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EBay Deal Irritates Individual Sellers

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish dept.

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."

2 of 382 comments (clear)

  1. The harder they fall... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Ebay has name recognition. That's all. Everything else they do can be done by another business following a similar model. It's not like they invented auctions, after all.

  2. Google doesn't want the liability by sjbe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Many of the hard-core ebay whiners on its website are practically BEGGING google to open up an auction site, mostly because it will have practically millions as a buyer base overnight.

    Google doesn't want the liability. If anything kills eBay it's going to be getting sued by every luxury good maker on the planet. EBay claims they want to ensure authentic goods but is unwilling to take the steps needed to ensure authenticity - namely physical inspection of items and their paper trail. Such physical inspection is completely outside Google's business model so they would be in the same boat eBay is liability-wise.

    All that of course assumes Google could take marketshare from eBay where Amazon and Yahoo failed. That's a BIG assumption.