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.
If you want crap, Craigslist is available too.
Google stock info
Ebay has had a major drop in its stock value over the past few months. I believe that, since the actual number of auctions/bidders has dropped, this was an attempt to get more money from those people still doing decent business... Power Sellers.
Seeing as to how stock is back on the rise, it appears to have worked from that standpoint. At least for the time being...
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
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.
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.
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.
Sniping is bad from a seller's perspective.
I bought my house in an auction that allowed sniping. At 11pm I submitted a bid for a property of around $200k. The other party had no chance to resubmit a bid at that time since the auction was closing 15 minutes after that.
The property itself was appraised at $240k.
I knew that the other party would want to revise their bid if they thought they would lose it. They were trying to benefit from the seller needing to sell fast, but didn't expect someone to jump in at the last minute.
So why is that bad for the seller? Since the auction allowed for my bid sniping, the other party never had a chance to put in a counter-offer. I was prepared to go up to $215k, and, judging by their reaction, they probably would have done the same.
The sniping cost the seller nearly $15k because there was no period to re-evaluate the bids.
(Not that I feel bad, I needed the property fast too since my previous home was washed away in a flood. I was just pointing out that the seller lost out on some $ because sniping was allowed)
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
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.
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.
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
If they would bid higher, they should have bid higher.
I agree to a point, that the kind of tools who nickel and dime and ratchet the price up should be allowed to fool around if it amuses them to do so. But the rest of us want to get along with things.
I go to a LOT of real-life auctions, so I know quite a bit about the dynamics of auctions. eBay is a proxy bidding system. An 'extend by 15 minutes' rule sounds like an incredible opportunity for a lot of 'gaming' that is far worse than things the way they are. Hell, nickel and dimers could keep an auction going for hours with such an arrangement. A real-life auctioneer would put a stop to that kind of bs immediately, an automatic extension just changes the rules of the 'gaming' it does not 'fix' anything.