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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."
With no real competition in the online auctions and micropayment system, I don't see things getting better. Craigslist auction anyone?
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Even though, this being about eBay, having the LAST post is the only one that counts.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Unless it is in a binding contract, with severe penalties, you should never expect a company to "keep its word." This is especially true when keeping said word affects the almighty Bottom Line. Cash is king, peon.
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.
Things like this, creeping fees, attempting to wrangle everybody into using paypal, and their generally horrid customer service is driving ebays userbase away in droves. Even my dad has commented on how the volume of craigslist ads has been increasing lately. Naturally it will take quite a while for such a juggernaut to die out, but my personal suspicion is that the age of ebay has ended.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I know several people who used to do a lot of business on Ebay who are rapidly becoming disgusted with it because of its clear preference for giant sellers over individuals; I'm not at all surprised to hear that this is a general trend.
Why is it that so many executives feel the need to destroy a successful business model? Ebay started as an online auction house where individuals could find a worldwide audience for cool, quirky stuff, and it was wildly successful as such. If its executives want to start a site for selling commercial products with free-floating prices -- which is essentially what they're turning Ebay into -- then fine, but why are they abandoning the business that made them successful in the first place? Ebay was one of the few real success stories to come out of the dot-com boom. It's really sad to see them throwing that away now.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Some people really make me wonder about humanity.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm getting a little more and more irritated about this stuff with ebay, and I would honestly jump ship if there was another decent auction-style competitor that is close to the ebay of the early 2000s.
Ebay is doing some SERIOUS wrong by the small seller (mostly through their fee issues, I don't think the feedback issues are as bad as some sellers try and make them out to be), and despite their platitudes, is turning into Amazon-lite. I have no huge problem with this, but they really need to make a decision on who they want to cater to and either split into two divisions or send the small-time buyers and sellers somewhere else.
I completely understand that businesses need to make money, and the buydotcom route may be one way to do that. However, ebay is WIDELY opening a door for another company to undercut them in the small seller market, and those of us who collect, buy, and sell anything used on a small scale and aren't interested in just shopping online for new stuff that we can get down the street at Wal-mart or wherever.
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.
I no longer use EBay because of the increased risk of dealing with people that don't keep their end of the deal (e.g. sellers that don't deliver the product or don't deliver a product that was described in the auction), and the fact that EBay was taking no steps to effectively deal with the issue.
Since then EBay has begun pushing PayPal harder, and that might also have been a reason for me to not use EBay.
The dilution of the auction space with fixed-price retailers is a big annoyance. Maybe it might also be a reason to quit.
If EBay wants to be in the business of aggregating retailers, then maybe it should register a new domain name and set it up, and provide links between it and the EBay site.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Their anti gun policy made me stop using ebay years ago....
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
Anecdotal, I know, but even in the past few months, some of the not-so-mainstream stuff on auction (e.g. computer parts) have seemed to dry up.
My missus used to be able to buy (and occasionally sell) a lot of antique and classic toys on eBay as a hobby. There were literally dozens of pages of auctions for the stuff at any one time for her to pick and choose from. Nowadays, there's only a handful of pages in motion at best, and little is selling (not just on her part, but in most of the auctions concerning antique and classic toys).
Poking around, I see similar patterns for other, similar things.
I don't think it's just recent policies, either (though they certainly don't help) - eBay is (just IMHO) getting one hell of a reputation as a giant fence for stolen goods, a hotbed of scams, and a place where you can't quite get the deals that you used to get.
Recently, they've tried to boost things by having $1 listing fees for certain items, and I'm sure they've been doing some offline marketing (but again, not like they used to).
I dunno... these are just personal observations, but I strongly suspect that they are indicative of a larger shift away from eBay... and the Buy.com deal kinda shows me that the company is getting a bit nervous about its long-term prospects.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.
Ebay has name recognition. That's all...
Sadly that is not all eBay has. EBay has network effects working for it which makes it VERY hard to displace them no matter how much money and talent is thrown at the problem. Buyers go where the sellers are and vice versa. Amazon and Yahoo both tried to take market share from eBay and both failed miserably. There are lots of other auction and e-commerce sites out there but none of them are likely to displace eBay anytime soon.
That's not to say eBay won't cut their own throat (they might) but that's pretty much what it will take to make a real dent in eBay's market share. Ebay's business tends towards a natural monopoly as do many marketplaces.
EBay degenerates into an alternative, inconvenient way to buy from major retailers (WHY would they list on eBay instead of their own websites anyway?) and somebody will set up a real auction site where you can buy used stuff from individuals and small companies. You know, like eBay used to be.
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?
I know several people who used to do a lot of business on Ebay who are rapidly becoming disgusted with it because of its clear preference for giant sellers over individuals; I'm not at all surprised to hear that this is a general trend.
The only sellers that should be disgusted are ones with their head in the sand. EBay's costs mostly fixed so they grow through volume. You get volume through larger customers who can provide that volume. Economic inevitability.
EVERY non-regulated company I'm aware of besides eBay provides volume discounts in some fashion for larger customers. I was an individual seller as well as a high volume power seller. One of the (many) reasons I no longer sell through eBay is precisely BECAUSE they provided no incentive for me to bring additional business to them. They kept raising rates instead of providing incentives to bring additional volume. Basically they priced me (and lots of others) out of their marketplace. It was too expensive as an individual or a business to continue to sell on eBay.
but why are they abandoning the business that made them successful in the first place?
The short answer is that they decided a long time ago to become a publicly traded company and the growth demands of being public is the deal with the devil you make to get equity funding. That's why companies don't really want to go public unless the owners are either cashing out (private equity) or they have no other choice. Had eBay remained a privately held company they could have chosen to stay their present size.
Businesses out grow their original business model all the time. Some businesses simply do not scale beyond a certain point. Amazon started as an online bookseller that had no warehouses of their own. That only scaled to a point. IBM got out of the personal computer business not long ago. That particular niche of the industry just didn't hold enough growth/profit potential for them anymore and was more of a distraction than an asset. When you are a publicly traded company shareholders demand growth and eBay has hit a wall with being the world's premier online flea market.
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.
Guns, alcohol, and many others can be a regulated or restricted market. There are age-limits, and various others (permits required, restrictions against owning a firearm, etc) which makes the whole thing rather complicated. When your business is general-auctions, some things are best left to the specialists.
I had an item which I was bidding on, but got a bit too pricey for me. About a week later, it popped up again in a second-chance, offer, so I snagged it.
Now, apparently the second-chance offer was a scan wherein somebody hacked the seller's account and was trying to get people to pay with an alternate email address. However, I paid through the proper channels (pay by paypal button) etc and the money went to the *correct* seller's account.
Of course, about an hour or two later the seller's account was temporary closed, and the auction removed. So I called the seller, who indicated that his ebay account had been hacked. I pointed out that I had paid to *his* (not the hacker's) paypal account, which was not hacked, and he offered to refund my money.
2 days later, no refund
So I had to go through hell with a bunch of the morons at paypal (who will thoroughly disclaim that they work with the same company, though ebay owns them now), pointing out that *EBAY* had closed the auction due to the hacked account. They told me that I could only file a 'did not receive' or 'not as expected' claim, but if I filed did not receive and then something arrived (even if it was a load of bricks), I could not later put in a "not-as-expected" claim. I also couldn't put in a "did not receive" claim yet because I had to give the seller time to send the item (which came from a bad listing, go figure).
So time goes by, and finally after days of calling them, they put the damn dispute in. Another several weeks I spent waiting while the seller simply ignored the dispute and didn't respond at all, and then it went in my favor. I got my money back - actually, less than my money back, did you know that on both a purchase and refund Visa will service-charge your ass for changing currencies, that's another story though - and was able to look laptop shopping *outside* of ebay.
The sad thing, that seller's account is still active, and he's happily still selling laptops. I couldn't even leave negative feedback because the auction I had been screwed on had been taken down by ebay.
So maybe the seller's account wasn't hacked, so he didn't commit fraud that way. He sure as hell did by keeping my money though, and forcing me to fight to get it back.
What does that tell me? Ebay, and paypal, support fraud, and they support fraudulent sellers. Screw them.
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
Maybe this is actually some sort of devil's bargain to put an end to the scam best buy has been running on e-bay for years. Best buy has this network of 2nd parties like "2ndTurn" and "DealTree", that simply sell-off Bestbuy closeouts. The scam is that they don't disclose they are best buy agents. So when you get to the check-out you suddenly see this whopping charge for local taxes you were not expecting.
2ndTurn lists it's address as Texas on all it's auctions so people outside of texas don't expect to pay tax since there's no @ndTrun brick and mortar stores.
But 2ndTurn is just BestBuy in sheeps clothing. Since they are one and the same they have to charge the brick-and-mortar state taxes. Yet all the complaints and abuse never gets connected to best buy.
It's a screw because people take this into account when they bid and then wind up paying 8 to 10% more than they bargained for. So best buy makes more money.
Moreover 2ndturn is vicious and aggressive about people who refuse to pay after they disclose this.
So maybe this is just
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
One feature alone would instantly pull me from eBay to whatever competitor there is: search and filter by "used item" vs "new item" and also "individual seller" vs. "large retail outlet".
When I go to online auctions, I'm looking for a deal on something used. I'm tired of living in a society where paying full priced new is the only option: it means individuals who'd be happy with a used widget have to spend more and our landfills fill up with still-useful widgets.
When I search eBay now for (tools/computers/whatever), I get 90% listings from large businesses selling new, usually crappy knock-off, items. I don't want a cheap chinese $20 wood router that barely functions. I want a used porter-cable router from some hobbyist who is downsizing his garage or upgrading to a newer tool. But the floods of cheap chinese crap are all I can find on eBay!
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
No, just because you don't understand the complaint doesn't make it invalid. Yes, the people who care more about winning than about getting the merchandise at a decent price are suckers. The reality, however, is that because there are so many of those people, all of whom bid with bots, the odds of anyone -ever- buying -anything- at a reasonable price on eBay rapidly approaches zero, making it a waste of people's time to even bother bidding unless it is at the last second in hopes that your random snipe bot might generate the lucky closing bid and do so at a price that is still under your personal maximum for the item.
Also, searching for items on eBay takes time. If that auction is then snatched by somebody else at the last second for only a dollar more than your high bid, people naturally feel cheated---not because they didn't bid what they felt the item was worth to them, but because the amount of extra money somebody else paid was so small that the value of the time they have to spend searching for another one and bidding for it exceeds the amount of extra money they would have had to pay to win the auction. That's what makes the last-second bidding thing absolutely suck for buyers.
Finally, there's the problem of snipe bidders who then turn around and resell the products on eBay. They calculate the average selling price minus fees and shipping costs and effectively guarantee that no product will ever sell below that price. In effect, this creates an artificial supply shortage and drives up the average selling price of goods for everyone. Of course, eBay doesn't want to stop that because they rake in money from fees every time somebody does it.
And then there's the issue of shill bidding---somebody bidding against you to find out what your maximum bid is and make you pay as much as possible. Of course, they might accidentally go too far on occasion, but odds are somebody will outbid them, and if not, they could always retract the bid (and then rebid as a different user for just a little less than your maximum bid). It's probably safe to assume that such things happen far more than eBay would like us to believe.
I have participated in many auctions on eBay, and with only one or two exceptions, the only ones I have ever "won" were because I bid low initially, then sniped against myself and the other snipers at the end (and even then, success is limited). The system is utterly broken as it stands now, and I have basically stopped buying anything through eBay unless it has either a "buy-it-now" option or an "or-best-offer" option.... Either every bid should require you to key in the text from a CAPTCHA or bidding should be extended by five minutes every time someone bids within the last minute of the auction. Either one would fix the problem. Until the problem is fixed, eBay is, IMHO, an utter waste of my time.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.