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).
I wonder if this layoff has more to do with the online tax reform on small businesses.