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How Amazon and Google are taking eBay's Business
prostoalex writes "Wall Street Journal says many online sellers who started on eBay are now going solo, being helped out by 'name-your-own-price' Amazon Marketplace and Google's and Yahoo's advertising programs, which allow small businesses to direct their ads to search engine users interested in specific items. The article discusses several companies where online sellers, being disappointed with eBay's falling profit margins, increasing fees, disruptions coming from PayPal account freezes and high fraud rate, are leaving eBay. Many start with setting up their own sites, continuing to do business on eBay, but then switching to solo e-commerce entirely after looking at profit margins."
controls keyword spamming and curtails the megasellers
So people selling things are choosing ways that make them the most profit?
Bizzare.
air and light and time and space
network. I know other outlets aren't immune to frauds, but ebay is fucking rediculous. Whenever I am looking for anything substantial(for instance iBook, xbox etc) I have to sort by highest price first. Why? Because an overwhelming majority of the auctions are for "Information on how to get a free iBook!" or "iBook for 40 dollars". Ebay doesn't have to legally police it's network for those types of fraud, but I think their lax policies are going to harm them.
Not to mention the huge number of grey market items on eBay. I don't want to buy anime off of there because a majority of the DVDs are Chinese bootlegs. I would rather download them than buy the bootlegs....
Monstar L
I would be interested in what percentage of ebay auctions are from full-time sellers. It seems that these folks probably drive a sizable percentage of Ebay's revenue. Losing them could hurt the bottom line of the company very badly.
Amazon and Google still have a ways to go to become all that popular with full time sellers. There are a ton of guides for becoming a full time Ebay seller. But I find very few for Amazon and Google.
With the talent behind Google, and the online prescence of Amazon, there is no doubt they can eventually overtake Ebay as the popular option for the masses. Going to an online store to purchase or sell items, require more than simply turning on a PC running Windows. The market is already somewhat ahead of the game in their knowledge and willingness to try something new. As such, they are that much more open to new options, should they be saturated with those options when it comes to marketing.
"A war over religion is like fighting over who has the best imaginary friend."
eBay and Paypal rank way up there as the most evil companies on the net. I have a friend who sells via eBay, and from what he's been telling me, eBay has been making it harder and harder to get refunds on failed auctions all the while increasing their fees.
As for Paypal, it's practically a crook's paradise (eBay is too actually). They force you to enter in your checking information if you wish to perform any transactions over a few bucks (forget the exact $). Once you've done this you are completely at their mercy to screw you over however they'd like.
With credit cards, you always have the option of a chargeback. Once you have linked your banking info to Paypal, good luck! Now they get all the say as to when/if they will give you credit back if something goes wrong. If a seller sends you a box of bricks, screw you.
Here's a personal experience I've had with Paypal. A while back I posted an ad to sell some stuff. Someone bought them and paid via a "VERIFIED" Paypal account. The buyer came by my house and picked them up in person. Everything looked legit until Paypal reversed the transaction saying the "verified" account was stolen. I emailed Paypal and all I got was one runaround after another. In fact I started getting the same replies over and over again!
My problem is, either Paypal is an escrow or they are not. If they're not, they have no right to refund the money. If they are, they have an obligation to re-imburse me for my losses. However, they took the coward's way out, refunding the money to the user to avoid being sued and losing in court for failing to protect their user accounts, and screwing me in the process saying that only orders sent by mail are protected under their TOS.
I really hope eBay and Paypal die off in really horrible deaths.
eTrade SUCKS
Well, if your reselling (most case you are) you still have to go by MAP [Minimum Advertised Price]. Maybe its the services ^_^ hrmm...
... and that's the problem. I sold my motorbike on Ebay when I emigrated to the US last year, and was so disgusted with the service, I even wrote a journal entry about it.
Ebay doesn't care if the seller has problems as long as the percentage cut is in Ebay's bank account. They do little-to-nothing to make the seller's life easy, in fact it's a very customer-unfocused setup.
As long as Ebay keep their current modus operandi, I'll not be using them again, and they have to run out of sellers eventually...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
An interesting project which would require a very large operation would be to start keeping track of every completed eBay auction. With such a database, you could search by keywords or some other query to figure out the historical value of items, the best time to sell them (graphing calculators in August when school starts), or to analyze other trends. This could be valuable both to buyers and sellers.
The current eBay robots.txt includes the text
# eBay may permit automated access to
# access certain eBay pages but soley for the limited purpose of
# including content in publicly available search engines.
So Google could get away with doing such indexing - which would be of very high value to many people, since eBay makes old auctions inaccessible after a certain period - at least under the current robots.txt.
I'm aware of the legal and technical problems that might arise. (Recall the 2000 Bidder's Edge lawsuit where an online auction aggregator was prevented by eBay from using their data.) You'd need a large company and a lot of machines with different IP addresses to quietly check every auction, and I can think of at least twelve different ways such a database of prices, bids, times, durations, titles, and descriptions could be important.
So why hasn't anyone done it?
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Example:
1) Post something on their sites
2) Advertise the hell out of your own website on each post
3) Browsers become buyers and watch the shoppers from all of the above auction/sales sites come to you next time and buy direct
You can also ship more advertisements for your own website with catchy phrases like. Buy direct next time at [Your URL here] etc.
Generation Trance: What generation are you?
People think they can run an e-commerce shop and not do any technology or even integration. They can run the whole thing via ebay. The problem is is that there's a lot of margin getting eaten up by fees to service providers and the services aren't flexible. That, and anything that is really really easy to run is going to be subject to a lot of competition very soon and declining margins, like ebay drop shipping.
If you're on the internet you're a technology company. The same way that if you're a retail store you're to some extent in the storefront design, logistics, human resources and interior design business. At least in retail you can get into a franchise where someone has figured all this stuff out for you. With technology though there isn't a really good reason to franchise because there isn't the limited trade area issue.
I'm not aware of a site called "Amazonspaymentsystemsucks.com," nor have I heard any horror stories about Amazon stiffing customers.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Huh? You ship the item, right? Put your promotional material in the package. "Visit our site. 15% off your next order. Same day shipping." Amazon doesn't let you do that?
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
> Paypal wants to be treated like a real financial institution, but doesn't act like one.
Slight modification: Paypal wants the respect that real financial institutions command, but without the very real legal liabilities that go along with it.
Cheers,
-l
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