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?
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.
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
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.
But Craigslist isn't fancy. The look and feel of Craigslist is that of buying and selling through the newspaper classified ads. ebay's user experience lets someone selling stuff from the junkyard behind their trailer feel like they are "in business".
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
Solution: Don't allow sellers to give retaliatory negative feedback I disagree with your evaluation of this. Typically what happens is a buyer gets a piece of crap defective product and gives the seller a negative. The seller then blasts the buyer with a negative even though the buyer did nothing wrong and was just trying to inform others about the seller's crappy product.
The point is, ebay cannot expect its whole user base to be so diligent, which is why this step is absolutely the right one to take.
I agree that ebay took absolutely the wrong track on the hidden names issue, which is why I'm so surprised they stepped up on this one. I'll believe it when I see it.
Problem: Sellers are giving buyers negative feedback even though the exchange was fair and square? Solution: Don't allow sellers to give retaliatory negative feedback
The term "retaliatory negative feedback" says it all - it's actually against Ebay's rules. Sellers shouldn't give negative feedback just cause they failed to get something right and got called on it via feedback. The buyer's only obligations are to give correct shipping info, read the full listing and pay the correct amount (on time). If the sellers don't like dealing with difficult buyers, then maybe a new line of work is in order.
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.
Critical mass. If you are a seller, you want to sell your item on the site with the largest number of potential buyers in order to get the highest price. If you are a buyer, you want to sell your item on the site with the largest number of potential sellers in order to get the lowest possible price. If I start a competitor to eBay, at launch I will have no buyers or sellers. Buyers won't start visiting until there are items listed, and sellers won't start listing until there is evidence that buyers are visiting. You can spend a couple of years charging no fees and hope you can build up the critical mass required to make people visit your site, but until then it's not going to be making you any money.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's simple: Ebay has mindshare. Because they're so big, if you want to sell an item, you need to go there because all the buyers are there. If you want to buy an item, you need to go there because all the sellers are there. It's a catch-22. So, if you try to go to an alternative place, like the now-defunct Yahoo auctions site, you either won't find what you're looking for, or your item won't get bid up to a decent price. This is why Yahoo finally gave up.
Even worse, Ebay now owns Paypal, which is the only way left to transfer small amounts of money online, and the sites are tied together.
Because of all this, a new auction site can't just start small and build up to being a good competitor to Ebay/Paypal. No one would bother using them because no one else is there. The only way to compete with Ebay is to start BIG, and offer everything Ebay/Paypal offer, but for much lower cost. And even that would be a huge risk, because it's banking on the idea that so many people are pissed at Ebay that they'll try it out.
The only company I can see pulling this off is Google. They have the size and money to make a full-featured auction site and get it mostly right the first time out of the gate, and they already have some sort of payment system which could be adapted I believe to be a real Paypal competitor. They also have a reputation for providing many of their services for free, and their reputation overall is very good, unlike Ebay's (or Microsoft's; if they tried this, it would fail immediately just because of their tainted image).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
So the upshot here is, "the original bidder was an idiot for not putting in the top price he was willing to pay to begin with." If he'd put his bid limit at $240k, E-bay would have automatically raised his bid when the bid came in for $200k. If somebody had sniped him above $240k, well, that's more than he was willing to spend. As far as I can see, people who complain about sniping are people who a) don't understand how to bid on E-Bay and b) let their emotions get in front of the judgment and decide that the most important thing is that they don't "lose" the auction.
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.
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.
What is funny is that if eBay did update the site to disallow sniping, then all of the companies that were there solely for that purpose will be gone overnight and we'll have to read another article about how many jobs were lost.
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
So if you're a proponent of the proxy bid system: USE IT. It's working as intended. If you bid what you were willing to pay to start with, then no sniper will ever pay less for the item than you were willing to.
That's what I don't get about people complaining about sniping saying that people should just use proxy bidding: if they themselves proxy bid then the way others bid (sniping or not) is of no concern.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
You are confusing sniping with the proxy/autobid process.
:-)
If one person selects proxy bid (in other words, they tell ebay to auto bid up to a given point) then all works up to the max bid process (or at least up to the point where the sniper runs out of time).
But if two folks are using sniping software (outside of ebay's control), then this is what happens:
10 seconds before the auction ends, the software for one user checks the current bid (say $10) and then submits a new bid with the minimum increment ($1) up to their max. This is not $100, but $11 (yes, you can configure the software to use higher increments to avoid the issue of getting a bid rejected because another sniper already put in for $2 rather than $1, but that is a different discussion for a different time)
The next user comes in and does the same thing, again incrementing by the minimum.
Depending on how soon before auction end the stuff starts, they only have a chance to get 3 or 4 of these exchanges in before the timer goes off and the bid ends.
Now, if you had one bid sniper vs the autobidder, again, each resulting in an automatic 'bid minimum' increase, the sniper would only have a chance to up the bid 3 or 4 times, depending on server response time and how soon before the end they started. So in our hypothetical case, the bids may get up to $20 or so if there is time to do 5-6 rounds (bid, check current price, resubmit new bid with minimum increment). The autobidder will win only because the ebay software will respond instantly (latency of 0).
Assuming a latency of 0, then yes, the sniper and the autobidder will end up with the same result as no sniper and everybody using autobidders. Of course, only in a physics class can we assume a latency of 0.
I actually prefer Craigslist to E-Bay. It's expensive to ship anything to Alaska, especially when 99% of the power sellers on E-Bay refuse to ship via anything but Fed Ex and UPS. Sure, there's UPS ground to AK, but it's only about $3-5 cheaper than 2nd Day Air (the next option we have), and takes two weeks instead of two days. So if I am looking at a small package on E-Bay, I know it's going to cost at least $25-30 to ship it. It's not unusual for me to look at 75-150% of the purchase price for shipping on E-Bay. So instead, I usually just try to find it on Craigslist and pay *no* shipping. Craigslist rocks, IMHO.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?