I've sold hundreds of items on eBay, almost all payable only via bank transfer/cash, and never had serious problems. If I get a smaller audience, well, that's an acceptable compromise in the long term.
Real pity because it's hard to know where to sell that sort of thing these days.
The site would also collect identifying information about everyone who transacts while using it. Maybe phone number, or driver license photo. You are not allowed to have more than one account, although you can have multiple "personas" if you wish, each with their own ratings. (but creating multiple personas cannot fool site anti-abuse staff, who can all obviously see the same account behind it) Creating an account is hard. The site would employ advanced protections against account takeover.
Whenever you buy and sell from someone, perhaps you can see the "7 degrees of Kevin Bacon" style interpersonal connections that link you to them via vouches. If fraud happens, it makes all of your connections look bad, and there would be an incentive for them to shun you, if they care about retaining their access to the site. When fraudsters get onto the platform, you can always trace their vouches back to the "bad apple" who showed poor judgment and began inviting the wrong certain people. Indeed, perhaps in order to retain access to the platform overtime, you have to keep getting vouches every once in a while.
Big sites would not use these policies since they would invoice friction on purchases in result in lower conversion. But perhaps there is a niche somewhere for a highly trusted online auction house.
I wonder how far a system like this could go in stamping out fraud online. It seems like the problem with fraudsters is that they can always keep coming back with new accounts that everyone is forced to treat with the certain default degree of trust, and then the fraudsters exploit that. If you made it difficult for each person in the world to have more than one account on the service, then anyone engaging in repeat fraud would very quickly stand out as such. (As many personas as you want, but only one account)
Or phrased another way, its like the gun control problem where the only people following the gun control laws are the non-criminals you have no need to fear, and the people who don't play by the rules are the only source of problems.
Seriously boggles the mind what people are willing to say on Nextdoor.
Unfortunately even though eBay violated their own written policy by siding with him, this is SOP for them. They have a decades-long unwritten policy of shitting all over their sellers. This became apparent when they removed sellers' ability to leave negative or neutral feedback for buyers, which led to a huge influx of scammy buyers. eBay didn't care because more buyers means more revenue, and the sellers who had built their entire business on eBay had little choice but to stick around for the shafting.
1. Craigslist is slow. On eBay, you're done in 7 days. It can be pretty hard to get full market value on Craigslist in anywhere near that amount of time, if at all, especially if you're in a smaller city.
2. People on Craigslist are flaky. I have no idea what compels someone to email a seller with interest, schedule a time to view an item, and then just not show up, but they do it all the time. Why even bother?
3. People on Craigslist are needy. On eBay, I list and then I sell. I am selling two items on Craigslist right now. You should see my phone's messaging app. It's full of the unknown numbers of un-serious buyers asking pointless questions they'll never follow up on.
4. People on Craigslist are, well, people. That means I have to meet them somewhere. Arranging that always ends up being more difficult than a trip to the post office.
I view the tradeoff like this:
eBay = simple, easy, fast, but with a nonzero likelihood of total loss
Craigslist = nearly guaranteed to be difficult, slow, and annoying, but with a very low chance of total loss
I don't think it's an easy decision. They are definitely not interchangeable.
I was moving and had to sell a lot of stuff fast. I scheduled around 6 people to come look at a futon. 0 showed. Even after I offered to give it away for free. Huge waste of time.
http://www.wmcactionnews5.com/story/31621453/2-people-shot-d... http://www.cbs46.com/story/26038628/two-people-injured-in-kc...
I was beginning to think that buyers on Craigslist are instructed to act this way. :P
I haven't sold on eBay for ages. There's very little I want to sell that is worth enough to go through the hassle though I'm not sure there are generally good alternatives. (For used photo gear, I'd use one of the online stores. I won't get as much but there's much less risk and hassle.)
Another lesson about ebay: Don't ever ship something to an address other than the one ebay has. My brother sold his phone and the guy asked him to ship it to "his daughter's house for a present". Turns out the account had been hacked and now he had just sent his phone to a scammer.
The last horror story i have: The same brother sold an iphone on ebay and the guy claimed it came with the screen cracked. Ebay sided with him on the return and my brother received a letter in return with nothing in it. Fortunately for him that time, ebay just let him keep the money and the scammer keep the phone (albeit, after 2 hours of arguing with their customer service).
TLDR: I've had way too terrible experiences on ebay to ever use them again.
So not only do you have to worry about scammers, you have to deal with a market for lemons [1]. (Quite ironic now that I think about it as that is one of my favorite economic articles)
[1]: https://www.iei.liu.se/nek/730g83/artiklar/1.328833/AkerlofM...
The company I left last year sells the bulk of their products on Amazon, and maybe 1/4th of their inventory (same type of products) is listed on eBay. Amazon sales are relatively smooth with much less friction per sale than eBay. It's gotten better since they went with a sales aggregator service, but they still barely break even on eBay as opposed to Amazon and physical storefront sales, when they figure in labor and time costs. When I worked there the sales personnel were able to list five or six items on Amazon in the time it took to list one item on eBay.
eBay really doesn't make sense for a larger business unless they have thousands of the exact same, new sealed merchandise, and that tends to be the cheap mass produced garbage that you find on wish.com and similar sites. The small to mid closeouts wholesaler doesn't have a place on the site anymore, which is why many are moving to Amazon. Unfortunately, as this article points out, scammy buyers are just as much a problem there.
As things get more expensive on eBay, you become a bigger target for scammers and stand to lose much more, so it becomes a terrible option both because of how many scammers there are and their policy of screwing over sellers. Also the more expensive it is the more likely I'll be able to move it on craigslist which is a sure thing.
Amazon could easily add an insurance policy option for sellers with a few minimal requirements for documenting the sale/shipping - Amazon collects a small fee, encourages better habits among small sellers and it all works.
From reading online, this is due to their use of Experian for identity verification. But if you don't have any credit history, as I do not, you do not exist within Experian's system and are automatically considered by Amazon to be a fraud threat and so are effectively cut out of the system and blacklisted without recourse, even if you're a longstanding good customer with other Amazon products.
Amazon's was especially bad because it allegedly had an appeal process that allowed submitting other forms of identity documents to bypass Experian's failure, but it never functioned correctly and attempting to verify my identity would fail because I had not yet verified my identity, and then the fact that I wouldn't verify my identity manually sent up a bigger red flag that permanently blacklisted me from the service with zero recourse now, even as I explained that I was unable to because their system wouldn't let me. Their customer support people would just say "I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do. You are not allowed to participate in this service anymore." I lost a lot of respect for Amazon at that point.
Pro life tip: just get a credit card or two and nurture your credit score. Don't fuck over your utilities and make sure your payments are on time. Voila. You're a real boy. Not my rules or something I endorse but hey someone here had to say it.
In my area, it's almost impossible to even rent an apartment without good credit history, and it's absolutely impossible to rent a non-crappy apartment. Why? Because there are enough people with solid credit histories to fill the buildings, and because of the lower risk, there's no reason not to rely on credit checks.
FWIW my friend and I made an app called "Emberall" it makes it easy to record/label video and save it to the cloud. It's mostly used my new moms recording their kids, but would be equally useful to anyone that wanted to regularly record and archive video evidence like the article suggested.
It's bad for sellers, too. Imagine shipping a $400 LCD (this is approximately how much the MacBook Pro retina screens cost) and the buyer receives it scratched or broken. It happens alarmingly often. As the seller, the only thing you can do is replace or refund. That's why you basically have to make a ton of profit off of these--or really learn how to package them (many sellers won't bother.)
The buyer's history was full of similar purchases.
I've been careful about documenting shipments since. Overall, I am reluctant to sell on Amazon these days because of the A-Z guarantee, which is only sustainable for large sellers.
Fraud is a sticky problem at scale. A few bad actors poison the well for everyone. As a buyer I appreciate Amazon's policies, but as an occasional seller I find them completely draconian. There is very little you can do to contest a decision against you.