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

Moving time!

[DaHat]

Screw all of this talk about moving to Canada or Europe... sounds like China is now the place to live... except for that whole... oppression of unfavorable speech and blocking of websites.

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.

Re:Moving time!

[operagost]

Being allowed to move millions of people to build a dam or host an Olympics without the consent of the governed does wonders for the GDP!

The 21st century will belong to China.

[CyricZ]

Indeed, countries like China and India will be where the 21st century will take place.

But in the big picture, it is just the typical East-West reversal. Remember, in centuries past China and India were the major world civilizations. The Europe of today is much like the China of the 1200s. And the China of tomorrow will be much like the Europe of today.

The East was on top for a while, and then various events lead to the West becoming more prosperous. But we see the tide turning one again, this time in favour of the East. In three or four centuries it will no doubt switch back towards the West's favour, and soon enough there'll be yet another switch.

That's great

[Anonymous Coward]

because eBay just raised fees for US sellers again.

Re:That's great

[CyricZ]

And, like it or not, the Chinese market dwarfs the American market. Remember, that holds true even today, without the full Chinese market being completely realized and integrated. Once the Chinese market really gets going, coupled with that of India and other Asian nations, traditional markets will look quite irrelevant.

Even with significant wealth, a 300 million body US market is still quite insignificant when compared to the 2 billion person Indian and Chinese markets.

EBay is quite lucky to be able to tap into such fantastic financial resources so early on. If they can maintain a foothold in those markets, they will become extremely prosperous.

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:Where is the online auction competition in NA?

[Vellmont]

Does anyone know of any other good online auctions?


Pretty much they all suck, with Yahoo sucking the least. The problem is really a chicken and egg problem. To attract buyers you need a lot of items available. But to attract sellers you need a lot of buyers. With both those groups settled on ebay to do auctions it's very hard for another auctioneer to get a foothold, even with cheap or free listing fees. I've looked at yahoo auctions before in the hopes I'd get a better deal because of the smaller amount of buyers, but I can almost never find what I'm looking for on yahoo auctions. Because of this I essentially forget that Yahoo even does auctions.

The real competitors to ebay is still people selling things locally and privately. Craigslist is probbably the biggest competitor to ebay because you can get things the same day, there's no fees to anyone, and there's no shipping as it's all designed for a local city.

Fortunately for EBay

[ztucker]

In an unrelated move, the Ebay subsidiary PayPal tripled its "seller protection fees" for as yet undisclosed reasons

Ebay's Failure

[Bellum Aeternus]

My time in China showed me that Ebay is failing, not because of competetive pricing, or a poor cost model but because their major competetor is home grown and plays to the Chinese cultural prefrences. Ebay has been hesitant to branch their code base to make Ebay-China more Chinese friendly -- and therefore no cost cutting measure is going to save Ebay in China. Just look at how wonderful Ebay did in Japan. http://news.com.com/2100-1017-845099.html It's the cuture stupids , it's the culture!

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.