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eBay Battles Power Sellers

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the something-to-think-about dept.

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.

6 of 370 comments (clear)

  1. Re:eBay has great solutions! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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 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.
  2. Re:eBay has great solutions! by artificial_grey · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Let me fix that 2nd one for you:

    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.
  3. the final straw by Dzimas · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Alternatives... by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:I'm still lost... by zacronos · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:I'm still lost... by anagama · · Score: 5, Insightful
    No -- the power sellers are absolutely wrong. Anyone who has bought something knows that the sellers use feedback in a retaliatory fashion. Ebay realized that buyers were not trusting the rating system. Take away buyers' trust, and the system will fall apart. Sure, the fees are made from sellers but if they can't sell, they'll quit ebay.

    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:

    ... But one of the criticisms of the eBay feedback system--probably the largest public forum for judging the reputation of a business in the world--is that its ratings are far too positive to be believed.

    Go ahead, browse the site. You'll see that the vast majority of sellers have 99+% positive ratings. If you were grading on a curve, a 98% would probably be equivalent to a "C" on a report card--and it's relatively hard to find buyers with this rating. Below 97%? Forget it. No one's going to buy from you.

    There are some who point to the consistently high ratings as a sign the system is working. After all, so this line of argument goes, all the bad sellers are simply weeded out. They get bad ratings, they can't sell, they withdraw their sorry little wares from eBay. End of story.

    But there's another, less positive explanation: People are afraid of what is referred to in the eBay community as "retaliatory feedback." That's when a seller (or a buyer--it can happen on both sides) becomes annoyed or enraged at a negative comment posted by someone else about them, and in retaliation posts a negative comment in return.

    --
    What changed under Obama? Nothing Good