Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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
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