As a buyer, however, it's great so unless you have enough margins to protect you from scammers, and if you just want to sell one-off things like eBay from the 2000s, then don't bother.
As a technology platform, eBay is an embarrassment. They released features like collections that didn't work on their production website and it looks like they got rid of it entirely now. They have a half-built API that has confusing documentation, and their APIs that do work aren't very useful. Nothing about their site has changed in 20 years, and they're waiting to die, like Yahoo. I'm surprised Amazon or even etsy hasn't been able to destroy them yet, since they're a stationary target that hasn't done anything meaningful in over a decade.
Tickets are a great example. I've done thousands of ticket buys and sales alike on eBay since the 1990s. But now, eBay actually sabotages ticket searches by polluting every event with hundreds of fake "classified ads" for StubHub (which they own) so that people give up and go to StubHub instead, more than tripling their cut (at the same price point). And you can't exclude those shell ads, which don't even represent actual tickets, from your searches anymore.
And the fraud problem is very real.
On a completely different note: the internet of commerce things has always felt like some sick mashup EvE Online and game of thrones. Not only is scamming and awful behavior allowed, it is encouraged by the way rules are enforced. The net is dark and full of terrors
Hadn’t use ebay for a long time and bought and sold a dozen items last month. Had to deal with scammers twice. One fake account winning an auction I was selling then failing to pay, forcing me to relist (I assume the scam is that a fraction of the users will ship before payment). Another fake account bidding seconds before the end on an auction I was bidding for a large amount, revealing everyone’s max bid limit, then cancelling the bid, and bidding £1 below my max bid limit to max me out (all within seconds). Unimpressed by ebay’ support reaction: “it is probably a new user who isn’t familiar with how ebay works”. Seriously? I even wondered if ebay wasn’t behind that fake account, then I thought that any decent programmer with access to the back end would do something more subtle than that to max out transaction prices, then I thought: but if it is the same guys who designed the rest of the website...
...revealing everyone’s max bid limit, then cancelling the bid
I feel like auctions should be auto-pay. Or, at least have an option to list them that way. This reminds me of the time I was selling football tickets and someone did this. I had to scramble to sell these things after the person bid and never paid.
Tickets are obviously worth nothing after the event. It was a major headache, and I almost didn't sell them at all.
I've only ever had a problem as a seller twice in all those years - one scammer insisting the cheque was in the post and demanding that I send the item immediately (and leaving bad feedback when I didn't) and another reporting the items being faulty despite being (incredibly cheap) untested vintage electronics for spares.
Neither time was I left out of pocket and I'd more than happily sell stuff on there again. But I have heard the horror stories and appreciate that I may have just been incredibly lucky.
That said, a few years back I did trip some kind of threshold and was automatically upgraded to a business account, which means that my "business" (aka home) address now appears prominently on all my listings. Apparently ebay have no way to downgrade it again and have asked me to just create a new account - throwing away 15 years' worth of positive feedback in the process...
Did they reach out to you? Did they threaten to ban your account for not listing as much as before?
I cant imagine going through the effort to do a clean up of accounts, but not have a way to fix them. Not even a manual one.
I tend to use AliExpress for buying things directly from China. It's not always the easiest site to use if you want to make complex queries, but I've only had three packages out of a couple of hundred purchases not arrive - one the seller resent, the other two I flagged as not having arrived and got my money back pretty quickly - the site keeps your payment in it's own escrow service, only releasing it to the seller when you confirm receipt.
I've bought a lot of stuff from China on ali and ebay, but no single item over $30 in value. So far I'm at 100% in terms of delivered items. A lot of crushed packaging, but no damaged items. Maybe 95% in terms of on-time delivery.
What country you in? For me (in USA), the non-arrival rate is well under 1%.
>Canada and USA postal systems bear the brunt of the costs of "free" delivery.
That makes no sense. You have either been infected by propaganda, or are a propagandist yourself.
The real risks are couriers in my experience.
eBay success:
1. Avoid GSP
2. Sell only inside your region
3. Mark and photograph everything sold and keep the serial numbers.
4. If there’s any risk of something packing up, sell it spares or repair. Doesn’t affect the final value.
5. If someone pulls one just cancel the sale and move on.
6. If someone picks up from you take a signature.
7. If you do a buy it now, tick the immediate payment box.
If someone picks up from you take a signature.
If you do a buy it now, tick the immediate payment box
I wish this was possible. Any time I list an item, it doesn't matter if I mark it US shipping only, and no matter how many times I put in the description that I ship US only, I get flooded with people from other countries asking, "How much to ship to {$nation}?"
After a while I got tied of telling them I don't ship to wherever they are, and just told them that international shipping rates are listed in the description. (Which they aren't, just the note saying no international shipping.)
Then I just started ignoring the bombardment.
Then I just stopped listing stuff on eBay.
This is rather surprising, as I'd expect this to halve the prices of items.
1 Buying on ebay is nice and safe because eBay protects the buyer and will almost always rule in the buyers favour.
2. Selling on eBay is fraught with problems: The Seller is not protected from scams at all. It's easy for a buyer to buy something, and they can flag to eBay that their account was compromised. Because eBay own PayPal they then just yank back the payment until the issue is resolved, and there's nothing a Seller can do about it. See point #1
3. If you are just having a clear-out and want 'some money' for old stuff you no longer want, then yeah it's still worth putting stuff on eBay. You may not get top-dollar for what you sell but at least stuff doesn't end up in landfill.
4. Trying to sell on eBay as a new business is a complete no-no these days. The big powersellers are so entrenched that for most product lines they dominate the search results. eBay now lets you 'boost' your items for an extra fee, which is basically a scam to paper over their broken ranking systems.
5. If you are a new 'business' seller, you are limited to a set number of items up for auction at any one time, which severely limits your ability to get exposure in listings. This is a crazy policy. It is like buying shop premises in a mall, but only being allowed to stock up one shelf inside the shop for 6 months. It's just not a viable start-up situation.
6. If you want to sell as a business, doing that via Amazon is a much better bet these days. Depending on how much you want to pay you can either just list your item and manage everything else yourself, or send a palette of your stock to Amazon and let them deal with everything for you ('fullfilled by Amazon'). tbh, I've not doing this in practice yet, as my current stock doesn't qualify, but it certainly seems more new-business friendly than eBay.
Eating refunds is preferable to being strict about them, because the freewheeling refund policy invites more sales overall. This may also be a policy of the credit card companies, since they want to do more business as well.
eBay wants your experience to be just like buying from any online retailer, so they impose the same policy on their sellers. Naturally this invites the scammers. But the calculus is the same: The retailer eats the scams and bakes the cost into the selling price.
The hardship is for the "little guy" who wants to sell a few things. They can't take a statistical view -- a single loss could kill them, or eat all of their spare time dealing with it. But the little guy isn't eBay's focus. It was announced long ago in the business press, that eBay was shifting their focus from being America's Yard Sale, to being more of a regular online retail space akin to Amazon (at the time).
My thought is that eBay works for sellers if you've got a big enough mark-up and enough sales to cover the cost of simply writing off the scams and refunds. For crap bought as surplus, or imported in bulk from China, the mark-up could be greater than 10x.
Exactly so. I've done a bit of buying and selling acoustic guitars, and would now only do "buyer collects".
I do this because several acquaintances have been scammed, mostly with the buyer claiming that the guitar wasn't in the case when it arrived. In each case, eBay has sided with the buyer.
So I've now given up eBay and found a local auction house that does regular musical instrument auctions... much less chance of being scammed there!
I'm from NZ and I suspect our local equivalent (TradeMe) has the same systemic problems:
* Horrific UI flaws.
* Adverts. Everywhere. It's like they don't want me to use the site.
* A new version of the UI for mobile browsers (a replacement for the broken mobile browser version), that breaks all their links within emails
* Automated emails sent at 4 o'clock in the morning (I complained and was told it was so they could use their servers efficiently).
* Please please let me filter for NZ only - so I can choose not to have drop shipped items if I want it this week...
I also use eBay.com.au and it is sweet to use in comparison to our local TradeMe, but TradeMe is the incumbent that everyone uses...
The horrendous UI, unresponsive servers, bids being lost like every other auction, the easiest features like watchlist being outright broken 50 % of the time, watching items randomly not working, random 500/"oops" errors, broken search, tons and tons of ads (THIS IS A PAID SITE FFS) and so on make me think that they don't want to make money.
UX wise; I don't think it's possible to do worse than "Your bid of X has been submitted" followed by "This auction has ended. Sold for X-1.". Don't expect users to come back soon if you keep doing this to them!
Turn off your e-mail notifications during sleeping hours? Pretty certain we all get e-mails at all hours of the day.
I think you've just been lucky, after all the whole point of buyer-scams is that they buy something, then raise a complaint and get a refund.
The end result is that the buyer has your item, and has their money returned. Sure they might need some available money, but they don't lose out.
As a seller, I have very rarely had issues with buyers. I always sell via buy it now and I usually am able to get a price comparable to what I would have gotten on Amazon. I find that Amazon is not ideal for one off, used items. eBay tends to be better.
It helps that I'm generally selling personal stuff I don't need/want anymore, so the risk is relatively low (I've only had a couple of expensive sales where I sold things worth over $1500). On the other hand, if I was a store where profit margins were king and a scam could really hurt me, I'd probably have a better system and better intuition about scams as well.
Now that I make some serious money, I'd rather buy from Amazon. Not the marketplace either. Just plain old Amazon. Where I know I am dealing with a company should problems come up and not some kid in their parents basement.
As far as selling goes, I come to know that all the buyer has to do is complain to eBay they never got the goods. How do they proof that? As far as I know they don't. They just write a colorful mail to eBay claiming nothing arrived and they sent the money via paypal and just as easy, the payment gets reversed.
About 8 years ago I used Amazon to sell a bunch of my old books. Worked great.
Last year I tried to start doing it again, and it's a giant pain. Yesterday I tried setting up a new account and they aren't letting me add anything for sale to inventory because of some supposed undescribed problem with my credit card (which works fine for purchases).
So.. Amazon has its own problems.
Amazon's site is quite flawed as well. It's a lot better but not by much.
Etsy seems a better proposition but for whatever reason they limit the types of stuff that they sell.
Facebook seems to be coming on the scene now though their offering is more like classifieds than auction.
Amazon's UX is far from perfect but the site at least works. eBay's site is so completely dysfunctional I'm almost surprised that people still manage to complete a significant amount of transactions on there.
N.Y.C. itself is another of their rules: put the dots in anything that seems like it might be an acronym or initialism, even when when the rest of the world stopped using the dots decades ago. When was the last time you saw NYC spelled as N.Y.C. anywhere, except for the N.Y.C. media?
These organizations will always write I.B.M., F.B.I., C.I.A., H.P., and so forth, even when those companies and organizations themselves do not use the dots in their official names.
What I can't answer, though, is your question: why do they insist on this even when it contradicts the correct usage?
Now in some fields, like computer documentation, there's practical reason to change. It would be confusing to capitalise command-names if they are lower-case in their (case sensitive) native language. But newspapers aren't bound by that consideration, and it doesn't really apply to company names anyway.
But there ought to be another rule that takes priority over that one: when you use the name of a person or company, capitalize and spell it as they spell it. They are the ones who get to decide. It's not the prerogative of a third-party publisher or newswriter to override that.
It seems like a simple matter of humbleness and deference to whoever owns the name. It's eBay, not EBay, and IBM, not I.B.M.
What I don't understand is why a news organization would feel it's their business to override that - and why it's especially prevalent in the N.Y.C. media.
It is entertaining though! :-)
In 2001, an eBay user might have given an eBay seller a low rating for an unsatisfactory packaging job; in 2018, an Uber driver might be dinged if a rider doesn’t like his personality or choice of music. Facebook recently began ranking publishers by trustworthiness, based on feedback from users. Upon discovering a problem, a platform company’s first instinct is to find a way to expose it to the wisdom of a market, or at least the will of a crowd.
It’s a transactional platform; the transaction is very clear to both sides,” Hagiu says. “By and large, buyers and sellers are aligned on eBay.” A seller banned for counterfeit sunglasses hasn’t lost any rights, just his ability to use eBay. Crucially, to most ears, a scammer’s claims to the contrary would sound ridiculous.
The article's view on what ails the internet is the flawed idea of "wisdom of the crowd". The recommendation based systems where companies say - "others watched/read this so, you must like it too".
But then the article presents Amazon as something better and conveniently forgets that Amazon too has a similar ratings system. Though only the product level reviews are front and center. Seller reviews do not take the limelight. And as evident by Amazon's glut of fake products this weakness of rating systems is being gamed too.
> But quite often [Facebook is] managed like [a marketplace], because in many ways, that’s exactly what it is: a giant, multisided marketplace for buying and selling, in which the largest party — the users — doesn’t do the buying or the selling. A social network’s profitable transactions involve everyone but the users. Ad rates are even determined, in many cases, by auction. If eBay is a machine for finding the right price for a pair of shoes, Facebook — behind the veneer of enabling human connection — is a machine for discovering the right price for a pair of eyeballs. Your eyeballs.
The article is a meandering and muddles
A seller banned for counterfeit sunglasses hasn’t lost any rights, just his ability to use eBay.
I would have loved to see a rating and some reviews of several development processes before wasting my time posting patches.
Note that this isn't a dig at any particular project, I know FOSS is hard and free time is scarce (and so is funding).
Quick ones:
1. Date of last commit to main repo
2. Number of issues open on Trac/Bugzilla/GitHub/Jira whatever (note, I'm taking a point off if you use Trac, only because there's still an instance from 10 years ago sending me emails that I can't unsubscribe from)
Takes more time:
3. Number of open pull requests/mailing list patches and general discussion around them
4. Any kind of clear and updated roadmap.
Edit: number one these days should be an up to date and working CI/CD system with published artifacts, including for Windows.
Why isn't it very popular? Why don't people have it like the travis-ci badges?
Edit: https://cauldron.io seems to be a hosted version of GrimoireLab.
Sinking ship.
The take away of Thiel glaringly missed Palantir in favor of some digs.
Would love to see the NYT describing a left winger as eclectic and severe. Even masked antifa don’t get that treatment.
It’s frustrating to have to mentally guard against this political mudslinging. The article is worse for it, and IMO it’s just coddling their readership and narrowing their audience.
- Delivery times aren’t accurate. When I buy something from eBay I expect it will arrive within a week, but if I want something to arrive in a shorter time I buy it elsewhere. There is no way to filter listings to find which sellers will post an item today, and ship it via a method that will arrive tomorrow. A lot of listings are marked Fast&Free, but those have an estimate delivery date of Thursday.
- Too many Chinese sellers. A lot of items are sold by Chinese sellers who list the item location as in the UK, but in the description say that there is a 20 day delivery time. If I want stuff from China I’ll buy it from AliExpress.
- Too many duplicate listings. If I search for a common item where there are a few variations, I usually see the same item repeated a handful of times on the first page.
I think that's because if they don't give a pessimistic estimate of delivery time, they open themselves up to 'it didn't arrive next day' type negative feedback and DSR scores. I'm in the UK and am selling cars part time to earn extra money at the moment - most of which need things doing (hence my markup). Nearly everything I order from eBay arrives next day (if I order before 10am), even though it usually says 2-3 days minimum. But I totally agree, it's a PITA as you should be able to filter down to those who actually will put it in the post that day if you order before (say) midday.
>- Too many Chinese sellers
Totally. They are spottable for the most part, but it's a pain to have to read the listings for the giveaways, and occasionally I'll miss it and then have to wait a couple of weeks for something to arrive. This has happened in the past when I've paid for it, and then they've said 'sorry... just checked and the UK warehouse is out of stock, so we'll send it direct from our China warehouse' - as if there's actually a UK warehouse. These have ALL been listings claiming 2-3 days' delivery.
>Too many duplicate listings.
Yup. It's getting crazily difficult for car parts which I get a lot (see above) - slightly different listing, same seller, etc. Or different seller, identical listing with slightly different price.
If you want to buy a notebook with a US keyboard (which some devs prefer) and when it's hard to get them in your home country.
eBay.com offers a Global Shipping Program where the US seller just send their stuff to this shipping program and eBay takes care of everything else. Even customs will be paid by eBay and the buyer just pays once and benefits from fast processing. It's a buttersmooth way of international shipping.
I got my last notebook within just one week and it was still cheaper than the local version in my home country. I know that some notebooks offer US keyboards in any country (ThinkPads and Macbooks) but then you usually wait also min 1-2 weeks because they are custom builds or they come directly from China.
Don't know of any other entity than eBay offering this.
This is why the UI is horrible and, in general, the site feels stuck somewhere in the early 2000s. Perhaps this is also why the company culture is broken and somewhat dishonest. They have frequently engaged in dramatic policy shifts when someone got the idea that the bottom line could be enhanced. In these cases, they are capable of totally disregarding their ecosystem (especially sellers and affiliates). Worse, they would outright lie about their intentions, which I suppose they felt necessary for placation when completely screwing over their "partners".
eBay has long had a certain toxic nature, including an almost uncanny ability to leave customers and partners feeling disappointed, if not outright cheated at some point. Whatever the shortcomings of the people who participate in their marketplace (including scammers), they are amplified by eBay, whose resolution policies essentially amount to doing as little as possible. This is what people are reporting as disappointment when they've needed an issue resolved.
I am amazed that people still use eBay.
Basically everything else that's bad about ebay I can deal with, but that's the one thing that sends me racing to other sites.
I wrote about the irony of them promoting the sale of refurbished items when it was a refurbished Xbox that I purchased last year that turned out to be a dud, on Medium (https://medium.com/@chakrabortypritish/ebay-india-a-cautiona... - I had to incorporate a bit of sensationalism to try and fetch some views, which is why it's written the way it is, didn't work anyway). Turns out that the seller lied about the machine's warranty, and Microsoft support couldn't help me either. eBay support consistently told me that they couldn't do anything about this according to company policy. Never felt this helpless on an e-commerce platform, and I've never gone back on eBay.
And yes, their platform UI/UX is horrible, I concur. The only way to show that the Xbox was stuck in a boot-and-crash loop was to record a video, and they did not permit video uploads on their (laughable) grievance redressal platform.
And I'm okay with that.
For instance with musicians - particularly guitarists (only because we tend to be gear enthusiasts) - Reverb.com has become our new Ebay.com. It's even replacing Craigslist for a lot of what we were doing previously (allows local deals, too).
They essentially took all the good things that were working for Ebay and tailored it to musicians. It's a slam dunk.
I use Ebay for many replacement parts for items not normally found in stores or worse jacked up on Amazon because they come bound with Prime shipping. Amazon might be top dog from name recognition but places like Wal Mart are trying and unless Amazon gets a grip on knock offs they are in danger of alienating a good number of buyers.
Started selling some old tech/appliances I don't need anymore on eBay: last month 4 items for 250 EUR total, before that a few more items for ~400 EUR total.
Items went for 50-70% of the original price, and then eBay took their commission which at times was quite steep at ~15% of the selling price. It was still worth it since for most items I couldn't find any takers locally on Kleinanzeigen (Craigslist analog).
eBay has annoying limits for new sellers so to sell my old Sony camera I had to wait a month after selling my old Canon DSLR. It's impossible to contact a human support for this issue. They raised my limits automatically recently though.
Don't remember any problems with my buyers or when I bought something. Some of it I shouldn't have bought at all but that's a different story :-D Looking forward to clearing more of those storage boxes.
I've been buying and selling on eBay since they came to the UK but I have to hold my nose every time I visit the site.