
I liked Larry Page's (Google co-founder) take on it: "A management team distracted by a series of short-term targets is as pointless as a dieter stepping on a scale every half hour." Very nice.
However, there are a lot of things I (and many others like me, I'm sure) won't buy on eBay because of the lack of protection from the company. But I'm not sure that eBay should do this - the resources involved are purely losses; no revenue will be gained directly, only indirectly (hopefully) through increased traffic.
I think a better solution would be for a cottage industry to grow up (similar to Paypal or the escrow services already doing well b/c of eBay) offering transaction insurance or seller/buyer disputes for a reasonable price. If this business did well, eBay would probably purchase it the way it did Paypal.
What really cheeses me off about businesses that benefit from a network effect (like ebay) is that once they have their customers "locked in" there is no incentive for them to improve their business because it is very hard for competitors to challenge them.
On a sidenote, check out New Zealand's version of ebay. The interface is so much cleaner and easier to use. I'm surprised how e-bay can have such a crap, ugly interface and continue to operate as a successful company.
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
Yes they are. If they rented the space to Joe and Joe shafts you, then you can take it up with the owners that let him sell there (assuming they have some kind of policies for sellers). Same with ebay. And ebay has the means to implement more checks anyway. It isn't just a street corner.
I'd also like to add that one way to deal with problem buyers and sellers is to leave bad feedback for them. If they screw you over, LEAVE THEM FEEDBACK. If they get enough bad feedback, nobody will deal with them anymore!
This system should be self-correcting, but the reason it isn't is that people are concerned that if they leave a bad feedback, the other person will retaliate. On my site, I've seen people with 2,500 feedbacks (ALL positive) freak out because one person left them one bad feedback. If nobody is willing to suck it up and leave appropriate feedback for a problem buyer or seller, then they're just passing the buck and letting more people get screwed over.
On my site, I ban people after their feedback ratio drops to a certain point in relation to the number of feedbacks they actually have. If more people would leave the bad feedback when it was deserved, more people would be banned. But since they don't, the system has no way of knowing the person needs to be banned. And without leaving the bad feedback, *I* certainly have no way of knowing that the user is a problem.
Really, if you're not willing to do your part - don't blame the auction site.
What usually happens in most of the "paypal problems" is this:
Person x puts money into paypal (with credit card usually)
Person x then pays person y.
Person y then (for the sake of this example) takes the money out of Paypal (e.g. to their own credit card/bank account) and sends the goods.
For whatever reasons, person x then decides to do a chargeback for the credit card (for example, if they dont get the goods, the goods are faulty or whatever else). Credit card company asks Paypal to pay back money. Paypal then freezes account of person y so that they can take back the money to pay the credit card company. If person y has transfered the money to someone else on paypal, even more accounts may be frozen until things are sorted out. But if (as in the example above), person y has taken the money out of paypal alltogether, thats when paypal will go to bank accounts, credit cards or whatever they can to get the money back from person y.
What we need is a new service similar to Paypal but:
A.backed by an existing bricks and mortar bank (to provide security and confidence that there is real money in a vault somewhere to back up your virtual dollars)
B.complying 100% with banking regulations
C.provides more ways to put money into your "e-account" (i.e. ways that DONT allow the service to take money from your bank account or your credit card without you specificly making a transaction)
D.provides a better way to handle disputes than "freezing the accounts of anyone who might be remotly involved and moving money around without permission"
E.operates worldwide so that everyone can use it (like PayCrud)
F.would not allow other services to touch the account without permission (so you could have a PayCrud account to pay people who only accept payment that way and have it linked to this account so that if something goes wrong, PayCrud cant touch it). Ideally, you would need to specificly authorized a direct debit (be it once off or recurring) before it was valid.
Course, even if such a service was set up, Ebay would probobly "prohibit" people from using it (to force more people to use PayCrud which they own)
It happend to me, though. I sold computers using PayPal. One buyer called up PayPal because the system was damaged during shipping. PayPal told him they could do nothing, so he contacted me and I replaced it immediately for him.
A day later my PayPal account was frozen and all of the money I had in there was stolen by PayPal. That was last fall, and it's still frozen. PayPal will do nothing for me. All because the customer called PayPal first.
-JemYes, you can. And if there are several complaints, action will probably be taken, depending on the venue. In an enclosed mall, you'd better believe that the mall management will have a talk with the vendor, and their lease will not be renewed unless things shape up.
Property owners who have high visibility leases, and depend on high visibility and positive consumer attitude are very careful about keeping the image up. One or two lousy stores can drag down the profits of an entire mall, and force good clients to look for retail space elsewhere. No leasees = no money for landlords. They do care.
Smaller places will be more tolerant as long as the rent checks don't bounce. The bigger the city, the less policing will go on in these "off-main" singles or low volume rentals. The smaller the city, the more careful everybody is. A few really bad trasactions, especially with the wrong people (tip: beware of grandma, she knows everybody in town), can spell doom for a business. If you run a shady business in a small town (say, less than 100,000pop) you can expect to only get leased space from an equally shady landlord, or you'll have to buy your own place.
Then, of course, there's the local licensing authority. You can always lodge a complaint with the board which grants business licneses. Depending on the rules, it may be possible to get a repeat offender banned form doing business in your town.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Well,
I worked in the electronic department at Sears and saw this no questions return policy abused.
People woule buy a video camera, use it for a wedding, then bring it back say they didnt like it. Even got one back that had seawater in it and the lady said it came that way. Manager made me take them both back(and commission was retroactive). Hell, they would take things back thate were a year or two old and give them a percentage of the full price back.
Craftmans tools, life time warranty. People would show up with tools so old and funky just for new ones. I caught one of our old faithful returnees at a flea marker, buying used craftsman stuff, returning it for new and then reselling it for almost new prices.
Sears no questions return policy almost put them out of business. The abuse was rampant.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Or don't find an investor. I'm $25,000 in the hole for my 5+ year old auction site. I don't even know why I do it. Part fun, part education, part excuse to remain a reclusive hermit in my office avoiding the light of the sun and human contact. :)
GothicAuctions.com
I think the largest improvement to the feedback system would be to weight it by amount paid. If someone sells 10 things for $1 each, then a few months later (after the items are no longer in eBay's cache), he looks like a reasonable seller. If he's trying to sell something worth $1000, I might consider buying from him. This person's feedback looks exactly the same as someone who has sold ten $1000 items. Since sellers pay a percentage of the sale price to eBay, this makes it a lot harder to fake good feedback with a lot of small transactions.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I snipe because I'm a cheap bastard and I hate getting into last-minute bid/counterbid wars over rare import games. I know it's a cheesy tactic, but it's not my fault if the current high bidder didn't set an appropriate max bid and I snipe, preventing him from re-bidding.
Others have already said it, set your max bid to the most you'll spend, and then stand back. Or snipe. There aren't too many other choices.
Now, I've only bought 16 things on eBay in my 3 years with them. And my first sale has yet to happen. But so far, I'm pleased with eBay and the sellers I deal with. For the most part, any single item I bid on is less than 50 bucks, and often 25, so if I were to get hosed it wouldn't be the end of the universe.
GTRacer
- I finally have a star!
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
Paypal is very hard on sellers who get a complaint posted against them. The general rule was to lock the account of who ever has a complaint against them with no questions asked. This usually causes trouble to the generally undercapitalized web businesses, who now have a huge cashflow problem. They can't pay their suppliers because the proceeds of all 100 auctions have been locked even though 99 were happy and one is a whiner. Like ebay they are much better than the alternative (sending a check or money order and waiting two weeks for your stuff.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Now, if my CD writer dies, I just go buy another one, and I'm out only a few $10 bills. I don't care (as much) about quality. If my CD writer works for two years, I'm happy.
Also, look at WalMart. They don't usually stock high quality items -- they go for the lowest prices possible (watch out for falling prices). Their whole business model is based on having the lowest price anywhere. This is very appealing to most consumers.
At ebay, you can often find good deals. Sure, the items are used, and since most things made today are made as cheaply as possible, it might fall apart.
I think as long as ebay realizes they are a "low price leader" like WalMart, they will continue to have success.
--
Get rid of everything Micro and Soft: Buy Viagra and/or Linux
A flea market is not retail... it is Re-Sale. the "not for retail" marking can only bind the first sale, not subsequent. And it is possible that he bought the cereal.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
"At least when I buy something in a store and it doesn't go my way I can confront the store owner directly [usually get exchange/refund at that point ;-)]."
How many times have you been ripped off on ebay? Do you actually know anyone who has?
I've been using ebay since August of 1998 and in all that time I have been ripped off a grand total of ZERO times in over 150 transactions.
I have had a few incidents, such as:
* A buyer who bid up an item and then disappeared before sending any money (I resold the item a few days later for almost as much).
* A seller who took my money, then sent an e-mail to let me know that they would not be able to ship the item as expected because the quality did not match their expectations (it was something they had ordered to resell) and they refunded my money promptly (via M.O., this was pre-PayPal).
* A seller who claimed to have shipped a product to me but it never showed up. They then claimed to have shipped it to the wrong address and were reshipping, after another week or so they gave up trying to make up new stories and refunded my money.
* A seller who sold me a high-end digital camcorder that showed up damaged. I notified him via e-mail and he shipped me another one without waiting for me to return the broken one first.
Other than the first one, I've encountered these same kinds of issues shopping in real brick & mortar stores and in dealing with various online companies.
Are there people who get ripped off on ebay? Sure, you betcha. Are there people who get ripped off in real brick & mortar stores? Yep. Online shopping? Yes. From a guy on a street corner? Sure.
If you're going to shop anywhere then you need to be aware of:
* Feedback, either through an obvious display like on ebay or by calling the BBB and asking before dealing with a new company
* Return Policy, especially on anything expensive. A lot of online sellers charge a "restocking fee" which can be as high 15%.
* READ BEFORE YOU BID. I've done business recently with an electronics liquidator on ebay (userID BuyEssex) and they have really high feedback (55,000+) and a lot of negative feedback. A quick review of the negative feedback shows quotes like "Didn't know item was broken, bad deal" yet when you read the auction description they're replying to you'll see things like "we plugged this in, it DOES NOT POWER ON, sold AS-IS" and then people complain because it doesn't work...
* And the number 1 rule, as mentioned by previous posters, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
Feedback is hardly an accurate way to figure out who's good and who's bad. For one thing, a lot of high volume sellers trade between each other for higher feedback (hence why every feedback is the same..."steller buyer, better than expected, A++++").
Furthermore, stuff like this happens:
I just bought a non-working device, it wasn't marked as-is but was missing the proprietary power supply (thus forcing me to build my own, which will take about 10 hours). So I left neutral feedback explaining this caveat emptor situation -- and the seller went back and changed his positive feedback (i had paid the same day) to a negative feedback along with a series of lies claiming I begged for a refund and made unreasonable demands.
This pissed me off. NEUTRAL + $100 != NEGATIVE + Broken Fucking Device. I did nothing wrong, and now I look bad? It pissed me off even more when the guy emailed me, asking if I wanted to drop BOTH feedbacks under ebay's Mutual Retraction program.
Essentially, he chose to mar my reputation in the hopes that the damage would cause me to remove my neutral. After all, one negative out of 20 is worse than a neutral out of 850.
But I'm not going to do it. Ebay isn't my livelihood, and so I don't care that much. But I bet a lot of unsatisfied customers in that 850 did remove their feedback rather than get tagged as a negative buyer.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
They always do a great job of getting the public to buy into the fact that they are just a marketplace, and nothing more.
And they are bastards for it. I got a real steal on an item because the seller had listed it in the wrong place. He then tried to charge me a $15 "handling fee" (not mentioned in his auction) + $20 shipping to make up for the low price. This is a violation of two of eBay's policies (fee avoidance and listing handling charges in your auction), so I of course refused to pay and filed a complaint.
eBay's response? "You can think of us as a classified ad section. You wouldn't complain to the newspaper if you had a dispute with a seller that had advertised there. We're the same way." Followed by, "Oh, by the way, if you don't pay we'll slap you with a NPB alert. Three of those and we'll suspend your account."
It's pure bullshit. They want to have their cake and eat it, too. Either you're a free marketplace or you're not. eBay has established that they are not, as they cancel listings they don't like, they have a whole list of rules, and they slap people that don't play nice. They are nothing like the classified ad section of the newspaper and need to stop pretending that they are, and start enforcing all of their rules equally.
For now, eBay effectively has a license to print money. They don't have to do anything to appease anyone.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig