Slashdot Mirror
eBay Battles Power Sellers
DigitalDame2 writes "eBay power sellers, angered by the recent eBay policy changes, have been hitting back the auction site with listing boycotts and now with accusations of fake listings and forum censorship. EBay admitted that a "bug" in its system had accidentally placed listings from eBay-owned shopping.com onto eBay.com late Friday night. A California-based seller's new eBay listings did not allow users to actually bid on his items. "This guy has over 35,000 items. And there is no button for a 'buy it now' and no button for making a bid." As a result, sellers are threatening to take their complaints to the Federal Trade Commission, but eBay is not backing down." Normally I wouldn't really care, but I think this is interesting because eBay is so dominant in their field, that there is no real alternative. Watching how things like this play out is interesting to me because I want to believe that the internet will require everyone to be more responsible or lose. But the real question for me is at what point does total marketplace dominance trump that.
...as to why eBay even implemented these changes. Was there some major drive for it, or what?
If you want crap, Craigslist is available too.
Right now eBay's board is having a few analysts go through this list of "power sellers" and derive some nice little numbers. (A) What percentage of income on listings come from these people? (B) What is the approximate dollar value in having those auctions available to our users (probably pretty small)? (C) What's it going to cost us to retroactively fix these erroneous auctions, restore the forums and send out apologies to every eBay user? (D) What are is the probability that the FCC will act on the user's complaints? (E) What's the maximum fine we could receive from the FCC?
Now here's the math, if A + B > C then eBay will probably send out apologies and make a good effort to please these power sellers. However, if D*E < C then I'll bet there's no chance in hell they're taking action on this.
Now look at it from the other side of the issue, the power sellers on eBay. What dollar (or percent) value do you assign using eBay to your sales (probably pretty high considering the exposure they offer you). There are competitors however small, you could go to them but it's going to hurt your sales. So the question now becomes whether or not you've lost enough on these fake auctions and censored forums. The answer is obviously no. A young idealist might blindly stick it to the man and suffer in the name of ethics and against censorship. But the businessman would not.
So what Taco is interested in is whether or not eBay is going to do the moral and ethically correct thing and take action C regardless of price or if the sellers are going to move to another site out of respect for free speech and standing up against shadey listings. The answer is "no" thanks to the effect of symbiotic profit experienced on both sides.
My work here is dung.
O Positive
O Neutral
O Negative
Comments:
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Alternatives exist. I like gunbroker.com (aka forthehunt.com if your workplace filters the word "gun" in a url).
No restrictions on listings, other than legal things (body parts, slavery), no listing fees unless the item is sold, the costs are fair, and NO SNIPING - true actions. If a bid happens in the last 15 minutes of listing time, it automatically extends to 15 minutes.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
If you're unlucky (and that is becoming more and more frequent) to have a buyer "give up" on your auction after winning it, be very, very careful with what you click. If you're a inexperienced seller, you might assume the FVF (final value fee) reversal link, which shows after a dispute is ended, would revert the final fee to you - when in fact it gives the FVF irrevocably to ebay. And they don't care - after all, what alternatives you have in Europe? And now with the end of sellers giving feedback on buyers, this kind of abuse will only increase, the only hope honest buyers and sellers have is that the complains will be so many that ebay will finally be hit where it hurts, on its corporate pocket. Anyone willing to start a worldwide (or even only EC wide) alternative?
Cap of "padded" buy.com listings on ebay.
Is it just me or isn't that called a monopoly? Maybe the feds should get involved.
Problem: A seller is getting his mate to bid against something you're trying to buy?
Solution: Hide the names of the buyers
Problem: Buyers are giving sellers negative feedback even though the exchange was fair and square?
Solution: Don't allow sellers to give retaliatory negative feedback
Problem: Someone's found out about the fact you're a bunch of crooks and has posted all the evidence in a forum?
Solution: Delete the posts and claim it was a bug
Summation 2
I hope to Christ I'm not the only one who found the concept of "NO SNIPING" at gunbroker.com entertaining.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Sure eBay "gave" you free gallery listings but bumped final auction fees so now your paying even more, but the point that I can't stand and no one seems to ever try to change is the double dipping on fees mandated for using eBay with PayPal. PayPal is the devil. Craigslist is the way to go, unless you have a high ticket, low weight collectable, in which case eBay might be your only option despite all the potential land mines.
You answered your own question in the blurb:
...
"I want to believe that the internet will require everyone to be more responsible or lose. But the real question for me is at what point does total marketplace dominance trump that."
"eBay is so dominant in their field, that there is no real alternative. "
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
You'd think with all of the complaints eBay has from both sellers and buyers that an alternative would have blossomed by now. I've used eBay extensively to buy and sell goods, but I'd love to have an alternative auction-style, online marketplace to delve into. Paypal seems to be eBay's killer app, but you'd think Mastercard and/or Visa could come up with something else to compete and go get those dollars from fees and such.
But the real question for me is: at what point does total marketplace dominance trump that?
Enjoy!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I want to believe that the internet will require everyone to be more responsible or lose. But the real question for me is at what point does total marketplace dominance trump that.
An auction site is just a natural monopoly. It's in the interests of the sellers to have all the buyers on one site (increased buyers/item), and it's in the interests of buyers to have all the sellers on one site (increased items/buyer).
Ebay is a public company, so even if there's some virtuous people running the company, there's still the interest of the shareholders.
The only thing really standing in the way of Ebay doing "whatever it takes to make more money" is the sherman anti-trust law. Monopolies ARE legal in the US. What's illegal is using monopoly power to stop competition (and likely a few other things).
AccountKiller
I didn't see one - everyone's claiming that there were 10% less items for sale, but for what I was looking at, the numbers seemed normal. I expected things to run a little short near the end, but it didn't happen, other than the nominal "cheap listing day" crap they pull every so often that spams all my searches with a billion identical items.
Which is a problem for eBay. When they make their insertion fees cheap, everyone spams a billion auctions, drowning out the stuff I want with cruft I don't. The problem is, those items can't really be searched away - they are the item being looked for, technically, just not the one you want.
I believe probalby 95% of people on eBay really don't give a damn, it's just a vocal minority spouting. I certainly didn't see any changes. Then again, I use eBay for finding hard to find stuff. Stuff you can buy in a store, is usually less of a hassle buying it from the store (B&M or online) - rather than eBay. eBay's for all those items one either can't find in stores (sold out/not made anymore/rare items), and the ones complaining are those who sell what everyone else can find at an online store. It's not like eBay even has many deals, so bargain hunting isn't an option.
As for the reasoning behind the changes, well, consider "feedback hostage" is rampant on eBay. The seller won't post feedback until you (the buyer) do. If you post negative feedback (say, item was fraudulent), the seller will do the same to you, even though you fulfilled your obligations (i.e., paid seller in a timely fashion, tried to resolve issues with seller, etc). Most good sellers will leave feedback immediately since the buyer's fulfilled their contractual duty to pay. (Part of the changes also involve the buyer not being able to give feedback for 3 days or so, to prevent the buyer from the lesser idiocy of "I paid seller within hour, item didn't arrive 5 minutes later" crap, or the more common "item did not arrive" when buyer hasn't even paid for it!).
There's no real good solution to this - you could do feedback escrow (buyer and seller can't see feedback until both have submitted it), but that won't protect against buyers doing what I mention.
I don't know if the changes are good or bad, but I'm guessing they came out of all the complaints from buyers who left negative feedback because sellers deserved it, while getting retaliatory feedback in return when they did their end of the deal.
In the long term, the feedback changes are really important for the sellers too. I've known lots of people who got ripped off on ebay, buying from sellers who had 98% positive feedback, because they hadn't bothered to go through and actually read all of that feedback---some of "mutually withdrawn"---to recognize that they're dealing with a sometimes dishonest seller who knows how to use feedback threats to keep their ratings high.
If ebay doesn't want people to be turned off, they need to get this under control.
Yes, I've heard it all, there are jerk buyers as there are sellers, and this will mean some honest sellers absorbing negative feedback they don't deserve. The point to keep in mind, is that this effect will be distributed more or less evenly among sellers, leaving it possible to reliably distinguish the good sellers from the bad. Under the current system, the dishonest sellers benefit the most, because they are the ones willing to use threats and retaliatory feedback to prop up their profile.
I'm still surprised ebay had the foresight to do this.
Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, IBM - they have had their turn through the monopoly ringer from major governments . . . why is ebay exempt? Because there is no fanatical base screaming? Watch out ebay, you may create it, and then, well ask Mr. Ballmer what making checks out to EU is like!
Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of man. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
Please somebody come in and challenge Ebay. The market is screaming right now for some competition.
Has anyone heard of any G-Bay rumours?
- John
The last time eBay did a major change to their fee structure, I was a large power seller.
I sold jewelry $15-%50 range. Mainly silver with gemstones, almost no costume. I had a rating of about 9000 and % positive of 99.7. I was netting about 35K a year. My system worked on volume. I would make $0.50 to $1.00 per sale. At that size I ended up sending eBay about $70K a year.
The last time they cahnged their fees they essentially killed my profit margin. Now I could have adjusted at that point and probably survived but at the same time they started using some incredibly poorly written bots. These bots decided I was selling illegale stuff and even though I had exceptional records eBay refused to have a human even look at what the bots were reporting.
After over a year fighting with eBay and holding my last months worth of fees (about 2K) I finally got someone from their collections department to give me some information...I ended up settling the debt for $1600 plus a printout of what the bot was reporting.
To sum up, because eBay did not treat me fairly while at the same time demanding more money from me I have completly left them and they no longer get my $70,000 a year in fees.
While eBay is still huge, Google and other search engines provide independent sellers almost as much visibility so I predict that these sort of heavy handed tactics will only speed eBay's decline from the throne of online reselling services.
Are exactly the sellers that should leave ebay or simply be banned outright.
Get rid of the storefronts too.
Ebay is great when it acts as a garage sale, but that is rare since all the professional sellers turned it into a gigantic strip mall.
The FTC will laugh in the faces hopefully.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
Can't the comment system just blacklist links like this? Of course malicious...
Since my feedback just recently went over 1,000, eBay keeps sending me e-mail to jon the PowerSeller program. I told them what they could do with it...
Lawrence Person
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http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
The problem with eBay is that it has shifted away from being a private auction site used by people trying to sell their own stuff. The modern eBay is home to thousands of somewhat shifty "Power Sellers" who buy stuff at estate sales, thrift stores, and garage sales. They list the stuff with often misleading descriptions and rip people off. Unfortunately, these junk dealers generate huge profit for eBay (I worked out the total fees related to a transaction once, and they came to about 15%, including PayPal, listing and final value costs).
It's time to split eBay into two sites - Pro and Casual Sellers. Let users quickly and easily filter out the "power sellers" and others who sell hundreds of items a year and focus on the amateur sellers offering their well-kept vintage cameras, video game consoles and so on. While they're at it, they also need to fix their feedback approach once and for all. Disabling negative feedback from sellers hamstrings good people and puts them at the mercy of sometimes irrational and mentally unbalanced buyers.
monopoly is always bad.
"Normally I wouldn't really care, but I think this is interesting because eBay is so dominant in their field, that there is no real alternative."
/. ...)
There was a time that people said the same thing about Hotmail in the webmail market. In the end, if people call for an alternative, someone will fill the emergent niche; if this alternative is of wide enough appeal, it may become the new mainstream. So, I agree with the summary that this will be interesting to watch - it always fun to see the lightweight newcomer battle the huge and established titan, even if the little guy ends up getting smashed...
(In fact, this is a good summary for why I read
Be careful of your thoughts; they could become words at any minute...
No competition? Now's my chance to launch a Sealed-bid second-price auction site; something which actualy provides benefits to the buyers.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
http://xkcd.com/325/
If ebay doesn't shape up, won't their total marketplace dominance end? What obstacles are there to starting a competitor to ebay? Is it illegal or something? Will noone use it? Don't these disgruntled sellers constitute a perfect marketplace for such a competitor?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
This is very interesting in terms of market dominance to me as well. We closed our Ebay store nearly a year ago because we saw the fee hikes coming, and were already having trouble making it pencil. I have been struggling with many problems recently in our business that are hitting the same wall of "We don't care because you can't go anywhere else" I remember it used to be if you squawked enough you could get a little satisfaction, now all that seems possible and available is a "Sincere apology for the inconvenience" and I am really tired of it. If someone does business with our company and is unhappy for any reason, we take every step to make them happy! Why are so many companies losing sight of the long term for short term gains?
Blue Heron Organics & Natural Products
Some Power Sellers have it good. I like to browse the coins->ancient->greek category, and I have to wade through the listings of high volume sellers hawking crap like jewelry (not even all coin related) and reproductions (even though there is a specific category for these). One of the reproduction sellers didn't even bother to list the fact that it was a reproduction in the auction title. I tried reporting them to eBay as being listed in the wrong category, but that was as effective as yelling at the crack in the sidewalk that I tripped on, and a lot harder to do to boot, since I had to wade through several web pages to actually send the message on. Apparently, these dealers had the "terms of service = suggestions" package. I do use other sites than eBay, but unfortunately, they don't have the volume or selection. I guess the most frustrating thing for me is that I can see how much better it could be, if they could only work up the energy to care. They have drifted too far from their garage sale roots, and I don't see any improvement coming. But then again, they are "only the venue", as the keep telling everyone who threatens to sue. With all their marketing, that defense is becoming a bit shaky... -- Tom
OTR rocks!
Markets still work when imperfect substitutes are available, though not as efficiently. For example, some who might've previously thought of selling through eBay first may now consider CraigsList first.
Ebay is a public company, so even if there's some virtuous people running the company, there's still the interest of the shareholders.
Ebay is NOT run by virtuous people; it's run by weasels. To see this, just like at their recent rate increases: they sent out emails to all their members loudly proclaiming their new, lower listing fees (which in reality were only lowered a few percent--BFD), and saying NOTHING about any changes to their final value fees, which make up the bulk of the fees sellers pay. To see that, you had to go to their site and read through all the fine print, to find out the FV fees had increased a whopping 60%.
In addition, Ebay has repeatedly had the gall to claim that their rate increases were somehow GOOD for the sellers! Since when does anyone consider it a benefit to pay more for something?
Ebay is run by evil, lying, despicable people, make no mistake.
The recent moves of eBay puzzle me. The scientology backdoor is one thing, but the action in Poland is entirely different.
eBay.pl is by no means dominant site in Poland. In Poland, THE auction site is allegro.pl, with more than 90% of the market. They charge very little for putting an item on auction, the percentage for a successful sale is low too. The second one is Swistak.pl, which, being much smaller, offers no fee for putting your items on auctions, and restricts all fees to people who sell lots, feature their producte etc. eBay used the same strategy until recently, keeping a firm third place close behind Swistak.pl
But last month or so, they introduced fees for putting items on auction. Result - almost all sellers from Poland vanished. It still lists some 80000 items 'from Poland' but if you check the listings, you see that over 90% of them are "e-book, electronic form, free electronic shipping everywhere world-wide." Currently there's some 8000 non-eBook offers )many of them duplicates from the few remaining desperate powersellers putting the same item in multiple categories) on eBay (vs almost 4 millions on Allegro), and essentially eBay.pl is dead.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
IMHO, ebay has done much to destroy the marketplace, likely as the perfect market is not really profitable, as much as theorist might argue otherwise. The buy it now option and reservem pricing kills the auction premise. Powersellers kill the idea that you are trading with an individual that is just trying to get rid of unwanted product. In the end, this is just a flea market, and eBay is just the booth renter trying to create a profit out of otherwise wasted space.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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Webmaster for a Titanium PowerSeller here. Shooting Star on eBay... forgive me if I don't tell you which?
We hate eBay, we hate the awful customers eBay brings us, and PayPal won't stop lying to our customers when they fuck up their shitty excuse for a bank. We're gonna lift up stakes and move on to Amazon, leaving only a few signpost auctions in our wake. eBay and PayPal combined have managed to fuck up $200,000/yr in fees.
How victorious. Seriously, if a seller on eBay has a website? GO TO THE WEBSITE. Don't let eBay shove its dick in your shopping cart.
As a VERY part-time seller on ebay (I may make $5k this year, and with everything I put into it, I may not really be making any money), I can attest to the oddities that ebay is trying to pull.
.99 and cover the fees unless I add about $4-$5 to shipping, which is REALLY starting to cheese people off at times. Ebay hates it, too, but I don't really care about that.
Right now, I'm doing okay, except I can't make much on an item I sell for
Of course, other major sellers on other sites (Amazon, or any major retailer) have similar shipping (or pay for bulk rates) and also have the luxury of 4-6 weeks shipping. Not NotQuiteCajun, no sirreebob. If I don't have it out next day, (or get an ignorant buyer on the west coast) I can get tagged with 4's instead of 5's on my shipping time for no good reason than they didn't get it yesterday.
The sellers not being able to neg buyes is gonna be a wash - I don't think it's going to hurt as much as some sellers (particularly on the ebay feedback newsboards state), but we ARE going to see a rash of a small percentage of new buyers try and say "send me crap for free or I neg you." Ebay BETTER step up to the plate when that happens and back up the sellers, because it is going to get VERY bad between some sellers because it will be VERY easy to slam your competition by making a new user id and bidding something up and not paying.
I may shift to trying to move stuff first on discussion boards and such instead of auctions. We'll see.
Ok first the disclaimer, I do work for eBay though I have no specific or internal knowledge of this particular case.
The part of the article here that caught my eye was "One forum thread from Friday pointed to a California-based seller known as sdc_prod_434012 with no previous eBay transactions whose new listings did not allow users to actually bid on his items."
Like I said I don't have any specific knowledge of this user or case but lets consider the facts and possibilities here. Its a user with 0 feedback, who has apparently never bought or sold a single item on eBay, despite being registered on the site for almost a year now. Then one morning he suddenly wakes up and in a brilliant display of speed and efficiency posts 35000 items for sale at once. Now then, is it more likely that this is:
a) An ambitious new user who was waiting for just the right moment to post his entire inventory for sale.
b) A scammer who is trying to get as many quick fraudulent buy-it-now transactions as he can before being noticed by the security filters.
I'd be willing to bet the correct answer is b, and that the anti-fraud programs correctly detected this user and disabled his items before people were able to bid on them. If this was a legitimate user then its unfortunate and I'm sure that customer service is apologizing profusely, but in 99 out of 100 cases like this its just your garden variety scammer and the fraud detection programs at eBay worked exactly as they were supposed to.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Online auctions are a business which tends towards market concentration. The biggest auction is the most valuable, and the auction systems are closed. eBay objects if you write a search engine for eBay auctions, or a system to manage auctions across multiple auction sites.
In contrast, e-mail systems are today open - Hotmail can mail to Gmail, and vice versa. That wasn't always the case. There was a time when MCImail, GEnie and AOL didn't talk to each other; eventually, the open e-mail system of the Internet wiped them all out. Search is open from the consumer side; all search engines can look at all sites. But it's not open from the advertiser side, not since Google bought DoubleClick.
So there's an inherent tendency towards monopoly in the auction area. It's a legitimate subject for antitrust enforcement.
So what is the going rate per MegaWatt -hour?
Ebay is closer to an auction engine, it suplies the tool but the SELLER is the one who is the auctioneer, this is odd because usually in auctions there is a threesome going on. Seller, Buyers and Auctioneer. The auctioneer is the middle man and makes sure BOTH sides keep up their side of the bargain.
The whole thing about negative feedback doesn't happen in real auction houses. Rememeber that deal with the vizors of the La Forge not being the real one worn by the actor? Was it the seller OR christies who took the heat for that? Answer,the auction house, they accepted the item and certified it as being real.
If I buy something at an auction I pay the auction house and THEY hand me the item. E-bay is a far cry from this and people forget this.
Auction houses are an ancient invention, there is a REASON they work the way they do so it is only natural that when ebay tries to change this ancient process problems will occur.
If ebay worked like a normal auction house then there wouldn't be any problems other then the typical buyer beware, but that is try anywhere.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
On the Internet, it's mostly mindshare, and mindshare can be changed. Web Crawler gave way to Yahoo gave way to AltaVista gave way to Google. Building a virtual national company is much easier than building a physical one across the country, and eBay does have something to fear here.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I've sold over 15,000 items on eBay. I tried to be honest and fair and about 95% of people are good decent folks. As for the rest? Take your pick of: rude, dishonest, idiotic, incompetent, lazy, mean, criminal or any combination of the above. As a seller I've run into just about every kind of scam and rude jerk you can imagine. I've had a $6000 item stolen off the back of the UPS truck and then sold a year later on eBay. (no the police didn't care - we tried) I've had people leave negative feedback about the speed of shipping less than one minute after the auction closed and before paying. I've seen every kind of scummy fake seller you can imagine and every kind of fraudulent buyer. eBay and PayPal are generally unhelpful and uncaring. The moderation system is too unsophisticated to really be very valuable most of the time. As a seller it is a hindrance when you are new (everyone threatens you) and a weapon when you have a lot of feedbacks. Same thing as a buyer. Plus any power seller doing a lot of selling doesn't really have time to leave lots of accurate feedback. It's not that they wouldn't, there simply aren't enough hours in the day. No, sad to say but while double blind feedback has advantages, it won't actually solve the feedback problem.
Selling personal stuff on eBay, unless it's obscure and only valuable to a more global audience, is definitely less feasible these days. However, both my girlfriend and I have recently being doing a fair bit of buying/sellings from the free lists like Craigslist, Kijiji, and Facebook's auctions. They're definitely more local-centric, but I find the ability to meet somebody face-to-face and check that the item isn't a scam is more a positive than a negative.
The only time I expect to use ebay (as a buyer) now is if I want something that's not really available locally, but a lot of people seem to buy common crap that you could pretty much buy at WalMart for the same price once you include shipping.
Freecycle is a community of people who post items that they don't need anymore, or request items that they do. Everything is freely given, you just generally have to pick it up yourself. Yeah it's a Yahoo group, but it's great as a mailing list, and I think more people should join. I am a member of two groups, all locations within these groups are within 15 miles of me, and the amount of activity is really quite large. It's a great way to get rid of stuff without taking it to landfill, and you can find things available which you could never dream of finding on eBay. I'm lucky to live in an area of England where recycling isn't just some crank hippy fad, but is almost as normal as taking your bins out for the garbage collectors. That's the way things should be, and groups like Freecycle are taking it a step further.
I do like eBay too though.
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. Isaac Asimov
not that it's always easy to get stuff, is freecycle. Who can beat free?!? Of course, you usually have to pay for gas to get yourself to wherever to pick up stuff. The only major problem with freecycle is that it fills your email's inbox with literally thousands of emails, many of which are not useful to you. I'd really like it if someone would build an ebay like site for freecycle! It'd make life so much easier, especially for those situations where you want something, someone offers it, and someone else besides you gets to it before you and then you don't get the email in time to see that the taken email if there is a taken email sent at all... in other words, some highly sought after item that's made available may have 20 takes all looking for it, but only the first to show up got it, and all other 19 have been lead on a wild gooschase, which may have resulted in having to drive half a state away or more in hopes to get something that isn't there...
I can tell you that the problem with feedback is that we get negative feedback from buyers when it is absolutely uncalled for. We have had buyers leave negative feedback because they didn't like the music on the CD they bought from us. We've had negative feedback when the USPS lost the package and we replaced it for free. We've had negative feedback when a buyer thought the package should arrive in two days.
Once a buyer leaves a negative, it's there in the count. Folks evaluating our trustworthiness rarely look at the actual feedback - they just look at the numbers. We have been able to track dips in sales and prove that they follow a rise in negatives.
Buyers are "customers". There's a million of them out there, and many of them are really, really looking to pick a fight. I'm sure you've seen those types at retail counters. The only thing a seller has to prevent frivolous and undeserved negatives is the ability to leave similar negative feedback for the buyer.
By the way, our store is http://stores.ebay.com/CD-Velocity?refid=store
I hope the market can respond the the ebay monopoly by having a competitor that lists it's own auctions but also shows ebay results as well.
:-)
The ebay results showing up functionality backed up by a regulator of course.
If you're reading this there's a gap in the market. Please make a website like this asap.
You could also link search results to specialist auction sites too.
Best of luck, hope you get filthy rich
A blog I run for the wealth
But corporations like eBay have a natural limit to their growth - market saturation. That's where eBay is now; they can't find a significant number of additional users, so they are trying to find ways to make more money from the users they already have.
Keeping this simple idea in mind it's not hard at all to see why eBay is targeting the sellers - the sellers are receiving money and eBay can see just exactly how much the sellers are receiving. I can easily imagine a bunch of suits sitting around a conference table and looking at the huge dollar amount and trying to find painless ways to milk a few more tenths of a percent in fees.
They've already cut expenses - that's why their customer service department is becoming notorious for answering every question or complaint with a form letter and nothing more.
The hardest hit in this latest fee increase will be the sellers who buy "trinkets" at wholesale and auction them off; since they don't need a physical store their costs are lower and they could pass this savings along to the customer. Enough savings that even with the fees and shipping charges it was still a better deal than the local store. Higher seller fees can only be absorbed up to a point; when the sellers can't sell for less than retail and still make a profit then they're going to give up on eBay. If something is the same price on eBay and at the local department store then most would rather just go to the store; see the product in person before you buy it and take it home right now. Why pay the same price or more to buy something you can't see until after you buy it - and have to wait a week or more to get it?
And let's not forget the recent increases in shipping charges - and the weak economy that has cut down on the amount of discretionary spending. That's the root cause of eBay's slowdown; fewer buyers with less money to spend. I don't think that raising fees was a wise move for eBay to make at this point in time.
My "rules" for buying on eBay: Check prices at local stores and on eBay. Consider the total price; if you buy on eBay you'll pay a "shipping++" charge but no sales tax. Buying local means you pay sales tax but no shipping.
And what about non-power sellers who get burned by lying buyers? My rating is less than 300, but it's 100% and I put a lot of effort into my listings to try to keep it that way. For the most part I sell old PC and Sun hardware that I no longer use thanks to upgrading. My auctions go into an enormous amount of detail with respect to an item's condition, how I tested it to make sure that it works, and I list anything that's wrong that I cannot fix, like scratches, dents, missing 5-1/4" bay covers, etc.
I once sold an old PC that had been in my family's possession for years. Some jackass decided to be an asshole buyer and came back with "this is missing, that's not working", apparently assuming that I was some kind of clearing house who moves too much stock to know the details about a particular item. I responded by describing exactly that PCs condition as shipped as well as the statement that my family had owned that PC for years, so I knew every detail about it. I never heard back from the guy once he realized that I called his bluff and that I could have easily slammed him with a negative about trying to scam me.
But now I no longer have that protection, thanks to this f**king moronic decision on eBay's part. So what's to protect me from asshole buyers like the idiot who tried to scam me? Ban him from future auctions? Oh, golly gee, that will certainly stop other fraudulent buyers, oh boy oh boy. And if you think that eBay will seriously consider removing genuinely incorrect feedback, you need to stop smoking whatever it is you're smoking.
This new policy of theirs is going to do one thing: make eBay a haven for scamming buyers who now know that they have nothing to fear when lying about sellers.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
I ended the account that I had for years when I heard about the scientology connection. I urge everyone to do the same. I feel sorry for those who make a living using them.
There are plenty of alternatives, especially if you are a power seller with consistent inventory. Amazon, Buy.com, Pricegrabber just to name a few - will gladly list your inventories. Buy.com only charges when you sell something, free to list. If you already have a website store best bang is Google Shopping (formerly known as Froogle). Ebay has grown complacent and greedy, its ready to stagnate and fail.
They're monkeys, aren't they? How dare you! What are you implying? I didn't come here to be insulted by a legalised vampire!
A good place for general online-selling information is http://powersellersunite.com/. They have a nice chart showing the number of listings on various sites (click on Auction Site Count under Free Auction Tools).
The top sites:
Ebay sucks. I have a bunch of stuff that I was going to sell online, but these fees are ridiculous. What are the alternatives? (and no, I'm not looking for Craigslist - I'm looking for legitimate, nationwide auction sites)
They recently increased their rates. Their rates are so high I can't sell Wii's anymore.
http://www.quantcast.com/onlineauction.com/traffic
-- Andyvan
Normally I wouldn't really care, but I think this is interesting because eBay is so dominant in their field, that there is no real alternative.
Microsoft should have made a shared-listings deal with Yahoo Auctions and similar auction sites in order to compete with Ebay if they really wanted a new business to expand into. When Yahoo and MS saw Ebay becoming the dominate auction player, they should have made a sharing deal move around 2002-ish. They missed a golden opportunity, and now there's a monopoly.
Table-ized A.I.
I just canceled my eBay account last night. I received a message from eBay that they are changing their policies forcing you to offer PayPal as a payment option, or to obtain a merchant account. Basically, you must offer a credit card payment option period.
I have heard to many horror stories about Paypal that gives me no confidence in them at all. I don't want anything to do with Paypal. I also don't do enough business on eBay to need a merchant account at all.
So since this will affect casual users like me quite severely, I do find it interesting to see what the Power Sellers are going to do in response to the rules that are affecting them. I would also be interested in knowing how much business eBay gets from casual users like me.
There have been a lot of news articles lately about eBay and its policy changes, and I have yet to hear anything resembling a positive response.
The AC parent, while a bit crude, is 100% correct. There's a multi-millionaire in the area I grew up in who made all, yes, *all* of his money in the junkyard business.
He takes cars for scrap, pulls out anything useful, and sells the parts to people looking to fix their car on the cheap. This works great for him, because he can cannibalize even new cars that were in accidents and totaled, but which still have many brand new and functional parts. He pulls out alternators and rebuilds the cores, sells moldings that people break when they run into deer (a very common occurrence now that hunting isn't so common), and anything else that can be rebuilt, sold as-is, or refurbished and sold at profit.
Amazing business with incredible profit margins.
First of all, let's look at the two main eBay has done so well: (a) First to market, and (b) Greed.
Bargain hunters scoured eBay for cheap deals on things they wanted. Sellers found a massive market for weird niche products that might otherwise be garbage.
Now that they're entrenched and dominant in the market, people still go there first to sell things, because they have the biggest market, but they're not putting every-and-anything up for auction, because the newer fees make it no longer worth putting nearly-unsellable items up. On the other side of the house, bargain hunters are spending less and less time shopping on eBay, because bargains are getting harder to find as the "online auction market" matures.
Ironically, the company that created much of this market and took iron-clad control over it, fails to see the obvious: This maturity is inevitable and inescapable. The initial burst of amateurs buying and selling anything they have lying around is going to subside, and _most_ of the sellers are going to be professional or semiprofessional. The company can either accept this and try to maintain their dominance by staying (or becoming) more attractive than their competitors; OR they can desperately try to squeeze more money out of their biggest customers, even if it means they're going to hasten their own demise. The thing is that there are alternatives to eBay out there, which are getting more established and trusted, and as the need for eBay's universal customer base becomes less important, so will they. Sooner or later, eBay is going to die as a result of stupid short-sighted profit grabs like this.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I've got 500-800 old UK comics I've been intending to sell on eBay for close to a year now. However, the listing fees, the hassle of putting them all in (even with Turbo Lister), uploading pics and so on has just made it too much trouble. So, yesterday I repurposed an online shop I wrote a couple of years ago and coded a small app which will populate a database back-end with all the info. I'll stick the thing online, and never have to think about it again. If they start to sell, great, but I'm not making a business out of it and the solution works for me.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
DigitalDame2 wrote: Watching how things like this play out is interesting to me because I want to believe that the internet will require everyone to be more responsible or lose. But the real question for me is at what point does total marketplace dominance trump that.
To answer the question somewhat literaly, at 83%.
If you have 30% of a market, you're a mover. If you have more than 80%, you pretty much own it. The 83% number came from U.S. court cases in the days of the robber barons and the trust-busters.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
you seem to have created all these detailed examples of how you think sniping works, yet all us snipers are looking on in awe and wondering how someone could get it so wrong. IDIOT
Donahue has complained about the "flea market" aspect of the current EBay. He wants to move it in the direction of more professional sellers.
why do they need to give negative feedback?
I have been retaliated against, and on another occasion the seller refused to give feedback until I did with the intent to do the same. Both times I paid promptly (upholding my part of the bargain) and got screwed because they have position, in poker terms. Eff them. I'll never buy anything on eBay again.
* *some* buyers are scammers (it never arrived!)
* *some* buyers are hyper-critical (it's not new (duh, it said that in the listing))
* *some* buyers abuse the system (I've changed my mind, don't want it any more)
* *some* buyers apparently don't know how to use email to see if the seller can satisfy them
But a seller's ability to leave negative feedback stops NONE of that.
Dishonest buyers don't care about negative feedback. If they get it, they just ditch that account and create a new one. So the ability of the sellers to leave negative feedback serves NO LEGITIMATE PURPOSE other than to intimidate honest buyers who have a legitimate gripe with the seller.
Some buyers suck. That's true in any marketplace. Part of being a seller in any market place is dealing with buyers.
When was the last time you walked into Wendy's, and they wouldn't sell you a burger because you got negative feedback the last time you bought something at McD's?
paintball
...NOTHING!
The problem here is not eBay. The problem here is that:
- You are not smart enough to realize that your ability to leave negative feedback made no difference (the bad buyer couldn't give a rats ass if you left him negative feedback, he'd just open a new account)
- You are not smart enough to realize that your 100% feedback rating IDENTIFIES YOU AS A SUCKER TARGET!
Scammers LOOK for those 100% feedback ratings, because they know the people who have the 100% ratings are the same people who are illogically emotionally attached to their feedback rating and will appease scammers just to keep their rating.
Do yourself a favor - get a couple negative feedbacks so your rating drops to 99%. Bidders won't care, and the scammers will realize you're not a suckeer and stop trying to scam you.
paintball
That tweak only works if you're willing to accept a 60-90 day lag time before feedback posts.
With eBay's new system, buyers can leave negative feedback, and that feedback is available to other buyers immediately. If you 'escrow' the feedback, a seller has 2-3 months with which to screw over buyers before the first negative feedback starts to be public.
paintball
I'm glad to hear someone else getting tired of the shitty shipping options to AK and HI. I'm constantly seeing "standard shipping to US", and knowing that they mean "flat rate Fedex on the mainland". On one occasion I said fuck it, and held the seller to the letter of their listing, but I haven't made a practice of it, so that I don't see any more "continental US only" than I have to.
USPS Priority Mail is the best option for us out in the "near abroad", and I really appreciate the (usually) small sellers that offer it.
Luke, help me take this mask off
I hope to Christ I'm not the only one who found the concept of "NO SNIPING" at gunbroker.com entertaining.
Well, I found it mildly amusing. I shop online for two reasons: find what's difficult to find elsewhere, and/or look for a deal on something I want. As a buyer, I have no upside to dealing with extended bidding. I don't care to play the bidding psychology game. So, I don't make a habit of shopping at gunbroker.
I may be typical of the average snipping bidder. Since I'm bidding at the end, I've already decided to push the bid up to the limit of my comfort level, and I don't care to deal with the uncertainly of proxy bidding. If snipping isn't supported, I'm not going to play.
I'd be interested in knowing if any online auction sites have data showing whether snipping added or subtracted to the average final bid, and the overall volume of sales.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Lets say you have a lot of sellers on Ebay. Lets say they have a lot of positives. Life is good. The ebay community looks good, and buyers have confidence going in to their shopping. Now, ebay turns on its sellers. Seller negatives go up and buyers begin to lose confidence in ebay because they feel like they can't trust the sellers and buy elsewhere, like amazon. Looks like a case of shooting yourself in the foot to spite your face--the bullet might give you a nice warm feeling, but its going to hurt like hell tomorrow.
If ebay is loosing money, its not because of feedback issues. Its because they need to expand into new markets and think about new services they can provide. This is how the great companies grow. Cannibalizing their source of income (sellers) is only going to hurt business and not help. They need a new CEO--I bet they'll figure that out in a couple of years after the damage has been done.
Just callin' it like I see it.
I'm a powerseller. When the change took place eBay dropped my gallery images on about 150 of my auctions. Since I use their Selling Manager Pro to continously relist auctions they would have kept getting relisted without the gallery image until I did something. Funny that one of the billing changes was that they were no longer charging for gallery images. I contacted them and was told this was a bug in their system and I had to fix the listings myself. They agreed to refund my listing fees for the affected auctions. I took a $1500 loss in sales from this and was up until 4:30 am fixing the gallery images. I have not yet received the refund on listing fees. If it weren't for eBay people might come to my website to buy my items. But the first place many people think to go to purchase things on the internet is eBay. So for now I must continue to deal with them :(
There is a new eBay alternative called Bidtopia which appears to making incredible progress. Sure it is brand new (only 3 months old) and relatively unknown, but a couple of things make it very unique. First, they seem to hand select their sellers and they are building a very small but elite group including many Titanium and Platinum sellers that I recognize from eBay. To be a seller you have to be approved through an on line application process, and you must have previous online auction or e-tail experience (they actually turned me down). Secondly, buyers/bidders have to go through an application process also and they even have to complete a 99 cent online transaction to verify they are capable of online payment and confirm their true identity. This means that you cant simply open a fictitious account with a free e-mail and bogus name. The last thing I find fascinating is that the require all their auctions to be won at fair market value where the buyer sets the price. All Bidtopia auctions start at 99 cents with no reserve, so no wading through a list of overpriced merchandise. While they do have a reverse auction format, these items continue to drop in price until someone buys them or they eventually fall to 99 cents as well. While you would think that this would create a site full of low end junk, I actually found sellers listing $18,000 bijon men's suits, brand new HP G5 Proliant servers, iphones and even women's fashion from St. John. All in all Bidtopia seem to be taking a different approach than all the other auction sites. Rather than throwing out a wide net with a "catch all - we accept everyone" mentality, they seem to be custom grooming their site to their own peculiar standard. While a google search will tell you a ton of information on them, I first discovered Bidtopia when reading a case study that Microsoft did on their technology platform which I found really interesting. Apparently they seem to have no qualms about hosting their production site on beta Microsoft product http://www.microsoft.com/industry/retail/casestudylibrary.mspx?casestudyid=4000001488
Paypal:
"I have heard to many horror stories about Paypal that gives me no confidence in them at all. I don't want anything to do with Paypal. I also don't do enough business on eBay to need a merchant account at all."
You've been listening to only the negative. I've been an eBay seller since 2002. I don't know how many transactions I've done through PayPal, but my 'rep' score on PayPal is over 5,000 counting only verified members (a smaller percentage of users). I've never had anythng even vaguely resembling an issue with them...
Feedback:
As for feedback, no change for me. Since it was an option, my account has been set to give postitive feedback automagically the moment the payment is received. I have NEVER left a negative feedback for anyone. They paid, so customer service is on me.
Don't automatically count 'mutually removed' feedback as a problem with the seller. My FB score is ~7500, with 0 negs and 6 'mutually withdrawn'. In each case, it was withdrawn because I filed a mediation request with SquareTrade and the buyer would not respond. I have actually emailed people after they gave me a negative to see what I could do to make them happy.
I'm glad to see the unfair competition go away. By this I mean that I keep my rating high through solid customer service (meaning I'm willing to take a loss sometimes to make a customer happy) while some of my competition keeps theirs high by holding their customers hostage.
The biggest question I had for buyers in the past, though, was 'who cares what your feedback is?". As long as you don't get kicked off by eBay, I'm not going to send your money back because you have a few negs from sellers (I can spot a retaliatory FB when I see one, btw.)
Fees:
The lower insertion fees offset the FVFs, at least for me. Couple that with the even lower new rates in some of the categories I list in (media) and I'm fairly pleased.
iloveramen, I am a powers seller and have only sold 30 items in the last 3 months. Your rant is completely idiotic and without merit. Your saying all powersellers don't know how to use a computer (no communication), dumb (don't know what there selling), and slow (take forever to ship). Well I guess the 1500 + 100% feedbacks I got must be a bunch of bull S*** then and all those buyers didn't know what they are talking about. I am both a buyer and a seller (like most sellers) and we like to treat our customers like we would like to be treated. You have obviously never sold on eBay or you wouldn't be making such Ignorant Statements about powersellers or any seller. You may have had a few bad experiences with some sellers but to call all powersellers lazy, dumb, and slow!!! That would be like me calling all buyers con artists because they bid and then get buyers remorse and don't pay, or want a partial refund because it doesn't fit even though the exact dimensions were listed in the auction, or the buyer has a stolen account and uses a buy it now option on a $775 item then tries to pay with a stolen credit card through PayPal who doesn't catch it until the next day but doesn't let the seller know. All these things happened to me as a seller but I don't call all buyers con's because they aren't. I have a great time selling to the honest buyers, and by the way I list my auctions with detailed descriptions and magnified close up pictures from every angle. I contact the buyer as soon as the auction ends and when the package ships. I also ship the same or next day after payment is received if it is by PayPal or money order. This is all born out by my feedback. I've only left 4 neg's out of 1500+ and all were because of non-paying bidders. Several more deserved them but I just let it go the ones I did give were for warning to other sellers so they didn't get ripped off. If you don't think NPB's hurt a seller try again. For every NPB i get I lose about $20-$30 in premium listing fees, but eBay doesn't care because they get to keep that money. Again it is very obvious that you have never sold on eBay, if you had you would know that the boycott was not about powersellers but about all sellers. The smaller sellers like the ones you like to buy from are the ones that will be most impacted by these changes. That's what eBay wants' to get rid of the "flea market" style on eBay (these are the incoming CEO's words). Well, the small sellers like me are what made eBay and without them they will be just another Wal-Mart with shipping charges. They want to be like Amazon, well there's already one and they are growing faster then eBay. I hope you enjoy the new and improved eBay where you can leave neg feedback for little or no reason without even contacting the seller. You will find that there will be allot less choices and allot higher prices. By the way I would like to know what makes you think that this boycott was just about powersellers, all sellers from the smallest to the largest are pissed not just powersellers. If you would like to have a meaningful discussion about this I would be more than happy to accommodate you.