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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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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that's what I don't get. They lowered the price for insertion fees and raised the final value fees. That way power sellers will lose a LOT less money when they list a thousand items and only 10% of them sell. Plus since gallery pics are pretty much mandatory if you ever want anyone to look at your item and bandwidth is cheaper, they lowered the price on them or made them free or something. It was a fantastic idea that benefits mostly power sellers. I don't get it. If anyone knows what they're bitching about besides glitches, please do post it.
FYI I'm against power sellers. They're impossible to communicate with, they don't know anything about the items they're selling, and they take forever to ship items. If you want exactly what you want and want it fast, you gotta buy it from someone with under 250 feedback. The only thing I can think of that power seller would be pissed about is not being able to leave negative feedback for buyers anymore. But you know what, when I leave negative feedback because one of those idiots shipped me the wrong item 2 weeks later, I don't have to fear retribution anymore. That was the best update out of them all and if power sellers don't like it, too bad!
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A small tweak could help fix that -- allow the seller and buyer to each leave feedback, but keep feedback hidden until after both have left their feedback, or until the window for leaving feedback has ended, whichever comes first. That way even the seller from your example would get bad feedback; not leaving feedback for the buyers would only grant them a window where the feedback isn't visible.
And as pointed out by an Ebay executive when the new system went into place -- if a buyer has bad service from a seller, and then gets hit with retaliatory feedback after leaving an honest message -- that buyer is not coming back. And he's right -- I've become extremely hesitant to buy anything off Ebay after getting hit unfairly by retaliatory feedback. That hurts all sellers if enough people decide to just bag it. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080206-ebays-new-feedback-policy-no-real-feedback.html
And of course, retaliation is no secret:
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good