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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.
Oh, please. Craigslist is only useful for items in your city (if you even live in a city large enough to have a Craigslist site). If you're trying to sell some small $50 item and want a nationwide or even international audience, you have to use Ebay. No one is going to search the hundreds of different Craigslist sites for items.
CL is good if you're trying to sell some big, bulky item like a piece of furniture, which people generally would prefer to buy locally and pick up themselves. Ebay is terrible for things like that. Ebay is where you go for things like electronics and other things which are fairly easily shipped.