I can't say I am surprised as they have spent the last half decade or more trying to reinvent themselves as some sort of Amazon marketplace for companies selling new goods. Policies and rates have repeatedly penalised sellers ever harsher. It is now so buyer-centric that eBay is a safe place for buyers to experiment with their first fraud.
In the process they have thrown away their reason for being and why they grew. At one point just about everyone I knew used to get rid of their spare tat on eBay and post a link. One or two had nice little hobby businesses selling collectables etc. Now I doubt many of them remember it exists. No one I know sells on it any more. I used to get rid of all my old IT kit on eBay, yet now I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot barge pole to sell anything.
That is equally reflected in what's there when looking as a buyer - mostly company sales and endless cheap rubbish and far fewer private sales.
We launched a new brand of cell phone mount products several months ago. We were set up and going on sales with Amazon in a trivial amount of time. Meanwhile, on Ebay. Tried to start a new account to match our brand name. Pretty much immediately banned, I think it was because I used a Chinese cell phone number in my contact info with the account, but not sure, as it was never actually clear why I was banned. Then, after about a week of back-and-forths proving I personally am an American and we were selling with an American corporation. Got the account reinstated. Finally, trying to list the products in coordination with our shopify store was a nightmare, the products wouldn't list, and as I recall we had another round of account troubles due to just trying to list our products. I finally said screw Ebay, I give up. Well, surprise. If you can't onboard sellers then good luck staying in business!
eBay used to be great when it was genuine people selling their spare stuff. I used to buy and sell a lot on eBay and it was great - picked up a lot of great secondhand stuff at decent prices, and found new homes for kit I didn't need any more.
But for the past several years it seems to be dominated by "professional" sellers doing buy-it-now bulk-sells of new cheap
stuff shipped directly from China/Hong Kong that takes 6-8 weeks to arrive then when it does it is often awful quality and/or not what was in the listing. This ruined it for me.
There are a few decent secondhand sales still happening though - e.g. I got a really decent refurbished secondhand projector a year or two ago from a guy that specialised in projectors, and in the UK you can now collect your eBay orders from highstreet stores for free. It is just a shame that these genuine sellers are drowned out by the crap-pushers selling cheap tat.
I used to use eBay to buy/sell musical instruments. It was a typically a great platform for that. Then in 2009, I had a terrible experience with PayPal withholding my money because the buyer complained that the $1,000 keyboard I sold's AC adapter wasn't working. I offered to refund the cost of a new adapter and everything, but they buyer kept stalling and it was impossible to get anyone on the phone at PayPal to help resolve the situation -- my money just sat in limbo.
I think the whole ordeal took over 30 days to resolve. $1,000 held up in uncertainty over a $10 part.
Thankfully, Reverb came around for people like me. They are truly a joy to work with. I had one instance where the buyer seemed like he could be sketchy, mostly because he was from a foreign country and the shipping on the item would likely be a large percentage of the cost of the item itself. My item was somewhat rare, but not sought after, high quality, or that collectible, so it was only sold for around $500. However, I didn't want to expose myself to any fraud risk, and Reverb walked me through everything I needed to do to ensure that even if the sale was fraudulent, Reverb would take the hit and not me.
I'm sure running a massive marketplace at scale is hard and since eBay and Amazon have both tipped the scales considerably towards the buyer, that that's where problems tend to impact worse and occur more frequently. But the seller horror stories are impossible to ignore. I'd have a hard time selling anything worth more than $100 on eBay anymore.
> But for the past several years it seems to be dominated by "professional" sellers doing buy-it-now bulk-sells of new cheap stuff shipped directly from China/Hong Kong that takes 6-8 weeks to arrive then when it does it is often awful quality and/or not what was in the listing. This ruined it for me.
It depends on what you're buying I think, and whether you actually care that it's a cheap knock-off... and whether you're willing to dispute it if it turns out to be genuinely awful. (Why wouldn't you?) In my case I bought a laptop keyboard at some point that I didn't really expect to find anywhere at a reasonable price, so I kind of expected what I got to be a cheap knock-off, and sure enough it was, and did have minor problems. But it wasn't a big deal; I used it and it did the job and I was happy. On the other hand, just 2-3 weeks ago I went looking for -- and found & bought -- a used version of a particular scanner I wanted at ~10% of the MSRP (which BTW still sells at near the MSRP right now if you find it new-ish), and it's been working just fine. It's just not the kind of thing that sellers sell in bulks... and I frankly don't expect I could even find a fake version of it no matter how hard I tried.
Agree wholeheartedly. Unfortunately the prices don't seem to reflect the cheap "knock-off" products that are sold. I have since moved on to Wish and AliExpress, where the delivery times are also 4-6 weeks but the prices are 1/5-1/10th of eBay listings and the quality (in my personal experience) is at least on par or better, not to mention there is often a much larger selection.
We are lucky in Austria though, for 2nd hand stuff we have willhaben.at which everyone uses and is basically a mix of eBay and Craigslist (which we officially have @ vienna.craigslist.at but after years is still mostly just spam listings and is therefore IMO unusable).
My wife used to run a small volume eBay shop, maybe 50 listings at a time. About once a month she would have to deal with outright fraud, and eBay almost always sided with the buyers. I'm talking about things like brand new items of clothing returned completely destroyed by the buyer---huge tears, burn marks, etc---and my wife would be forced to refund the purchase price and shipping costs. It certainly wasn't worth her time or all of the stress.
eBay is rampant with fraud..I have a buddy that does a tremendous amount of of business there and the amount of crazy crap he puts up with is insane. "I just lost 2k today, well back to work"
The scammers on eBay are bold because they know eBay doesn't care at all about the sellers.
Interesting, I don't discount your experience, but with PayPal/eBay sides with the buyer, case closed. Their customer support to a seller might as out right have "fuck off" in their script.
I paid for my university tuition using eBay. I’d buy broken printers and repair them and sell them.
Eventually someone started buying printers from me, claiming they were broken and getting refunds. They would open new accounts and do it under different names, to the point where one week over half my sales were all scammed in the same way. I was out 5 printers, and had no recourse. That ended a very successful 3 year venture.
I totally agree. I have largely abandoned eBay, and I was an early adopter. Their policies are definitely buyer-centric, but the prices frankly are rarely that great, so when I am looking to buy something I can usually find it somewhere else cheaper with less hassle. When I want to sell something, I just put it on Facebook or Craigslist. Not great, but no worse than eBay and less likely to get scammed.
For me, eBay is the 99 cent store of online shopping. I'm not interested in the auctions anymore, and if I am there to buy something, it's because I was trying to save a buck & it showed up as the cheapest place to buy something on Google Shopping.
I enjoy using eBay. I can sometimes get faster and cheaper shipping than using Amazon. I have also bought all of my smartphones and laptops from here for the past 5 years.
I wonder if this layoff has more to do with the online tax reform on small businesses.
As a buyer it is often excellent, particularly as nearly all their policies now heavily favour the buyer.
Buyers need sellers and those same policies have put off many (most?) of the private and small sellers. That's removed many of the products I liked to buy and the very reason I used to visit and browse regularly. It's still handy for toner, and a few other random purchases, I even bought my Macbook via eBay.
No there are also scammers targetting buyers. In my case some script outbidding everyone seconds before the end of an auction to reveal bid limits, cancelling the bid, and setting a new bid £1 below the bid limit to max out people’s bids. Ebay support clearly uninterested in curbing this (the account that did that cancelled many other bids in the days after I reported this, having never completed a single transaction). I think their are outright complicit.
Ebay is a scammer nest and I will stay away from it.
That was their belief back then, under Meg Whitman. It didn't work too well for them, sales dropped because the site had a reputation for low-quality products and sellers who were plainly crooks. With Donahoe matters improved fairly rapidly.
There's no reason it needs to be just one or the other, especially considering a business based on network effect and, literally, market-making.
> Ms. Whitman got in a few public tussles with the “community,” as eBay’s buyers and sellers are known. One came when she made an arrangement with Disney to give it special status on the site — its own Disney Auctions page. That violated Mr. Omidyar’s founding principle that eBay would be a global platform to which any buyer or seller could come as an equal.
I hypothesize that the departure from this treatment of buyers and sellers as equals has eroded their uniquenes and therefore that part of its value.
Presumably there's plenty of competition in both the buyer-first and seller-first e-commerce spaces.
Gotta love Disney. In my humble experience with that company, it very often requests (and obtains) special treatment from business partners. It's magical.
For me it is the opposite, and I have been using eBay since the early days.
I can get from Amazon stuff that is new, that I can return with minimal fuss, at my doorstep, often next day.
Whatever savings I might get using the same item used on eBay do not compensate the time and mental strain of dealing with shipping delays, potential scammers, articles with defects "unmentioned" in the original description, non-existent warranty.
Nowadays I use it only for very specific items that cannot be found on Amazon, or just to sell spare stuff (in the very rare occasions where it's worth it).
No, there's a pretty darn crucial difference which is the reviews/reputation that you can view before you conduct the transaction. Someone with 5192 sells and 99% good reviews is probably not going to outright eat your money, but you have no idea if that's the type of person you're dealing with if you're using craigslist.
For all we know, that person blatantly ripped off 50 people. 99% sounds great, but at the volumes these massive sellers operate, a lot of people fall into that one percent.
On the other hand, if you use that criteria you exclude basically everyone who is not a commercial seller, which is one of the main points of craigslist-type sites.
> On the other hand, if you use that criteria you exclude basically everyone who is not a commercial seller, which is one of the main points of craigslist-type sites.
I was merely exaggerating criteria to get across a point regarding a very critical fundamental difference between eBay vs. Craigslist, not trying to list a comprehensive set of criteria for choosing reputable sellers. Evidently this wasn't clear, so to clarify: I also think someone who's merely sold 10-15 items of comparable prices over the past 4-5 years ago can also be sufficiently trustworthy if their reviews are 100% positive. And again, none of this is to say these criteria could not be relaxed or tightened depending on the situation, item price, etc... and, in general, you should also incorporate your common sense (which I would hope could go without saying).
No, I don't think they can. They can "game" maybe 15 reviews, but I have yet to be scammed by (or even hear of someone being scammed by) someone with thousands of reviews when they're almost all positive. It's kind of absurd to suggest the system is similar to that of craigslist where you generally have no data points whatsoever.
Something I heard about recently was businesses offering to buy accounts from legit users, priced based on how old the account is and % rating. Obviously that's something that could be abused by a scammer (buy trustworthy account and sell as many empty laptop boxes as you can before you get closed down).
I think it was ads popping up on FB asking to buy eBay accounts that made me aware of it but can't find anything right now on a quick Google search.
A couple of days ago I saw some tablets being sold for about 1/10th of their normal price by a seller with an old account and good feedback. But looking into it more I found that their only current sales listings were duplicates of the same tablet offer, and looking at past feedback it was mainly buys rather than sells and usually for household items and stuff that seemed personal rather than business related. Not exactly conclusive but it smelt funny enough that I didn't risk a purchase (I realise lots of people will just say that the low price makes it obvious, too good to be true means it isn't true etc... my own life experience has shown otherwise and I've probably had some bargains that those people would have missed out on).
I just tried to find the listing again and it seems to have disappeared - I feel it might have been a scam.
I enjoy using eBay as a buyer, been using it for 10 years and hundreds of purchases, only sold a few times but it's always been ok for me. There have been a few hiccoughs but I've always found some kind of resolution in the end. If the purchase is even slightly significant I check the seller's feedback out carefully. Really I think that's all that needs to be done but some people either don't know this, can't be bothered to, or don't want to spend their time in that way.
I seem to remember that the old-school method was to auction off a bunch of small-ticket items like shareware/freeware CDs, bumper stickers, etc. to build up positive reviews.
Another commonly reported one is paying for an item by Paypal then collecting. Once you have the goods you report the item as undelivered[0]. eBay ask for proof of delivery that you can't supply, so automatically refund.
Has been happening for years, but has become more prevalent recently.
Last time I risked selling on eBay I spent a good part of the listing opting out of eBay Ts&Cs: Cash only, collection only, Paypal will be instantly refunded etc. Probably meant eBay could have cancelled the listing, but it worked.
Proof of delivery? Registered mail or even tracking will do it (at least in Australia, dunno what Royal Mail give you). I can send a package that requires a signature at the other end.
That's if you send it, when there's a few different services with proof of delivery and some with insurance. I was calling out when the buyer visits your house/premises and collects in person, then claims to eBay the item was not received.
I'm not saying it should be this adversarial, but why not take a few photos with the buyer and the goods, them have them inspect the goods and sign a form with the date they received it and and a report on the condition?
I wouldn't think it's that weird since anyone who's rented an apartment has to do the same.
I beg to differ. In my experience (a small sample set of 1), Ebay sided with me, the seller, and not the buyer.
A gentleman from Italy purchased an old book I was selling. He disputed the transaction, saying the book had never arrived; however, the Italian post said they had delivered the book.
I mean at that point when the post office agrees they had the package, they literally cannot logically blame you, because you could not have had any fault in this decision. What else were you supposed to do, fly over and hand it over to them in person? The onus can only logically be on the receiver to make sure they get the package the post office delivers, not on you.
I understand the trouble starts when there's plausible deniability and no witness around. How do you prove they shipped rocks? How do they prove they didn't? At that point it really could be either person's fault, and their policy seems to be to blame it on the seller. That's what people mean when they say eBay "always" sides with the buyer. They don't mean that this is literally true even when it clearly doesn't make sense.
Yup. PP will freeze your whole transaction without notice if the buyer flags you for any reason without explanation and you can forget arbitration. Good Lucky.
Then file a refund request. Ebay will eventually refund it if the seller can't provide a tracking.
You can also spin it any number of other ways like if you get the item and the seller requests you to return the item then you just ship back a broken version.
In the process they have thrown away their reason for being and why they grew. At one point just about everyone I knew used to get rid of their spare tat on eBay and post a link. One or two had nice little hobby businesses selling collectables etc. Now I doubt many of them remember it exists. No one I know sells on it any more. I used to get rid of all my old IT kit on eBay, yet now I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot barge pole to sell anything.
That is equally reflected in what's there when looking as a buyer - mostly company sales and endless cheap rubbish and far fewer private sales.