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EBay Sellers Seek Management Change
BlueCup writes to tell us that even though some seem willing to let eBay's Chief Executive Meg Whitman slide on recent problems, many eBay sellers are calling for a change. From the article: "'EBay's core (auction) performance is suffering tremendously,' says Steve Grossberg, a longtime videogame seller on eBay. He says he now lists an item four times on average in order to sell it, up from two listings two years ago. Adds Andy Mowery, an eBay seller of home and garden gear: 'It is time for new leadership at eBay.'"
Ebay's management is in serious need of a kick in the pants. More for customer service, support, and the way it deals with fraud (which is all part of the same thing really).
Just because it's more difficult to sell on Ebay does NOT mean the problem is management, it means there's more traffic (buyers and sellers), so you have more competition. It may take twice as long to sell a game as 2 years ago, but I'm willing to bet there's well more than twice as many video games on Ebay now, as there were then.
--Not to be worried, Pitr fix.
They are going to have to get rid of fraudelent auctions. The last time I bought anything off ebay was a year ago, and the only reason I did that is because it was an uncommon item(English-Chinese electronic dictionary) that is hard to find elsewhere. If I search for anything that isn't eclectic, at least half of the items are fraud, if not more. I have to do a lot of slogging through(usually by sorting by highest price first and then trying to find the items I want) just to get to legit auctions. No, I don't want a "free xbox 360, powerbook and more!!!!!!!!!!" which just turns into a bid for "information that is 110% legit on how to find free items online!". I end up having to do a lot of work just to find the item I want. If you can't be bothered to get rid of fraudelent auctions, then I can't be bothered to bid.
Monstar L
Ebay has been around long enough that everyone knows about it, both buyers and would-be sellers.
Competition is fierce between sellers, especially any twits who bought a 'how to make money on Ebay kit' and are trying to do it full time- and buyers will jump sellers to save a buck or two- there is absolutely no loyalty on ebay.
I'm an occasional seller and very occasional buyer on ebay, and I like to be sure to be able to sell my stuff. Since I'm not trying to turn a profit on new items, just unload stuff I have and don't need for a few bucks I can be pretty cheap.
What do I do?
Put the starting bid waay under the going price (but at a price I'm willing to sell it at), and the buyout slightly under the going rate for an item. Usually it gets bid up close to the buyout/going rate, I sell my item, and everyone is happy.
I cannot imagine trying to run a normal business this way.
That being said, Ebay is soaking their sellers for more fees lately and this cut in profit margins isn't helping them at all.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
What ebay needs is for people to stop selling stuff on it as if it was their own store. I go to ebay to pick up a bargain not to pay RRP for something I could get from the store for the same price. ebay needs to get back to what it used to be, a place to pick up rare items for a premium or second hand items for cheap.
Try searching for mobile phones on ebay, it's become a joke. There are people trying to sell new phones with plans included. Why bother, there is a shop near by that can do that and not charge me for postage.
Don't even get me started on items that are clearly in the wrong category. I don't want to sift through 18 pages of leather cases for PDA's before I find the cheapest listed actual PDA.
I have the feeling that it's not her the problem, the reason for that is that it was her who scaled eBay from a company of 30 lazy workers to the eBay we know today with its 200 million eBayers. I don't know the problem very well but I'm sure that one could hardly find a replacement for her as she knows and has managed eBay so well so far, and fix the problem at the same time.
You just got troll'd!
I have been selling on ebay for 9 years now, since the beginning. Anyhow, what I see as the problem with ebay is this: eBay created, and then refused to truly govern this glut of "power sellers" who, more often than not, majorily illustrate exactly what is wrong with eBay.
Shoppers are tired of trying to buy, oh say a used or NOS laptop hard drive, only to be bludgeoned with auctions that consist of nothing but shipping overcharges after shipping overcharges after scams and more scams. Just trying to find a working computer or computer part sold by an average honest Joe at a decent price is nearly impossible. It's nothing but NYC camera store-style scam power sellers (now with used items too), if you know what I mean, and ebay turns the other cheek.
In fact, ebay continues to turn the other cheek even though they are losing money in these fee-circumventing, high-shipping auctions. It's strange. I guess they only care about insertion fees, and care little about maintaining happy buyers.
However, the system falls apart without the buyers, so therein lies the problem that I see.
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
I find more and more sellers are phony. They can even have a high "positive" rating and they burn you. There are so many bogus electronic sales its amazing. Laptop auctions come with emails inviting people to make end around offer. A Google search shows email addy on long list of phonies kept by private groups concerned with ebay fraud. You can find lots of interesting items with no bidders even in the last minutes. Why? Because people know they are phony. I got burned twice on ebay for cheap DVD's for sale by sellers with high positive ratings. Then I get notices from ebay warning me about seller. Oh it seems people, can hack/fake accounts. Haha too late for me. Getting burned gets almost no action from ebay, Paypal etc. Ebay went from interesting auction to flea market full of high prices, phony hustlers and junk. A friend bought big collection of all Buffy DVD sets. They were meant to be in excellent condtion. Then big box of broken plastic arrives and seller listing is gone. Lots of people figured out the deal and ebay. Amazon is much better. "How Amazon and Google are taking eBay's Business" http://slashdot.org/articles/05/06/22/2154201.shtm l
One of the popular refrains from eBay's management is that they don't have the resources needed to police auctions on a proactive basis. They can only respond to complaints from users.
From personal experience, it takes eBay anywhere from three to eight hours to kill a series of bogus scripted auction postings created with a phished account. That's more than enough time for the phisher to reel in multiple victims, all the while making the whole eBay marketplace look like a Romanian gypsy fair.
eBay needs to do two things to combat fraud. First, add a prominent, one-click "Report this auction" button to all listings. Right now the report link is buried at the bottom of the page. It leads you through the typical maze of customer-support options before dropping you at a page where you have to click yet another link to bring the auction to eBay's attention.
Second, when a user clicks "Report this auction," the notification message it creates should be transmitted, simultaneously, to several participants in a large network of trusted volunteers. These users would be recruited based on factors such as experience, feedback, and a history of accurate fraud reports. They would not have the ability to terminate auctions unilaterally -- they wouldn't be quite that "trusted" -- but they would have the ability to vet the violation report for legitimacy and forward it via a private channel to eBay, where an employee would be able to terminate the offending user's auctions immediately without a lot of additional reviewing overhead.
Formalizing the concept of community policing is the only way I can see for eBay to maintain credibility, in light of the undiminished volume of idiots who keep turning their accounts over to phishers on a daily basis. I agree with eBay management when they claim they can't police the site on their own. It's time they harnessed some of the outrage that's out there in the community, and put it to good use.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
A+++++ Good first poster, highly recommended.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
He says the company is taking "aggressive steps," such as a fee increase for store listings to "reinvigorate" the auction marketplace.
Increasing fees to the sellers results in sellers charging more for shipping, on which eBay does not charge fees, in order to recoup the costs. If a seller is charged a couple dollars in listing and selling fees on a low-priced item, why bother lisisting? eBay has lost its reputation as being a place for buyers to find bargain and sellers to get the highest price. Bargains are few and far between these days. No longer is it feesible to buy a book or new keyboard on eBay when the fees charged are so high that buyers are deterred due to the "shipping" fees and sellers are hesitant to list without a near guarantee of a sale.
Lower the fees and the market will have a new breath of life. Better to make $1 in fees on 10 auctions than to make $1.50 on five.
Also, acquiring Paypal hurt eBay in a way. They outright forbid vertain other payment services, such as Google's payment system, and by trying to force payment down a certain channel (for which they make more in fees), eBay is gaining more of a feel of someone standing over us beating us into submission rather than a comfortable play to spend time browsing and breathing easy and having options.
Not to mention both buyers AND sellers are being ripped off left and right these days and eBay seems to lack the inclination to do anything about it. If they're making their fees either way, why not let it continue?
It's a girl!
I use craigslist now. You don't have to register your fake details and remember useless passwords, you can sell locally and get cash instantly, usually within a day. Unless you're selling obscure shit, it's the way to go. AND IT'S FREE, GODDAMNIT!! Just like the good old days of the Internet. When I was a boy, the internet was a free place and playboy.com had free porn... and the girls had nice titties and they were all respectable looking. But I digress. USE CRAIGSLIST! You'd be surprised how many people want to buy your totally weird shit ... and how many of those nutty people live in your city. Doesn't work well if you live in the middle of nowhere, though, I guess.. :-(
Obviously seller growth has outpaced buyer growth. I've seen that in some items I sell as well.
Furthermore there are other alternatives to eBay now, especially for video games. When they guy started on eBay I'll bet a lot of people were not picking up used games at the EB, since they didn't stock them as they do today. eBay made that happen.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I second some of the more well thought out community policing ideas brought up here. Ebay cannot employ paid staff to adequately monitor the zillions of auctions that get listed every day, that does not compute as any kind of business plan. But overseeing an army of community volunteers...that's the way to go, as long as abuse can be curtailed. (people falsely reporting their competitors) some of the suggestions above seemed to mitigate that problem.
I've been selling on Ebay since almost the beginning - but I haven't bought anything ordinary in a long time for precisely the reasons people have mentioned here. The one time I tried to buy a piece of electronics, it turned out to be stolen. (A laptop, I returned it to the rightful owners) The lesson I learned was never buy any sort of portable electronics or anything that's easily fenced, because that's where it ends up.
I've had great success as a seller of unique items. The most interesting and high value was a 1963 Corvette Stingray Convertible. We got a far, far higher price than what locals were offering us. Ebay is almost always a better option than anything else.
On Ebay, the entire world of internet connected citizens really IS your marketplace, if you have anything of value to sell. this is the best thing Ebay has going for it right now. Everybody checks ebay by default to see if the thing they want is on there, even if they don't plan on initially buying from there, just price shopping. Many change their mind along the way.
My selling tips are:
* Sell something unique or at least semi-rare
* Be completely honest and up front about everything, and you will have perfect feedback, unless you run into a total nutjob buyer. (I've had some close calls, so now I put more disclaimers on the auctions about things like "customs duties and tariffs are not included" etc.) Include LOTS of documentation for something that could be suspected of being stolen.
* Go way out of your way to make people happy after the auction is complete. A good business transaction is a voluntary transaction between two people who are both satisfied with the outcome. If they get the item and it's damaged, fixed the situation as quickly as possible.
* Start your bidding at $1 (or $100 for high priced items) with no reserve, no matter what the item is. If you don't believe you'll get market value or what you want from the item then you should ask yourself if you should really be putting it on ebay, or if you really want to let go of it just yet. Do your homework and research completed auctions. Low start bids drive large numbers of bidders, which will increase the chances your item will become a 'hot item' and will get people to notice it in general. The Corvette started at $100 no reserve and ended at $27,000.
* make liberal use of the bold/highlight features for any item that costs over $100. it's the cost of advertising / doing business on ebay...no big deal. If your margins are that bad, don't sell on ebay. If you don't like their fees, don't sell on ebay. They are a lot cheaper than running a brick and mortar store or selling on consignment.
* your excellent feedback will increase bidding confidence in your buyers, it works. Work hard to keep it perfect. Don't sell anything you yourself wouldn't buy at the price you are expecting for it. BE HONEST.
* despite accusations to the contrary, Ebay is still a SELLER'S MARKET. The audience you reach by listing your item on there is INSANE. Now that everybody knows that, the competition for commodity items is also INSANE. I see nothing unpredictable about their current situation - the market is finally saturated with sellers to meet the demand of the buyers. Natural forces balancing out. It was very skewed in the beginning, almost comical. Unfortunately now the sellers include all of the scum of the earth, particularly folks who make a steady living scamming people. Buyer beware. Ebay needs to take steps to keep up with this situation, or th
Google Froogle anyone? You can list there for free. As customer I in fact use it quite often.
Sticking exclusively with eBay was guarantied to screw you someday. It seems that day is nearing. And as customer I find it pretty stupid for vendor being eBay-only anyway. Now PayPal have eased most of the problems, but I just feel myself uncomfortable being so much in eBay's land.
Get real people. eBay provided you with the "shelfs". But it still owns the shelfs and can do pretty much anything with the shelfs. (Just like ordinary public market.) eBay after all has to make money too. With many crackers' attacks, tightened security and audit, eBay I expect has pretty high operational costs. What I'm getting too: you have to pay for better security higher price.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Judging from their online town-hall type meetings, most of the vendors are complaining because EBay is reducing the number of storefront advertisements and paid placements shown when people search. Of course, as a potential buyer I'm really not interested in the store's retail products. The reason I'm shopping on EBay is because I want to get used stuff dirt cheap. If I wanted retail I'd go to the mall...
Don't listen to parent! Parent has bad ratings and doesn't pay for auctions! Seller beware!
Grandparent is A+++++ first poster. Will recommend to all. Will read grandparent's post again
You know you have a problem when you're self-employed and you seek a management change.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As a hobby, I sell some selfmade software through my website. On EBay, people are selling my software on compilation CD's (they even advertise it as such) and I have tried contacting EBay on this multiple times, ranging from simple e-mail complaints to registering as a vendor and followinging the official complaint channels explicitely setup by EBay for this very purpose. Not ONCE have I even so much as had a reply, even though I included all kinds of clear evidence and not ONCE did they ever take any action.
As long as EBay keeps willingly and knowingly cooperating with these fraudulent sellers, EBay can count on my "F**k y**!" anytime. If I could help destroy EBay, I would.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I prefer reading the negative feedback of sellers on ebay such as:-
// PAYPAL DISPUTE, DISGUSTI :For the fifth time, you are in the USA, it takes around a week for the post
WON AUCTION, SELLER NEVER COMMUNIC> NO ITEM RECIEVED
Reply by
item not received
Reply by: We are funny like that, we dont send things out until they have been paid for
I AM WAITING THIS SCALE 30 DAYS! WHEN I GET IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Reply by: When you pay for it!, WITHOUT FRAUDULENT FUNDS.
wrong lead (got plug to socket & 2m), AND slow delivery (11 days!)
Reply And so you thought you would rather neg than ask for a replacement???????
The Product is awful, shaved one side and it looked the same as non-shaved side!
Reply by : Perhaps you would get better results if you removed the safety cover?
Follow-up by ratboyab: o hilarious! perhaps you'd get better results if youd sell better items!
Paid instantly with PayPal, 9 days later but no goods.
Reply by: Its actually 5 working days, and it states 2nd class post in the listing
Paid instantly with PayPal, 9 days later but no goods.
Reply by: 2nd class post takes 2-5 WORKING DAYS, what is wrong with you people?
Video Game cheats, hints a
Some general thoughts on the issue:
1. July-August is the traditional dead-time for many kinds of sales, especially electronics. This year is no exception. Whining about slow sales in August is, well, stupid.
2. Things aren't selling as quickly because they aren't priced to sell quickly. Sellers have started to treat eBay like a storefront rather than an auction house. The starting bid and reserve prices reflect that and the sales pattern does too.
3. There are far too many 97% feedback powersellers. Old hands know better than to buy from such a seller but newbies get screwed. eBay policies should discourage the continued presence of folks who can't maintain a 1% or less complaint rate.
4. eBay is tolerating auctions where the seller does not actually have the product in question, may not be able to get it in a timely manner, and does not say so in the auction. This discourages buyers.
5. There has been a proliferation of "insane" sellers who don't bother to check the competition before posting an item on ebay. Take for example focus_technology. He has a Cisco 2509 listed for $450. 2509's have been selling for around $75. No 2509 has sold for more than $200 this year. Such behavior results in a lot of effectively invalid listings that clutter a potential buyer's view, discouraging them from continuing the search. eBay encourages this behavior by allowing sellers to relist an item cheaply or for free.
6. My personal pet peeve, they've tweaked paypal so that you have to go out through a bunch of "are you sures" if you want to pay by credit card instead of a bank draft. Its anti-customer.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Having to list an item 4 times on ebay to sell it is not indicative of a management lapse at ebay, but rather that either the seller has a misguided idea of the value of their product, or the economy is not as good now as it used to be. I vote option B.
What our government is trying to hide from us is that the world economy is in the beginning of a horrific collapse, which will go down in history as being sparked by the depletion of our energy resources and resulting price spike. Our government lied to us all throughout the 1990's about how great the economy was, and the resulting crash left many people penniless. Then, the government "fixed" the problem by creating another artificial boom, this one in housing. For the past 5 years, people have been hyper-extending themselves on adjustable mortgages to buy houses they couldn't really afford. Now that the economy has seen all the benefit it can from the second artificial boom, the housing market has crashed (not in terms of value, but in terms of peoples' monthly payments on their ARM), the government has nowhere to go.
We are about to see an implosion in the housing market that is going to make the dot-bust of the 1990's look like losing a quarter in a slot machine. We are at a point where we can no longer control inflation because we have sent enough money overseas that foreign governments now control the supply of US currency in the world. We BORROWED the money we sent them against the hyper-inflated housing values we created artifically in the early 2000s. Now, all the foreign governments like China and Iran have to do is flood the world with those borrowed US dollars to drive hyper-inflation in the US. Combine that with a crash in the only assets in the US that have real value, and the rest of the world will simply be able to buy us out.
Scary... truly scary... so your ebay problems are a lot bigger than you think...
Don't listen to parent! Parent has bad ratings and doesn't pay for auctions! Seller beware!
Grandparent is A+++++ first poster. Will recommend to all. Will read grandparent's post again
Is there anyone who think eBay's feedback system is truly useful or even fair? I get slammed when people don't pay and think they are funny. People ignore terms of auctions and think I'm unprofessional for not bending over backward. People don't ship my stuff because they found out the postage is way higher than they thought and decide to just keep my money. It's a sin how bad it is.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
As a long-time eBayer myself (both buying and selling), I see several glaring flaws, and a few smaller nit-picks. In (basically) an order of importance, I'd say:
1. Fraud is *way* too high! In some categories, it's not really a big issue. But for customers shopping for higher-ticket, more desirable goods, it's a severe problem! If, for example, you're shopping for new Apple products (from iPods to Macbook Pros), you can find obviously fraudulent auctions practically EVERY time you do a search. Worse yet, there are a lot of not-so-obvious frauds out there. EG. I recently tried to buy a used iPod 20GB from a guy that appeared to own a used book-store of some sort. He claimed he had something like 50 used 20GB iPods for sale, as well as 40-something shuffles. By the look of the photos he displayed, it appeared he had used them as loaners for some kind of audio-book rental program his store ran, and these were just being auctioned off since they were older units. I placed a bid, as did many other people. But then the auction got terminated at the last minute, and his account was suspended for fraud.
2. Too costly to sell some items! If you're trying to use eBay for its intended original purpose (sort of a flea market or garage sale to "recycle" your stuff you'd otherwise throw away), the fees usually eat up all your profits. If, say, I want to auction off a broken CD player for spare parts value - I'm only going to realistcally get maybe $5 or so out of it. That would be fine, except if the buyer pays me via PayPal, PayPal (owned by eBay) gets a chunk. eBay charges me both the listing fee and a final value sale fee too. Not to mention, re-listing fees if the thing doesn't sell the first couple times I put it out there. (And on something like this, heck - it probably won't! It's just something you want to relist until you luck into finding that person who happens to need exactly what you've got.) If you make a small mistkae on estimating your shipping costs on top of that, you can easily end up paying someone to win your auction!
3. Too much abuse in the feedback system. I really like the idea someone else posted here, where a positive feedback (with no comment) would get posted by default after X number of days, unless someone made an effort to do otherwise. I'm tired of the people who email, begging for feedback, or getting upset that you're "taking too long" to get around to it. I'm tired of the retaliation stunts people pull, where leaving a legitimate negative feedback guarantees you'll get an undeserved one in return. And I'm tired of feedback comments only being 1 line long. (On a positive, what are they gonna type anyway? May as well make a macro that says "A++++ Would do business again!" It's always something like that.) You don't get enough space to explain the reason you're giving a negative either. It's hard not to just look like a jerk with only 80 chars. or less to explain yourself.
4. eBay stores are a joke. I looked into them once, for a former employer, and they were *so* unattractive an option for us compared to practically anyone else offering e-commerce web sites with shopping carts. They just look too much like the rest of their site. Sure, the items come up in everybody's regular auction searches - but so what? That's sort of like me starting my own line of new cars, and instead of building my own showrooms, I negotiate a deal with Chevy to sell mine in a portion of their showroom space. Yeah, I get a lot of "exposure" that way - but it still makes my business look "second rate" compared to Chevy. eBay stores look like someone just had a bunch of normal auction listings, and paid to get them put under a different "eBay stores" heading. You can't even really customize the presentation of your listings.
"He says he now lists an item four times on average in order to sell it, up from two listings two years ago."
Here's a tip, set the auction price at $0.01 to start, and let people bid it up to what *they* think it's currently worth. You'll sell your items the *first* time.