In my kids’ generation (college aged) they all use Facebook Marketplace.

ebay is still useful for obscure stuff. if you want to buy used servers, GPU, electronics, car parts, etc. I don't think ebay and FB MP really overlapped, MP ate craigslist. The closest thing to eating ebay is Aliexpress.

I found ebay more reliable, interesting and smoother than Amazon. Amazon screwed me over for 40 USD now they are nagging that I should sign up for "Prime"

(I ordered a bunch of stuff, maybe 800 USD. They decided the order is fraudulent, and canceled it, without ever telling me. When I moved into my new place, there was nothing. No sheets, no nothing from Amazon. That this order was "canceled" without any email seemed to puzzle Amazon support. They told me in the chat to reorder with fasted shipping, and that they would reimburse the shipping. Of course, they did not. And the chat protocols clearly stating Amazon would reimburse the express shipping were a "misunderstanding".

Last time I ordered from amazon, I repeatedly declined prime. My bank called me the next day about a suspicious charge for a year of prime. I had to cancel my card and get a new one. The banker told me they'd had dozens of similar problems where amazon was charging people for stuff they never ordered.

When I got the package a few days later, the $150+ set of cello strings I ordered, sold and shipped by amazon, were counterfeits (and damaged due to improper packing, not that it mattered). I had to do a charge back to get my money back.

Please be understanding. Bezos needs the money!

If there was ever someone worthy of getting a bag of glittery dicks, it's Bezos.

The Amazon HQ address is public knowledge, but I doubt he opens his own mail:

Mr. Jeff Bezos, CEO

Amazon dot com, Inc.

410 Terry Avenue North

Seattle, Washington 98109-5210

(206) 266-1000

Bezos has not been the CEO for 3+ years, and he moved to Miami a while ago.

amazon is so bad about counterfeits and people listing products from different brands as the same article

Amazon is the American version of Temu, Aliexpress, etc nowadays; I wouldn't use it for anything but their own products (Kindle). For specialist items like the cello strings you mentioned, music shops are thankfully still a thing, both online/webshops as irl ones. I'd go there instead. Same with books.

It's borderline impossible for the high street to compete on fungible goods like art supplies and books. The only real value in those shops is knowledgeable and passionate staff who share your interests.

It's much worse than aliexpress. Ali won't send you used items or returned bricks.

Agreed, I normally wouldn't buy strings from anyone but a reputable violin shop. The strings I wanted were new and none of the small shops could get them at the time.

Out of curiosity, how did you realize that they were counterfeits and is there a big difference? FYI: I don't play cello.

The label looked like it was printed on a cheap ink jet printer. The colors on the label weren't the right shades either.

The strings were guitar strings rather than cello strings. They're too short for a cello. The winding metal is different too. A bow doesn't grip guitar strings as well.

Most counterfeiters send super cheap cello strings with a fake label. In those cases, the best way to tell is that the silk windings on the strings will be the wrong colors.

There's a huge difference in sound. Cheap/fake strings tend to sound metallic and harsh. They also tend to break quickly, while a proper set of strings can last over a year.

yeah amazon is rly weird. did had prime and cancelled it but the cancellation was retracted 3 times in the background and i had to pay 3 months more prime… never ever.. now its only expensive aliexpress and some netflix

Btw, 'informal' agreements, even oral only, are legally binding, though it may (?) vary by state. For example an email is legally binding.

In a case like this,there's not even the need for small claims - if you just contacted the better business bureau, you'd have gotten reimbursed the shipping and then something reasonable on top as 'an apology for the misunderstanding.'

The Better Business Bureau is a private organization with zero power to enforce any agreements or judgments. At most, it was Yelp before the internet.

BBB accreditation is a big deal for most major companies, and it includes an obligation to resolve issues (exactly like this one) with their arbitration. I've used them 3 times, with 3 positive (and rapid) outcomes.

Next time you have a straightforward 'they're wrong' issue with a company where you're getting outsourced flowcharts for support, try out the bbb. They're great.

Small claims would obviously also work, but that's a major investment in time/bureaucrazy, while a bbb complaint can be completed online in 10 minutes with maybe one or two brief follow-ups, but usually all it is, is them getting in contact with a human who can do things - and for cases like this, they obviously try to make it right.

I would have to file in small claims court. And for 40 USD I am not willing to do this.

I think you don't need even an oral agreement for a contract to be valid. Conclusive action is enough. Take a newspaper, but 2 USD on the table, leave. No words exchanged but valid sales contract established.

It’s quite good for jewelry and fashion items — their certification program is legitimate from all the digging I’ve done.

Local classifieds are great if you live in a dense area. But I've tried using them when visiting rural family and there's absolutely nothing for sale.

It’s astounding how bad FB Marketplace search is, though. For very popular things, it’s fine. For browsing and “huh, that’s interesting,” it’s fine.

But if I am looking for something specific, it is an incredible failure. It’s so bad I suspect they intentionally don’t want it to work well. That is, I think they only want to optimize for low-effort social buying, not picky people who know exactly what they want.

For this reason I have bought way more stuff off eBay than FB Marketplace recently.

It seems to just ignore filters like “date listed” sometimes too. And people will list items at nominal prices and give the actual price in the description. Generally a poor experience.

Was looking for car, and found out they mentioned down payment lolz. FB marketplace is very bad.

I know some car listing sites (used to, at least) offer ad products to dealerships that would post their inventory on FB Marketplace as well.

It also doesn’t seem to respect the distance filter.

I’m not one for conspiracy theories usually, but I’m pretty sure the state of Marketplace search is, if not ‘deliberate’, at least a result of metrics-driven development. The search results are _just_ useful enough to keep you scrolling and tapping, so the vagueness increases engagement :-(

You must be kidding. No kid uses facebook anymore.

"ewww, facebook is for moms" - every kid born after the first gen of facebook

"old-person tiktok" is what my kids call instagram

Depends on the country.

Lots of people have a Facebook account just to use Marketplace, at least in my area.

or adults for that matter. outside of Marketplace.

eBay and Facebook Marketplace don’t really compete. FB is better for normal fungible items. eBay is better for specialty stuff. Don’t forget that you have to pay to list and usually have to ship on eBay. It’s two totally different vibes.

If I wanted to sell a Dewalt angle grinder, I would go to Facebook first.

If I wanted to sell a Sony E-mount camera lens, I would go to eBay first.

Most used things I buy make more sense on Facebook. Most people I know use Facebook because they are usually looking for regular things.

FB marketplace is full of people wasting your time.

"Is this still available?" Yes it is - never heard from again.

I stopped giving out my address. I will give a general area where we can meet so they can gauge how far it is for them. When they are on their way, I give them the public location to meet. Only serious people will meet me. On some occasions, I still get ghosted. But ghosting has become more and more common. I don't recall it being this bad when Craigslist was huge.

Rather go back to yard sales.

I miss the olden craigslist days sometimes. Even responses that sounded like scams were somehow real people at times. I once sold a PSP Vita hours after listing it on Craigslist. The response had superbroken english and was insistent they had to buy it in the next two hours at X location. That location happened to be about a mile down the road from my job so I humored them. Turned out it was just a guy from out of country that was only there one more day for oil field training. Paid me in cash and didn't even hassle the price.

Yeah, FB marketplace is the worst for that. I end up putting up with it, though, because it also has a lot of legitimate buyers and no fees.

I usually just give folks my home address and a time I'm going to be home anyways, and ask them to send me a message once they're on their way. Then I generally forget about it until I get a message from them. If they ghost me, oh well.

I don't take the ad down, and if anyone else asks, I just tell them to ask me again after the scheduled time.

eBay has had to reinvent itself. For me, I don’t trust eBay for legit merchandise, I sorta assume it’s knockoffs now, probably wrong. I’ve never used them but I was under the assumption that offer up and what not are popping off as eBay disrupters.

They cleaned up their act substantially in the past 3-4 years. There are still scammers, of course, but they seem to be taking action that favors buyers as well. I just don't see how they can protect everyone from all the various scams. If they accept all the risk, it will be exploited by scammers.

It was always fairly pro-buyer, but it's moved so much more in that direction it's somewhat hazardous to use as a seller.

For a lot of stuff, as a seller, I'll just trade-in or use random hobbyist forum buy&sell sections which ad-hoc reputation systems.

FWIW I don't hear of nearly any of the horror stories I used to. From my recollection, 2011 was about the peak of it, where buyers were claiming to never get their stuff, getting liberal refunds at the expense of the sellers. Sellers were getting their accounts locked by Paypal, sometimes with tens-of-thousands of dollars at stake, only to get it back 6 months later if they begged and screamed.

I opened a seller account in about 2020 to unload some server gear and almost got scammed, but I googled the buyers name and saw he was accused of fraud by several other people. I re-routed the package and although I didn't get reimbursed for that fee, ebay made me right and paypal (I think) gave me a small credit. They even had a phone call with me which seemed like they actually investigated it (I dont remember many details, it was 1 transaction 5 years ago).

There's just no way that any online auction can control fraud. I was on ebay yesterday as a buyer, looking for a tape backup drive. The seller clearly had been burned and (bitterly) warned that the sale was final, because previously he had sold a working drive which was parted out, replaced with broken parts (heads) and returned as defective. there's no way a third party can protect against it because either way the fraudster wins. 1) sell a bad drive, claim it was good, but accuse the buyer of fraud. Or 2) buy a good drive, swap it out with bad parts and return it. how could anyone (like ebay) solve this problem?

That's the point. They want to drive off amateurs who are trying to liquidate dads old tools in favor of the guys who are doing that stuff in professional volumes and the professional dealers and importers who are buying lots of stuff and breaking them up for retail sale and "real businesses" who run an eBay store alongside their other ecommerce stuff. They were pretty transparent about their motives IIRC.

imo it's slightly more pro-buyer than it was a couple of years ago. If only because unreasonable buyers have killed off most of the value of having 100% positive feedback.

Remember losing it a few years ago when an obvious scammer tried to bully me into a partial refund for an item he had already resold at a 50% markup.

Yes I have a 25+ year old account with 100% feedback, but I don't think it matters nearly as much anymore. Also clearly some subset of buyers understands they can abuse high feedback sellers who want to maintain their feedback rating.

In a way I like the more conversational forum buy & sell system where I have feedback, but also each purchase starts with a DM. I usually can suss out from a few DMs if a buyer is going to be a tire kicker wasting my time, or a perfectionist who will be a pain to sell to. In either case I let those buyers pass and wait for someone worth doing business with.

On eBay you have no choice in who your buyer is.

I set basically everything at an inflated price and accept offers. The kind of person who's going to be a pain will basically never pay an inflated price and if they do you can partial refund the amount you actually would've accepted to let them think they've won.

Nina Kollars gave an interesting talk on scammers selling coffee through eBay using stolen credit cards. Signature way of knowing is they're shipped direct from nespresso and the purchase price is 40-50% cheaper than retail. I ordered some keurig pods and experienced the same direct shipping and cheap prices.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2IT2oAzTcvU

eBay is interesting. It has consistently high profit margins, but no upward movement in revenue or profit, which peaked over a decade ago, and its returns heavily lag SP500.

I’m guessing investors don’t see much opportunity for growth in the online auction business to make it worth dumping a bunch of money just to take market share from eBay.

eBay I think had their growth capped once you had Etsy, Amazon FBA, and other options on the field.

Your average normie has no interest in the hassle of selling their used stuff (which has, if anything, got harder in my 25ish years using eBay), nor of buying random used staff from anonymous individual sellers.

Etsy covers the arts & crafts coded goods (though much is now China dropship).

Amazon allows the big merchants to sell to normies who just want to click "buy" without thinking about seller rating risk, when something will arrive, etc. Basically most people have no idea they are buying from not-Amazon, because it says amazon.com and that's good enough. eBay never had the smarts to create that user experience.

Amazon fulfillment, That’s the killer. Why bother with another marketplace when vertically integrated Amazon does it all

Because you're a used <pick niche> dealer or a dealer of something that is on the large end of what you can send in "normal" mail. Tires come to mind, even on Amazon very few of them are actually FBA.

> online auction business

Do they even do it nowadays? I was under impression it turned into an ordinary marketplace, probably with a bit more focus towards small/private sellers.

Yeah of course they do. And it’s still used by people looking to get deals.

From my perspective, eBay has a solid niche of older items, and they tried to break into the buy new items market too, but the hassles of selling mean for the most part only scalpers sell new items on eBay. Although there's some niches where it's not unusual: new auto parts seem common, I guess it's easier for a dealer parts counter to run an eBay store than otherwise.

I find that for a lot of "cheap junk from China" gets cheaper when you eBay it directly from China and cut out the cost of the Amazon middle man.

Recently I bought a chainsaw tool on eBay from China as I didn't want to buy a 6-pack for $10. I was able to buy a couple for about $0.20 more per unit. Sure, higher unit price and they'll be here slower but it's several $6ish saved.

ebay seems relatively competitive with aliexpress, sometimes even cheaper. amazon everything seems to cost much more

Amazon has free returns on almost everything, so if comparing prices for the same item, the cost of free returns has to be added.

I mostly use eBay for buying computer and bike parts - e.g. my most recent purchase on my work (tax-exempt) account was a batch of a specific model of 40Gbit NIC, and a specific type of bike seat post on my personal account.

The eBay search function isn't great, but it's vastly better than Amazon, where search results are polluted by large numbers of garbage sponsored results - this may be related to its success in these niches. (although in my case it's partly because I can avoid paying for Amazon Prime, and still choose things based on prices that include shipping)

Honestly ebay is currently a notch better than amazon, IME

they actually were disrupted -- craigslist

Is Craigslist still a thing? In my area, was the vice city classifieds. The hookers are gone, but so much obviously stolen stuff was posted there.

It is somewhat surprisingly (still) a $500m+ revenue[1] company, with very minimal employees and expenses. They're printing money on house and car listing fees.

1: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/craigslist-revenue-...

still had good successes with CL as far back as 2019 for selling a car, and picking up used servers.

that said, general consensus at least where I am in WA and Canada is FB Marketplace is the new CL. which is a same because FB sucks

You can't be "disrupted" by something that existed before you...

I quite like places like /r/HardwareSwap or the like.

I just use Craigslist. Yeah, that greatly limits the pool, but eBay is scummy and so is FB.

For those in europe - check out vinted.com

Vinted seems popular amongst people who never used eBay for buying and selling commodities like clothes. Is it any good for selling higher value specialist stuff like electronics, musical instruments etc?

For higher value goods people usually prefer others, I think Backmarket.com is one of the main ones (it's definitely the main option for electronics in France) but there's also Refurbed (know it from Belgium but I think it's German) or Rebuy (know it from the Netherlands but it's German as well) for example.

Each of those three claims to be the largest one in some metric.

in my experience it's good for buying them (i.e. people not knowing items will go for multiples of what they've listed on ebay)

My wife uses Vinted (UK) for selling hers and the kids clothes, usually single-to-double digit values at most (or she uses Oleo to just give it away). It works _fairly_ well from what I've heard, but she does have the occasional issue with people complaining about things and sending them back for obtuse reasons, often hardly worth it because the value was so low, the cost of the shipping there and back eclipsed the value of the item.

I wonder at times whether this is their game, hoping people will just tell them not to bother sending it back and they get a refund anyway.

As for ebay, I stopped selling anything on there years ago, well over a decade, when someone tried to scam me out of a laptop but failed. If something is valuable enough for me to sell, I sure as shit am not selling it on eBay.

More often than not, I give away my valuable tech that I'm done with, because I'd rather get nothing for it, and give it to someone who'll appreciate it than risk being scammed by some scumbag.

This way, friends and family get my hand-me-down PCs, laptops, phones, etc for nothing and they're still, by the time I'm done with them far better than something they'd buy with their budgets. When I buy something, I factor its lifetime in my possession into it's cost, I effectively expect £0 value left in it when I'm done or I don't buy it; everybody wins.

I have what I think is probably a weird mindset that practically everything I own, short of maybe a car or a house, I assume is worth £0 after I've owned it.

Probably indicative of not having a very good business brain. However, it always seems strange to me when when people buy things and keep track of their used values the whole time they own it - expecting at some point to trade it in.

My wife is also on Vinted. We use it also for young children clothing. It is great if you use cheap shipping options, and combine items.

For old computer stuff, I gave away quite some stuff to people driving to Ukraine. This then goes to kids or their cause.

On a whim I once bid on a "collectors" type Switch game. Me and someone else raised the price near the end of the auction. Not being used to eBay bidding I wasn't ready near the final seconds and got outbid.

A couple of days later I saw the same item relisted. I wouldn't be surprised if the person I was bidding against was just there to pump the price for the seller, or was an alt account of the seller. Obviously against eBay's TOS but I'd be surprised if it didn't happen.

Isn't that just ebay anyway?

Ebay entered polish market and lost to allegro. Then ebay basically quit.

As far as I remember ebay hand waved at everything, especially scam.

Allegro is getting enshitiffied nowadays since it was bought by VC.