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Google vs. eBay/PayPal
That's Unpossible! writes "Google has today made a small announcement on their blog which could shake up the landscape of buying things online : they are going to start allowing certain parties to sell items through Google Base, which people can buy using credit cards linked to their Google Account. According to another blog post, Google already accepts payments in this fashion for Google Video, Google Earth, Google Store, etc. How long until Google Base is directly competing with eBay? The framework is now in place."
Don't forget that eBay already has a HUGE customer-base established, in addition to having some odd categories which I never thought would get any attention but looking at the listings there's quite a few items already :P Not to mention that thanks to goldenpalace's advertisement stunts (ie: buying odd objects off eBay for exorbitent prices) eBay already got a pretty good spotlight on TV. Two things to keep in mind here:
- When buying the shop that has lots of selection will hold lower prices
- As a seller, I'm looking to get maximum exposure when I sell something.
Those two factors, I believe, will give google a pretty good run.
Erik
That the service is going to be a Beta?
the internet? the google name? id love a big competitor to ebay...but its not THAT easy...
Failing to see how ebay is specifically singled out here.
It does give folks another avenue that the ebay 'buy-it-now' provides, but there isn't anything within the google framework that does the auction thing.
I mean, amazon provides the flea market thing as well...
I got screwed over by PayPal.
I sold something on eBay, and opted to print out a UPS label, and pay for the shipping directly through their PayPal system. Started the process and everything was fine, I paid for it, and only needed to print the label out.
Crap! I didn't have the right kind of paper (I wanted to use label material) so I had to go find some in my wife's office.
By the time I got back, my session had timed out. I went back to my original eBay item, and followed the same process. Thinking that it would register as the same shipping/payment. Wrong, it charged me again.
Okay...fine, I'll just cancel the first one.
Can't cancel a shipping payment until UPS receives the electronic statement from PayPal. Okay, I'll check back the next day.
Whoops- can't cancel a shipping payment after 24 hours have passed.
eBay customer service did ONE thing for me when I contacted them about this. They confirmed that I was screwed.
$46 down the drain because their sessions time out too quickly. Fuck them...
No reason to lie.
* Drive to innovate
* Prices closer to the actual cost of the service
* External Innovators can become suppliers as the companies get creative to win market share.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
Considering how unresponsive Paypal is and how much of a maze Ebay tries to be, when you try to contact their customer support, this can only be a good thing.
Maybe this move will force them to stop acting so arrogantly towards us, their customers. And try to provide some actual customer support.
I don't quite get what google base is. From reading the FAQ this is part of google's plan to organize all the worlds information -- but sometime we need a bit more structure than that. I sell my photos on ebay and would love to be able to use a different service as payments to ebay are death by 1,000 cuts. But, are people really going to look for photos of London in the same place they'd try and find recipes and free web hosting?
If Google treats sellers well, they'll be jumping ship from eBay in packs. I'm guessing eBay will lighten up on their sellers and the new equilibrium will be sellers using both services.
Competition is a good thing. More outlets for sellers is more business, also a good thing. I'd use Google before Amazon.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
PayPal has lost so much goodwill, and annoying so many people that frankly I think people would move to a replacement if it was half-decent. Google need to look at what PayPal did right (simplicity, flexible, secure) and what PayPal did wrong (bad policy, account locking, 'random' charge-backs, poor complaints system, in escrow service).
I must admit, however, that having my personal information (name, CC, address) linked to my search queries seems like a profoundly bad idea... Even if that is still technically possible with my ISP I don't think they care enough, or it is in their best interests to do so. Google on the other hand...
in my personal opinion, Ebay has ruined the excitement from real live auctions.. but Google on the other hand.. I have a feeling that one day, Google will be one of the first things all people do in the morning.. like checking your email or the news.. a daily process.. And what if they started doing auctions?? Well just imagine having Google Alerts for auctions.. You could have a message in your Inbox saying, "Hey, some guy just put up a Marlon Brando signed photograph.. Click here to BID now".. and my problem would be solved...
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Does anyone have any idea why Paypal wouldn't let me reset my account by e-mailing them scans of certain documents, requiring me to fax it to them instead? This is one reason why I may be switching to GooglePay - I'm not opening a new e-mail account so I can have a new PayPal account. I didn't forget my PayPal password, I just couldn't remember which of my many passwords it was, and I got locked out before I could guess the right one. Another e-mail account, another PayPal account - this will just get worse. So I'm kissing PayPal goodbye. Hey, I was a good customer for a long time, why wouldn't they just let me open a second account with the same e-mail? Only two accounts, clean history on the first - what's the problem? Also, their call center... Having to say out loud "yes/no" to a machine that somehow fails to get it, instead of the good tried-and-true method of pressing a button - what's the big idea? Couldn't you at least provide both options? Man, that thing hung up on me about five times, and they were all international calls. Also, I don't mind them outsourcing their call center to India, not being an American myself, but only when they can find people with clear enough accents, as far as their average customer is concerned. International call to the USA, then through not-broad-enough-band VoIP to India, then an unfamiliar accent... uncomfortable. (I actually love the Indian accent, but it's hard for me to understand what's being said.)
News for merdes. Shit that matters.
Ask me about my sig.
Google Dollars: trade one-to-one with US currency a la Disney Dollars
Google History: send actual wireless webcams back in time and space to search history
Google Genes: pick your baby's DNA from Google's wide base of genetic data. Google Cyber-Implants: when you're *really* assimilated! Have the power of Google searches on tap in your own brain. Win every trivia game show. Ace every test. View porn just by thinking about it.
eBay is of the main advertisers on Google, they bought over 600,000 keywords last year alone. eBay doesnt have enough static pages for Google to index it properly so this is a nesscessary evil. Without eBay's support of Google, you're taking a loss of about 10M+. That's a pretty big hand to bite.
eBay has traditionally always had competition, and if anything this only helped it grow even larger. Look at Yahoo and Amazon, they couldn't even take it. The fact is that eBay is a differenet company now, than before. It's shifted it's focus from being an "auction" site, to being a marketplace.
Google is a great speculator, and it really has to be with the way it's stock is. A tighter integration of eBay and Google would be an intelligent move, eBay is a proven company, with rising stock for the last 10 years, and continuing to post profits well above expectations. PayPal, like it or not, is still the most reliable and easiest way to pay for things, and I'm sorry, but I've used it for well over 100 transactions and unlike my credit card and bank account, I dont pay an annual fees as a customer, and as a seller, it's a lot cheaper than the cost of getting a merchant account.
The point is this, eBay stands to lose ground in the market it's saturated. Google will have to figure out how to deal with fraud, customer/seller debate and at the same time promote it's product in a non-competitive manner such that it doesn't lose it's main advertiser.
Short of that, if Google decides to lock horns with eBay, I'm pretty sure you'll see eBay take a cut in it's stock to retain and regrow it's own markets. Competition is healthy, but I really doubt that this is anything more than posturing.
On an aside, pick a popular product, Froogle it, most of the vendors I've dealt with have had huge problems, lie or deliberately mislead me on price. Now add 10 million amateurs, wannabes, and fraudsters, and tell me that I can reasonably expect a better experience than eBay.
PayPal and eBay are both very successful venues and means. They've become (at least, in the US) universally known and serve as the Kleenex tissue of online payments and the Styrofoam foam of online buy/sell/auction, respectively.
.99 with $19.99 shipping {nudge, nudge}) and accept payment through PayPal at this point. It would be nice to see an alternative.
I do believe that it would be nice to get some real competition going for these companies - and perhaps Google has the chutzpah to pull it off (not to mention the cash). I, for one, would love to see some new ideas in the auction/sell/pay space. It could also keep the costs of these services relatively in check, as well.
It costs a very large percentage of a sale to sell something on eBay (that is, unless you are a super-seller who can get away with selling an item for
A Passionate Independent Musician
Google has "Do no evil"
pfft, PayPal has nothing, except your money.
Task Mangler
Shut ebay down because of illegitimate auctions? What's next, shutting down the internet because it helps terrorists build weapons?
No, they can not and will not do that. There is too much of a legitimate userbase for ebay, and too many people around the world (because, as you should know, ebay is available in many countries as a subsite tailored to that specific country, featuring auctions by people in those countries) who use it daily.
Besides, if they did shut it down, another would pop up to take it's place, much like the P2P programs/networks.
This does not make for a healthy marketplace.
There is of course competition between sellers, but if ebay raises prices, makes it impossible to find items by completely eliminating categories, or decides that it'd rather heavily weight the market towards those who pay for featured ads, the users have no comeback, other than to not use ebay.
They can't just go to the 2nd highest auction site in many cases, as there effectively isn't one.
Competition would greatly help users.
there's no more legal basis for shutting eBay down because of that than there is shutting down a public school because some of the kids sell drugs in the hallways, or shutting down a Walgreens because the guy in the Santa Claus suit out front isn't really from the Salvation Army.
There are very good reasons for sessions to time out. How long did you take?
The transaction was probably deemed to have completed the moment the "label" was displayed on your screen.
So you should have just printed it out anyway. Print to a file or print to an actual A4. You can then either print to the real label later, or photocopy to the real label depending on whether you do the former or latter.
Or save the page to print it out later (which is why javascript or flash tends to suck for this sort of thing - you may not be able to print the stuff properly).
A payment service that still depends on the credit card infrastructure is only a mild advancement.
As bad as you think the PayPal and EBay fees are, they a dwarfed by the blood credit cards suck out of our economy.
I'm not talking about the interest on unpaid accounts, I'm talking about the merchant fees. Those are the 2 to 6 percent fees that every merchant pays on credit card transactions.
These fees are hidden from the consumer, because the credit card mafia forces retailers to charge the same price for cash as well as credit card transactions. As a result, the retailers raise all prices to cover the cost, and even the person who doesn't have a credit card subsidises the system.
I believe the Fair Trade ministry in Australia rules this illegal there, and forced the listing of the credit card fee on the reciept, along with sales tax. If we adopted that system, the fees charged by credit card companies would be visible, and some people would choose to pay with cash instead -- thus allowing market pressure to do it's work.
If google's system is just a credit card processing web application, I won't be using it.
What is really needed is for someone to re-start PayPal's original business model. There were no fees, the company lived off the interest on money in the accounts. There was no need to provide your real name, it was all keyed to an email address and password.
Starting such a business would require getting over the "chicken and egg" hurdle -- there is no incentive to sign up for it unless there are other people in it to pay and bill. However, given the financial costs of the current system, it has to be done.
One way to do it would be for the small ebay sellers, who have the most to gain from this, to band together and do it themselves. We could form a company or association and each account holder could pay a small fee (such as $20) to get a voting membership or voting share -- if the charter specified that profits were divided equally among all accounts in a yearly dividend, the big sellers would have an incentive to keep costs down so they didn't simply subsidize the small guys.
I think the offering of credit should be done through a system similar to prosper.com. I think the offering of credit should be separated from the transaction system.
I know what you mean about the ethics. Google started out in 1997, when IBM came to them and said "we need a search engine, and fast". Of course, Brin wasn't all that talented, and couldn't write one on his own, so he went to Yahoo and said "hey, let me buy this search engine off of you for $50,000, no one wants the things anyway". Then he turned around and sold it for $100 million.
Years later, we have google bundling all sorts of seperate software together, and constantly raising the price on them because there are no competitors. When some little search engine tries to get it's website registered, Google threatens to cut off ICANNs balls, and boom, that little search website only gets to be used via IP address. The list of abuses is insane.
And when that antitrust lawsuit was filed, who would have thought the DOJ prosecutor would be assassinated with a carbomb?
First off, there are people who spam the system with thousands of items (often directly, or redirecting to Amazon) where they say they're cheaper than everyone else. When you click on it, instead of being "$40", it is actually "$50". Often the first three or four links are spam like this - you can buy the item, but you're told it's one price and then it's another. When you e-mail Froogle help to report this fraud, they are very slow to respond, if they ever respond.
Another thing is Froogle has started this stupid thing where they group items together, so if yous search for say "onetouch ultra strips", you'll get a first response where it says "Compare 47 prices" currently. But when I click on that I see not only OneTouch Ultra strips but Basic Profile strips, and Surestep strips. I click on the 2nd link, "OneTouch SureStep Test Strips, 50 ea" from Drugstore.com, and nowhere in that page does it say Ultra. Now if I put Ultra in my search, and there are dozens of pages which have those 3 words in my search, why am I being redirected to a page that does not have Ultra? This is not a case of spam, this is a case of Google screwing up.
I actually have a store that has Froogle entries, people get redirected to my store on a false thing like this (the ultra to drugstore.com surestep thing), buy it and then want to cancel their credit card sale or want to send it back, because they think I screwed up somehow, when actually it was Froogle and they who screwed up. Froogle should get rid of this stupid, broken new system and put back the old system where when you looked for the word ultra you'd actually wind up with a product or blurb that had the word ultra in it. I'm using "onetouch ultra strips" as an example, but this goes across many products.
These are both major problems, so I won't even go into minor ones like how they're rating system for merchants has problems. The thing about Froogle is both of the problems I mentioned are new - their search system was working fine until they added this new grouping thing which doesn't work and which I'm sure no one likes. Don't put it out there until it works. And spammers were not around, but now they are, and Froogle doesn't deal with them. If they wait a week to deal with them each time, then they will never go away - if they can get a few hundred sales for each week on the fake prices, I'm sure the spammers will just set up a new storefront each week and make a ton of money. They should fix what's broken instead of coming out with whiz-bang new features every few months. Respond to e-mails about people spamming with fake low prices.