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.
Picking out one feature that they haven't ruined is poor consolation. As the other commenter notes Amazon has let you break down into price tiers for years. Most sites I shop at can do this.
eBay search results are better than Amazon however - but that is because Amazon's has become so awful.
A lot of people want to shop price first then see how much cost would increase by buying from someone already on the same continent.
Including shipping when sorting by price is the opposite of user-hostile and they've done this since forever, most online retailers don't do this.
I would be surprised if it's a lot that prefer default inclusion of international. They made the change right about the same time they made customs fees for international automatic and unavoidable. Makes me suspect that fee is including a hidden profit element in this dark pattern.
Including shipping when sorting by price
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
This.
I regularly buy on eBay and decided to sell a number of old hand tools. I have sold before, but not for a while. I put the the first tool as an auction to get the hang again, then waited 10 days for something to happen. During that time I purchased several items using buy it now and realised that I now AVOID auctions unless the items is particularly rare or special.
The BIN selling options interface seems to vary significantly depending on how you crate the listing: starting on somebody else's items and clicking "sell one like this" or creating a new listing from scratch, for instance.
But, yeah, I'm converted to Buy It Now as a buyer and a seller.
I avoid auction like the plague.
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.
For me, it is the inexpensive items with free shipping that seem to be the most risky. I also probably bid on auctions rather than fixed prices items more than the average person.
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.
https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/canada-post-reveals-it-is-the-rea...
As for the propaganda comment, isn't it a bit on the nose for someone to make that comment with a username Правда? Please let me now if you are having problem with colloquialism, comrade. да?
I was abroad in the UK, and I need a bag to go around my waist. So I asked for a fanny pack at the local Tesco.
The saleslady started giggling. This is joke?
Here's a great quote: “It just adds insult to injury to watch our postal rates continue to climb while China is being given a free ride to siphon all this money out of our economy,”
Lemme get this straight, China is siphoning money out of our economy by selling us products at a fraction of the cost of local retail monopolies?
China is keeping money in my pocket! Money that I can invest and create jobs with. China creates jobs.
China is not "siphoning money out of our economy". Chinese companies are passing their logistics costs to Western postal systems. There is a difference.
We honour the postage on packages from other countries. China's "One Belt, One Road" is being paid for by other countries' postal systems. Chinese companies need only get their products out of port.
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
Also run a mule bank account. All money in and out goes through an empty account which you transfer in and out of paypal. Never link a card to it. No arbitrary charges or refunds can be taken then.
If ebay have a problem with you they can come to your door and do it via official legal paths. They usually hire a debt collector here in the UK who will fuck off instantly if you file an SAR with them and ask for court documents (I had a run in with them a few years back after they didn't receive a fees payment I made due to a system problem)
But honestly there are so few problems out there really.
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!
Because eBay own PayPal
(By "full-service", I am not saying good service; just that they offer a broad spectrum of services now.)
One irony is that eBay was originally very hostile to Paypal as they tried to get traction for their own Billpoint system. They even killed listings for having Paypal payment buttons in them.
Fast forward a few years... eBay becomes so protective of Paypal's de facto monopoly, they made it a policy violation to even mention accepting cash in a listing. (!)
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.
Amazon is an altogether more structured and reassuring experience, but you don't have all the stuff you get on Ebay.
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.