eBay Scraps Transaction Fees in China

PlayCleverFully writes "The US online auction service eBay scrapped all sellers' transaction fees in China, in an effort to compete with local competitors offering free services, including Yahoo-invested Alibaba.com. The online auctioneer announced the changes on its China auction website, saying transaction fees would be waived, but small fees would continue to be charged for listing products on the site's webspace and for "feature" products. eBay's China unit, Eachnet, would also require all sellers to provide authorized online payment mechanisms to improve its credit environment, including PayPal and other escrow services, the announcement said. The move means that sellers won't get paid until the buyers receive and are satisfied with the products, it said."

Comments

It's all about a bigger marketplace

[morcheeba]

Yahoo Auctions beat Ebay to the Japanese market by only 5 months, and it has dominated there.

Where is the online auction competition in NA?

[qualico]

So what eBay is saying is now that we own the North American market, we'll keep raising the fees.

Does anyone know of any other good online auctions?
Maybe its time we start to take our money to the competition so we can get a break like the Chinese.

Re:Moving time!

[CyricZ]

You realize that this could be the first of numerous future requests, right? And there's nothing stopping the future requests from being far more probing.

With the first request they:
CAN see how frequently some query terms occurred.
CANNOT look up an IP and see what they queried
CANNOT look for users who queried for both TERM A and TERM B.

With the second request they:
CAN see how frequently some query terms occurred.
CAN look up an IP and see what they queried
CANNOT look for users who queried for both TERM A and TERM B.

And with the third request they:
CAN see how frequently some query terms occurred.
CAN look up an IP and see what they queried
CAN look for users who queried for both TERM A and TERM B.

At that point censorship and persecution is far too close.

Capitalism works well at first

[YearOfTheDragon]

Capitalism works - for the Chinese.

Capitalism must be cared for. You must care that there is enought competition. You must divide monopolies. Capitalism need a lot of work.

It's a system that works, but as any other system, when some people gets too much power the system is corrupted and stops to work.

In China capitalism is making the government to share its power, so it's working great. In U.S.A. the government is concentrating power in itself and in the big companyes, so capitalism works no more.

It isn't only a matter of what system you chose, but of whom is using it and how.

Just my 0.02c

[squoozer]

I'm pretty new to the whole eBay thing (about a month) but I have to say as a new comer I am stunned by the complexity and cost of it. The fees are nothing short of scandalous and the number of things that you have got to get your head round before being able to sell well.... The whole auction thing is dead in most markets as it is dominated by businesses setting start prices which are what they want for an item (erm, I'm guilty of that too but that's not the point). To top it all the site is slow and generally confusing. I'm surprised no one has taken the market away from eBay.