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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.
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.
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.
-JemI 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.
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.
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.
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