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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?"
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.
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.
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.
At least not for the expensive purchases, where saving money might really matter.
I bought my wife a present of her favorite bubble bath on e-bay. When it came, it was somebody else's favorite bubble bath. I got in touch with the sender, who apologized profusely and offered to send the right stuff. It never came. And, I never got my money back.
My friend, on the other hand, purchased a guitar on e-bay only to have it be in far worse condition than advertised. He never got his money back, either.
My conclusion is to never spring big bucks for anything on e-bay.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
...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
Sears makes money off of selling products in their catologs.
vs.
Ebay makes money off of people listing items to sell.
The big difference is that Ebay makes money even if the products don't sell, Ebay has both an excellant business model and a huge market share, plus their just plain usefull
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.
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.
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.
Grasshopper, just take a look at this appropriately named site for the answers to your questions. Why does Paypal suck? Click and read.
And the submitter is asking if the business model is sustainable?
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.
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.
-JemThe 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.
The comment the grandparent made about you having to police all your forums if you police one is just a warning. I don't think there are any laws that say such a thing specifically, but I know I have read about cases where some sites have been found liable in civil suits because they engaged in selective enforcement. I think the guy's comment was just to alert you to the fact that you're probably better off not policing things on your site or else you open a potential can of worms. I doubt he's right, but I think the idea behind is comment is worth looking into.
The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank.
-- Scotty.
The New York Times is a publicly traded company which sells advertising and subscriptions. They actually get about twice as much revenue from advertising as they do from subscriptions.
Let's dig into the New York Times finances. I start at www.sec.gov, click on Edgar filings, search for "New York Times", and grab the 10-K, the most recent annual filing.
New York Times 10-K
For the year ended 2003-12-28, their revenus was $3.2 billion. Here's a breakdown:
100% $3.2 billion total revenue
66% $2.1 billion advertising
27% $0.9 billion circulation
07% $0.2 billion other
Advertising revenue is up about 3.5% from 2002, but advertising volume, the number of inches of ads, dropped 3.8% from 2002 to 2003. The Times has been selling fewer ads but charging more for them.
Summary: the primary business line of the New York Times company is selling ads. Internet companies such as eBay are cutting into that ad business. And that's why the New York Times has been trash-talking Google and eBay lately.
>> Is eBay Worse Than Early Sears Catalogs?
As a former out-house owner, I have to say, "Yup". You can't wipe your ass with eBay.
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.
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
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