I stopped using ebay a long time ago. You can't find any deals on there any more. + now the difference in cost on the "deals" is so little, that its not worth it to take the risk of dealing with a possible scammer when you can deal with an actual company and have the added protection you get from using a credit card.
and thats another thing, thanks to eBay used things end up costing almost as much as they do new. In fact about a year ago I was bidding on something second hand, and the final price ended up being about 15% more than the thing cost new(both online and in stores).
That's not true. Very very few people are willing to pay by cash, so it's basically paypal or nothing, and eBay requires
paypal accepters to accept credit cards.
I can't speak to the price, except that I find ebay items by using google product search, and price is king.
I continue to use eBay, but only for obscure collectibles and art that can't be found anywhere else. They're still irreplaceable in that respect.
Still, it's hard to imagine why they think spamming themselves with fixed-price auctions is going to be beneficial. If anything, it hurts them by drowning out traditional auctions. Fraud and flaky sellers are too much of a problem on eBay to use them for any item I can find elsewhere.
It's possible you're right, though I honestly don't understand why anyone would buy something through eBay when they can get an identical item through Amazon for the same price without the hassle and risk of fraud.
Maybe not drowned out, but from what sellers tell me, there's a good chance that low volume sellers just won't be able to afford to continue selling on eBay because of the new fee changes that favor BIN pricing. Those are the types of sellers who generally sell 'unique and used' items -- so variety may indeed decrease on eBay as a result of these changes.
I feel that ebay "lost its soul" when it didn't respond to sellers gaming the feedback system. If you are not familiar with this, sellers would withhold feedback to the buyer until the buyer gave positive feedback to the seller. Now, there are buyers who give negative feedback to sellers without just cause, so part of this behavior is defensive but the essence is that there grew this distrust and ebay's "karma system" just broke down. I never saw ebay doing anything to fix this and bring a better sense of trust and goodwill in the community. Anyone else have a different experience?
Sellers can't leave anything but positive feedback these days. I imagine the next step is for the system to add those "fast payment good ebayer AA+++" lines to your profile whenever you do anything.
Even with my bad math skills, I know that if I sell a £50 (ok, £49.99) item on eBay UK currently, I would have to pay them £2.25 which is 4.5%, soon though, I will need to pay them £4.95, 9.9%, thats more than double, and doesn't even include listing costs!
What I want to know, is how they dare?
Though, I'm the fool, because I'll be using them to sell stuff in future, when selling things on auction sites, the more visitors means a higher price I will get for an item. (and the more I will need to pay eBay - god dammit!)
Not really. From the sound of the article, Ebay is moving away from complicated, unique, one-off auctions precisely because there isn't a huge opportunity there.
