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EBay Deal Irritates Individual Sellers
Dekortage writes "EBay's recent deal with Buy.com appears to be seriously irritating its veteran individual sellers. The deal allows Buy.com and other large fixed-price retailers to list millions of items on eBay without paying listing fees, and appears to be the direction that eBay will follow in the future. Understandably, individual sellers are outraged. 'I've paid eBay many hundreds of thousands in fees over the past several years and believed them when they talked about a level playing field. And they just plain and simple are going back on their word.' This comes after the dire prediction that eBay is losing its popularity."
According to a recent MSN-Zogby poll,
WTF?! Those numbers are huge!
MSN-Zogby, IIRC, conducts online polls. Online polls tend to violate a wide array of rules regarding statistical bias.
From vaporware to $7.6B in revenue in 2007(a $2B increase from 2006), basically done within a decade. I think the word I'm searching for is 'quitcherbitchin'. On it's way out? Not likely.
I don't see things getting better. Craigslist auction anyone?
You do know that eBay owns a stake in Craigslist of over 20% of outstanding shares? Craigslist will not get you away from eBay.
why do people insist on calling ebay an auction site?
it's not
auctions dont end at a certain time.
the end when the bids are no longer increasing.
plain and simple
Wrong.
Methinks you need to review the definition of "auction," troll.
I used to do about 150 ebay auctions/month all in the $5-20 range, but I stopped a couple of years ago. They kept raising prices to the point I was making them more money than me (especially after paypal fees), and even then they were pushing aside the individual seller. They've raised fees since I stopped using them too. Just recently I wanted to sell some computer equipment, and found their fees to be so high I'm better off not wasting my time listing it. They've priced themselves out of the market and alienated their core customer base at the same time. And they're surprised they're losing popularity?
The IBM and Amazon examples don't really work here: Amazon still sells books (whether they have their own warehouses or not is basically invisible to the customer) and the PC, no matter how huge its impact may have been, was never more than a small fraction of IBM's revenue stream. If Amazon stopped selling books entirely, or IBM abandoned their mainframe business, then their shareholders would be up in arms, and rightly so.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The IBM and Amazon examples don't really work here:
You are missing the point. The point is that companies often exit businesses that they were successful in. Even if they keep them they become a much smaller piece of the pie. I can come up with other examples if you like. How about Nintendo which started as a card company? Or 3M which originally sold corundum for grinding wheels? The point is that lots of businesses exit particular marketplaces all the time.
There are lots of auction services out there - Reviews from 2008 of reasonable eBay competition
From Craigslist Factsheet:
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
They also provide a nice list of FFL's so you can get your gun shipped to you.
You mad
I've said it before, I'll say it again: eBay is a broken sealed-first-price-auction where suckers are allowed to show their hand before conclusion. Anyone who bids in anything but the last few seconds of an auction is a _sucker_. Why announce to the world what you're willing to pay so that competitors can re-evaluate their bid and then one-up you?
Also, uBid does exactly what you say. I've won quite a number of auctions on there because of people used to the eBay system who snipe in the last minute or so and then don't pay attention to the auction after that.
I am the technology products seller mentioned in the article. I have a BS in Comp Sci. from the University of Maine, 95', and have been a Software Engineer at several .com's until I wrote the code that is running my website (http://www.teckwave.com/#showMostViewed), eBay Store (http://stores.ebay.com/TECKWAVE), Amazon, and Google Base accounts.
It's written in Java using the Google Web Toolkit for the website and several Web Service API's for integration with the various marketplaces, distributors, and warehouses. It runs on Amazon's EC2 compute cloud and uses S3 for image hosting.
My intention from the start was to create a scalable software platform to make selling online easy, and I think I've about done it. Buy.com coming into eBay and getting their backroom deal has accelerated my plans. No hard feelings though, business is business.
If anyone's interested in helping me scale this platform please email me... tlibby *at* TECKWAVE.com
Not only their business model. Their staff are mentally challenged too. Craigslist has the MOST restrictive mail servers I have EVER SEEN. I think military email servers on the edges of their networks are less stringent on who they receive email from. If you have an ISP email account or a free email account from one of the big providers, you don't have a problem. If you operate your own mail server, you may have a problem.
Craigslist requires that you have a ReverseDNS on the connecting IP address that matches the domain in the FROM HEADER, not the HELO/EHLO. That's insane. Only large corporations can do that in the first place.
I bugged those people for over a month and they would not budge on anything. Their policy does not even make SPAM impossible either. It just makes it impossible for any small business with their own domain to email Craigslist at all. You can only get through on the Postmaster account, not even staff accounts. The funny part, that their staff is not smart enough to understand, is that SPAMMERS can hijack whole network address spaces and add any ReverseDNS that they want. They actually think ReverseDNS is some sort of super shield they can hide behind to eliminate all SPAM.
The frustrating thing is that even businesses offering hosted email services cannot communicate with Craigslist since they are demanding a wholly separate IP address with a corresponding ReverseDNS for EVERY domain that you service. So it is legitimate people that get hurt, not the SPAMMERS.
Craigslist is aware of the problem. Their solution? Get a free email account at Google. What I love about that little gem of customer support wisdom, is that the user then calls me up and asks why I am so incompetent that I cannot even deliver an email to Craigslist. I have to carefully explain to them that Craigslist is refusing their email and why.
Maybe I am just ranting here, but I seriously doubt Craiglist is going to scale up in the future when they have people like this running their networks in the back rooms.
Craigslist requires that you have a ReverseDNS on the connecting IP address that matches the domain in the FROM HEADER, not the HELO/EHLO. That's insane. Only large corporations can do that in the first place.
Wowee zowee... I never realized that my half-dozen computers and my big, lazy butt qualified as a large corporation. But since I've had proper reverse DNS on my mail server for that last 5 years, that's obviously the only explanation.
You seem to be confused about how eBay's proxy bidding system works. That's OK, you're not alone. Based on the prevalence of "sniping" programs and people complaining about losing auctions due to "sniping", it seems nobody understands proxy bidding.
Here's how it works: You bid what you are willing to pay. No more, no less. eBay then bids ONLY AS MUCH AS NECESSARY to make you the winning bidder. Competitors DO NOT get to see your maximum bid. The seller DOES NOT get to see your maximum bid. The only person who knows is you, and maybe some admin at eBay.
Example: You are bidding on an auction. You decide that you are willing to pay exactly $21 for the item (you want to beat people willing to pay the nice round figure of $20, but $22 is just plain outside of your budget). Let's say the current high bid stands at $17. If you bid $21, you will be the winning bidder at $18. Even if you bid $10,000,000 your visible bid will only be $18 (until someone else bids higher than $18, that is).
I have participated in many auctions on eBay, and the only ones I have ever "lost" were due to the simple fact that someone else was willing to pay more than I was for the item in question. Sometimes they do it in the last 4 seconds of the auction (which is admittedly annoying), but they still have to be willing to pay more than I am.
It seems that a lot of people care more about winning the auction (like it's some kind of contest) than they do about getting the merchandise for an acceptable price. To me, THEY are the suckers.
Knowledge != Intelligence
Bidding will continue until at least (some time) plus up to 24 hours (randomly set)
I've used auction sites that did a variety things to extend the auction time, including what you suggest as well as adding time past the last bid. They sound great when you have lost an auction to a sniper, but in reality they have much more severe drawbacks than Ebay's system. Ebay's fixed end time is by far the best online mechanism I have run into. Online auctions really are not the same as outcry auctions, and work much better if different rules are used.
Ebay has a LOT of problems but this is not one of them.
Ever notice how a bunch of stuff on ebay is $0.02 + $5.00 shipping?? Honestly that's got to be a scam
Yes it is a scam, against Ebay. EBay charges a percentage of the selling price not including shipping. Sellers try to keep their Ebay fees lower by inflating the shipping costs. It is strictly in violation of Ebay terms of service.
I'd strongly suggest going into the Ebay message boards and spending some time there before buying and selling on Ebay. You will understand the site much better, which will lead to a far better experience.
You know, the swap meet/ flea market used to be fun. You could go thru peoples junk (from their own garage) and find cool stuff and great deals.. Then during the late 80's, it all started turning to Chineese junk and dealers of it. The last time I went to a swap meet, there were like 30 rows of "import" crap and only one row of garage sellers. Ebay is headed that way. RIP