I also purchase consumer items like batteries, dog toys, beef jerky, a DJI drone, and whatnot off the site.

Now as a seller I have no clue, but I have no clue what it is like to sell on Amazon either. I do find ebay easier to navigate by leaps and bounds over Amazon. amazon fills my pages with more trash than I ever want to see.

As a seller, I'm exposed for 30 days, because you can, for any reason, choose to return the item with a full refund, and just say it doesn't work. Ebay does not take evidence from the seller that this patently untrue. I've been burned twice this way and lost hundreds trying to sell two laptops.

He said you're asking to get screwed unless you list serial numbers and have photo proof of functionality and mention it in your listing.

In the hundreds of transactions conducted by the university club I was a part of (we sold IT stuff that went missing on its way to the dumpster). Based on his advice we generated packing lists that included the device serial, tests performed, by who, when and screenshots. We never had a problem. Our biggest worry was the accuracy of the fish scale we used to weigh shipments.

There's people out there who make a business out of buying stuff from sellers who are far away, claim warranty and then resell the working item.

This is simply how eCommerce works. You have to accept returns... and 30 days is just about as short of a period you can reasonably make.

> Ebay does not take evidence from the seller that this patently untrue

Neither does Amazon, or Walmart marketplaces. This is simply standard for there marketplaces. Buyers get peace of mind, which encourages more purchases.

This "scam" works on Amazon too - so it's not just eBay or something about how eBay has done things.

As a seller, it can be a pain sometimes - but it's a cost of doing business and must be accounted for, and planned for before you sell the item.

If you're trying to just sell something and walk away, CL or your local classifieds section is the place to be.

Are they seriously expecting anyone to put effort and wait just to buy something from their place? Granted, I hate how Amazon doesn't support Paypal, but last I recall ebay doesn't do 1-day shipping, let alone 1-day replacement when opening an RMA.

Besides, they don't even actually lower the price to match the competitor, they just give you a one-time coupon with the difference. They're not even trying.

This might be the first time someone has been upset that paypal support is lacking. I am surprised by this considering the general distaste for paypal typically.

What makes you wish paypal was supported if you don't mind me asking?

However Amazon has always resolved problems to my satisfaction. I don't imagine it would be necessary in this situation.

They are no questions asked easy and my credit card company cannot hold my money for 6 months for arbitrary reasons without providing proof. I see no benefit to Amazon using Paypal and only a less than good customer experience.

Paypal supports billing to my bank account while Amazon only supports credit cards and debit cards. The act of having to log-in to my bank account (and therefore involving their broken website and having to fetch the physical TOTP token) and fill up my card before being able to purchase something was enough to drive me away from buying stuff from both Amazon and Aliexpress multiple times.

I do realize I'm probably one of very few people to have a problem like that, though.

Fulfilled and shipped by Amazon.com items can still be intermingled with rando sellers from China whereas Walmart will source directly from a manufacturer or a large, billion dollar wholesaler who cares about reputation (I think)

I've been spooked by intermingling and default to BestBuy for big ticket electronics

Interestingly Amazon has done the same thing except they want to be Google (Android) and Netflix (content bundling with Prime).

I get the desire to grow but honestly more often than not trying to do too much just makes you mediocre at everything.

I recently read a book [0] that outlined some of the reasons why that happened.

Two of the main reasons outlined were: (1) As more and more people started selling on the site, items started to become commodities with fixed prices. So even old antiques started to have a fixed value. This encouraged more people to just buy it now. (2) Even by the mid 2000's, when ebay was still considered mainly an auction site, only a very small fraction of sales were made by auctions. Something around 90% of sales were buy-it-now new items. This meant that their real success was in buy-it-now and they started to focus on that. (Don't quote me on the numbers in the second part, I will try to get more accurate ones later).

So they had a lot of initial success in being an auction site, but there isn't really much of an market for a general purpose auction site. And once you become a succesful auction site, you basically stop being a auction site.

[0] I cannot remember the name right now and I cannot find it. It was about providing real world examples of famous economic papers. It covered wide ranges of topics about used cars prices, trading in prison camps, ebay. It was released in 2016.

Amusingly, seeing eBay's profitability early on, Amazon tried to build on an eBay wannabe product and failed miserably at auctions. eBay has had the segment to itself ever since. Why didn't Amazon solely focus on being the best retailer it could be, instead of pursuing a foray into auctions? They couldn't help themselves, they saw the $$$ eBay was earning, as Bezos did with the iPhone margins.

And while I fully understand the reasons for the valuation difference, I still find it hilarious that eBay is generating roughly as much net income annually as Amazon, at 1/12th the valuation.

Doesn't seem to impact buyers often.

As a buyer I have been happy with ebay, things take a while to come but are generally well before the estimated time and a lot of stuff is much cheaper than Amazon.

As per returns/bad goods, Sellers are generally willing to send a replacement item if the original has an issue

Shopping on Amazon is just exhausting now. Even for books they're not my first choice anymore - wordery is.

You got me interested. How deep of discounts are we talking here? And for what businesses? And have you gotten screwed ever?

Start using Aliexpress and you have one less reason to use Ebay.

For new items eBay's advantage is that you can buy in low volume straight from china (if you don't mind waiting a month) or from an importer who's running their operation out of a storage locker or basement. The prices are reflective of the decreased overhead compared to selling on Amazon (or some other "less flea-market like" option).

If you're shopping for something and don't want to wait for it to ship from China odds are you could already find it on eBay cheaper than Amazon in the first place.

This move is just publicizes and existing advantage.

Why would i go through all that work for just a match? If I'm only going to get the same price, I'm buying from Amazon/Walmart where I dont have to 1) contact someone, nor get the difference as a "coupon".

I've only spent single-digit hundreds on Ebay in the last ten years. Not because the prices were too high, but because I didn't trust the goods. This is a big splashy initiative solving precisely the wrong problem.

But I don't buy on Amazon only because of price. I buy for 2-day shipping, peace of mind on returns, and a consistent experience across the app and website.

I had a sealed collector's edition of StarCraft II that I wanted to sell a few years after the game came out. I knew that there was a very significant chance that if I sold it on ebay, some scam buyer would get it, open it, redeem the codes for all the in-game loot, then file a claim saying the item was not as described and that the codes were already redeemed.

Instead, I sold it through Amazon, using their Fulfilled by Amazon service. That way, Amazon will have verified that the game was still sealed and refuse a refund. It cost me a considerable amount in fees (IIRC, I sold it for $350 but only received $300), but it was worth it for piece of mind.

Though FWIW, some people have told me I still could have gotten scammed, it just became a little less likely.

Amazon is even worse, because sometimes there's no way to tell if items is original or fake and end up getting fake for same price as original. On eBay you can mostly safely assume it's fake, so at least you get what you pay for.

MAD [1]. Price-match guarantees are meant to deter price competition. If you cut your price below a price-matching competitor's, the time you have the best price will be short. After that, less profit for everyone (assuming similar cost structures). If, on the other hand, you match, everyone keeps their market share and margins.

Price competition in a price-matching market happens when someone has lower costs. It also happens when someone uses cheap capital to buy market share, intending to make up for lower margins with volume, e.g. to cover fixed costs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction

The literature is mixed on the effects of price-matching guarantees [1][2]. The most compelling resolution I've read says "price-matching guarantees can facilitate monopoly pricing only if firms automatically match prices. If consumers must instead request refunds (thereby incurring hassle costs)...any increase in equilibrium prices due to firms’ price-matching policies will be small; often, no price increase can be supported" [3].

In any case, enforcing an automatic price-matching ban would be difficult. Would you prohibit firms from lowering their prices to match competitors'? If not, it would just take a few turns of the ratchet to send the message to would-be competitors (and consumers). Whether the consumer surplus from those ratchet turns are worth the enforcement cost is an open question.

[1] https://www.bauer.uh.edu/jhess/documents/10.pdf

[2] http://people.tamu.edu/~sjain/papers/published%20pmr%20paper...

[3] http://www.simon.rochester.edu/fac/SHAFFER/Published/Hassel%...

Couldn't you just make a law saying "price-match guarantees are illegal"? Firms who explicitly move prices to match each other is fine with me, but the match guarantee is problematic. It seems that your conclusion is that companies use matching guarantees to implicitly collude but that even if we got rid of this they would still collude. But we should still stamp out collusion wherever we see it even if that puts us in a whack-a-mole situation.

As consumers, absolutely we do. But the person asking the question asked why companies don't do that, and the answer is that it's a bad business decision for them.

Same rules/ theory?

Basically you can have your cake and eat it too. (To some extent)

In order of easiest returns: "Sold and shipped by Amazon" -> eBay -> Amazon 3rd party vendors.

No? I'll stick to Amazon then.

https://medium.com/@datafacts/why-ebay-is-allowing-e-cigaret...

There is a huge market for "discounted" lego on eBay and the bulk of these are probably "stolen" (from Walmart to boot). If you don't believe me just google stolen lego and read up.

I think this is going to lead to some interesting pricing conditions in the market, ones that don't work well for retail locations like Walmart.

All this excitement in online retailing reminds me of yield chasing investors; the excitement appears as growth- and margin-chasing, and in the meantime the "plodding" sectors (and their associated populations) are overlooked. For example, I don't see a shift to online with dollar stores.

I don't get it.

I think they meant qualify but still, looks like it's only on select new items.