
Nobody Thinks About EBay - pmcpinto
https://www.racked.com/2017/10/16/16473414/ebay-online-shopping-resale
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sxates
The fact that eBay is now primarily (80%!) new items that are 'buy it now' not
auctions is why I have lost interest. Amazon wins that game hands down with
competitive pricing, 2 day shipping, and no-hassle returns. I can't get any of
those assurances from a bunch of random sellers on eBay.

What made eBay fun and interesting were all the weird things you could find
there that you couldn't find on sites like Amazon. Now every time I try to go
searching for something on eBay I have to wade through all the shady sellers
who have packed it with thousands of items that are better bought elsewhere.

~~~
hodder
for non-Americans, Ebay is great for cross boarder shopping. Amazon doesn't
have nearly the selection outside the USAA, so E-bay becomes a great way to do
that.

~~~
smcl
Yeah Amazon is pretty weird for cross-border stuff, even in the EU. I'm in
Czech Republic which doesn't have its own "amazon.cz" ... you can order from
amazon.co.uk or amazon.de but many items are unavailable. I think there's an
upper-limit on price as it tends to be Electronics (laptops, phones) that I
struggled with.

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noonespecial
They should try sucking less:

My most recent peeve is that its virtually impossible to order searches by
cost anymore. Every hole-in-the-wall Chinese seller has figured out that you
can do a multi-select on your listing and just stick in a random item with a
$0.99 price as one of the selections. This makes it appear as a $0.99 item in
the search results. The real product then has to be selected before you can
see the real price.

Literally every product is $0.99 from friendship bracelets to jet-skis with no
way to sort them. You just have to click each one to discover what it really
costs.

I mostly use Aliexpress now for that sort of thing; It's just easier and works
better.

And don't even think about selling an Apple product or you will learn quickly
about the "brick scam" that's been going on so long and is so well know, ebay
is basically complicit in it at this point.

Yes, I'm ranting but: I used to use ebay a great deal. Now I don't. They are
richly earning their irrelevance.

~~~
CamperBob2
_Yes, I 'm ranting but: I used to use ebay a great deal. Now I don't. They are
richly earning their irrelevance._

Another recent misstep on eBay's part has been to prohibit links to offsite
information in listings. So if you're selling anything that requires an
informed buyer -- from electronic parts and equipment to the aforementioned
jet skis -- your ability to communicate that information has just been
removed, or at least made artificially awkward.

It's as if eBay can't decide what kind of company they want to be. A back-
alley venue for scams and junk? A storefront for cut-rate Chinese clones of
popular gadgets? A place where the latest luxury goods from Guccci and Sorny
are always on display? Or a legitimate online marketplace that encourages
honest transactions between informed buyers and sellers?

~~~
noonespecial
They used to be the world's garage sale. This worked for them.

Now, not only did they become the world's sketchy back-alley, they're not even
very good at it.

------
twic
I use eBay all the time. It's my default shopping site. It has the things i
want, and it's no more expensive than Amazon, sometimes cheaper.

Indeed, i feel it has a bit of an edge over Amazon in selling slightly odd,
not entirely mass-produced things. For example, a while ago, i wanted to grow
a couple of plants from cuttings. Just two. To do that, i needed a couple of
millilitres of rooting hormone and a couple of peat pellets. No manufacturer
packages those things in such small quantities. xxlbigdaves-hydro does,
though. He buys big packs of rooting hormone and peat pellets, splits them up,
and sells a tiny quantity of both, together. He even throws in a razor blade.
Ideal.

More recently, i wanted a very particular make of lipstick for a halloween
costume. I could buy a single 2.5 ml tube of it on eBay. On Amazon, you can
either buy a big tube, or packs of several 2.5 ml tubes. That's a lot more
lipstick than i'm likely to get through in my life.

I'm in the UK, and maybe the sellers here are better than in the US, or Amazon
is worse. It probably matters that i am the last surviving human without
Prime, so Amazon has a higher marginal cost for me than for the typical
Hackernews. And i confess that i use eBay partly out of sheer bloody-minded
desire not to see Amazon take over the entire universe.

~~~
worldburger
Re: Amazon comment. How do you see this playing out?

~~~
twic
Amazon will take over the world outside China, and then a few years after
that, become just another seller on Tmall.

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Brakenshire
Surprised by the comments here, I've always found eBay positive, I buy mostly
used items, usually 'Buy it now' rather than auctions, and usually from
sellers with solid sales histories. I can't remember ever having a problem,
and I can't really imagine buying from random classified ads in preference.

It is disappointing though that they're focusing on new items, and not trying
to find ways of improving the situation for buying or selling used items. For
instance, perhaps you could have projects to figure out what most customers
look for in images, and encourage sellers to provide good coverage, or to pick
up images not properly focused on the product. Think of how many pictures eBay
must have of any particular laptop model, and when buyers browse, what images
they pause on, and where they zoom; it really must be an unparalleled dataset.
There are a lot of listings, even for expensive items, where the pictures are
just insufficient. And even with filtering and categorization, you could more
intelligently encourage sellers to answer categorization questions that meet
seller desires, that can be picked up through analysis of how people browse or
search for listings. If you could say to a seller "not putting in RAM for a
laptop cuts your audience by 18%", and gameify the process of improving the
listing, I imagine you could make a lot of progress. Or perhaps using known
dimensions of objects or their packaging to provide an simplified, streamlined
marketplace for shipping options.

Essentially, they probably feel that second hand sales are a niche market, so
they can't continue explosive growth without moving into standard retail. It's
the downside of the continual fast growth mindset. They could really cultivate
their market, and grow the company by growing the market, by incrementally
improving the buyer and seller experience for 2nd hand items. Shifting focus
away from that has big risks, not just rewards.

~~~
madaxe_again
I hate to say it, but it appears they have no idea where they’re going.

They talk about Etsy, they talk about amazon, they talk about aliexpress - and
then they say they want to focus _more_ on new goods. From where I come from
moving out of the niche you dominate and increasing your competing surface
area (retail of new goods is, uh, crowded) is an asinine move.

As to “millennials haven’t even heard of eBay” - what utter tosh. I and many,
many others I know have used eBay since our teens, and I’m now in my 30’s.
I’ve just furnished an entire house, from floors to fittings to fridge to
furniture through eBay.

Either way, if they honestly think they’ll succeed by trying to compete with
amazon and Ali on their own turf, they’re deluded, and signing up for an
express train to insolvency depot, where buyers loiter offering shady deferred
stock deals for sick companies to harvest for corporate organs.

They’d do far more for their brand by making the feedback system actually
useful again.

Oh, and their API is a world of hatefulness. Built an end to end integration
for an ecommerce platform - stuff of nightmares. 2000+ page PDF API guide.
Zero consistency in communications. Count from zero, count from one, can’t
count here. Single shared sandbox for the universe. No support. Spontaneous
deprecation. Never again.

------
abruzzi
I remember when eBay was though of as the ability to sift through a million
attics or garages to but all the things that someone else thought was barely
worth the effort to carry down for curbside trash pickup. Now it has a very
different feel, and it is somewhat taken over by new low dollar junk.
Thankfully the auctions are still there, and I can still buy old synths that
few people want, used parts for my motorcycles, or 30 year old Pentax lenses.

I've had far less problems with eBay than I have with Amazon. I mostly buy
used items on actual auctions. Occasionally a buy it now used item, but rarely
new stuff. Perhaps its because I'm a long time user of eBay (1997 IIRC) that
I've internalized a consistent process that works. Amazon was great when
Amazon was the only seller, but when the opened it up to third party sellers
and that turned into questionable and counterfeit items, I don't generally go
back.

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jameskegel
Ebay lacks consistency, UI-wise. It reminds me of MySpace in the generation of
Facebook, where users can use whatever visual themes they like and either
include or omit whatever technical details they'd like. After seeing people
get burned with being shipped empty boxes or just instruction manuals for
games, and then the hassle they dealt with just because the seller had evasive
language and fine print, I lost a lot of respect for Ebay.

Sure with Amazon, my shipper's items are all mingled together, but if I get
shipped a lemon, I don't even have to worry about it being taken care of
because Amazon handles that extra-mile beautifully. Ebay is borderline scams
and china reseller junk most of the time. One thing that Ebay has cornered the
market on, however, are items being sold for parts.

~~~
Scoundreller
I think Ebay's value is in its flexibility: you don't need a category to sell
an item.

Once a particular item can be sufficiently categorized, it gets its own
marketplace, like what's happened with cell phones.

It happens to Craiglist all the time. E.g.

Rooms for rent --> Airbnb.

Craft products --> Etsy.

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kylehotchkiss
“We have to tell our story differently because what people know about us is
not really who we are anymore,”

My last sale (of macbook) on Ebay was to somebody clearly trying to scam me.
But they were not good at it. I knew they were trying to scam me but I also
knew ebay protects the seller as long as you can prove the package went to the
address from the payment and the weights and sizes for the package made sense.
"Not really who we are anymore"... meaning a trustworthy place to sell junk?

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mockindignant
I feel like ebay died when they removed the ability of sellers to leave
negative feedback for buyers back in 2008. I understand why they did it, but
they created a less than desirable environment for sellers who moved to other
platforms like Etsy, and the buyers just moved along with them.

~~~
Scoundreller
Iunno, negative feedback for buyers was never helpful for sellers since
sellers never had much control over their buyers anyway.

At least these days you can somewhat restrict buyers (can't have zero
feedback, more than 2 unpaid item reports...)

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izzydata
They should double down on the auction part and maybe find some way to make
money off a craigslist like feature. Why bother trying to chase amazon?

~~~
mark-r
They're taking exactly the opposite approach, I wouldn't be surprised to see
them eliminate auctions entirely someday.

~~~
zodPod
That's a very Apple thing to do haha. "The _new_ eBay. Get what you want. When
you want. You'll never have to wait for an auction to end again!"

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Psilidae
"The company’s research has found that a younger audience wants unique
products and “is searching for items that push against conformity.”"

I wonder how much time and money was spent for Ebay to realize the obvious:
that young people like (and have always liked) being different.

------
raspasov
One of the biggest problems of eBay is item categorization. Just search for
"iPhone 6" and see what I mean:

[https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m...](https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.H0.XiPhone+6.TRS0&_nkw=iPhone+6&_sacat=0)

Even if you go the their "structured" iPhone 6 page it barely gets any better:
[https://www.ebay.com/b/Apple-
iPhone-6/9355/bn_3897179](https://www.ebay.com/b/Apple-
iPhone-6/9355/bn_3897179)

~~~
soared
All I see are iphone 6's, what do you mean?

~~~
zodPod
Try sorting by price. I commented the same thing (oddly enough, using the same
example) above and I remember, when searching by price, how difficult it is
because idiots don't like to use the categorization!

~~~
soared
Eh same thing happens on amazon. I search for a bike jersey and get totally
unrelated stuff.

------
seorphates
I stopped thinking about ebay a long time ago. I would only consider it if
it's the last seller of the thing on the planet. And I definitely do not and
will not use paypal, willingly, ever.

They've done not much more than strong-arm their user base on both sides in
one form or another for years.

Sorry, they're nothing but a ghost of the Internet past to this little
clicker.

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losteverything
I think about ebay. No other place to search (learn/discover) used collectable
stuff, like maps

A far as buy it now, that is a "wish" price for collectable stuff we buy.
Everyone knows the real bidding starts with 2 minutes left in the auction.

Where else is there? When craigslist could search every city - that was the
closest.

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jimnotgym
For me Ebay is the place where I go to buy x and instead find a million
listings for knock off Chinese versions of x, novelty accessories for x and
finally when I find x it is a sad worn out x that sells for 80% of the cost of
a new x on Amazon. Except Amazon shipping is cheaper.

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maxxxxx
eBay is quite a mess today but it seems Amazon is almost on the same path
these days.

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zandorg
They shut down Half.com not so long ago having bought it in 2001 or so for
$300 million. There goes a good marketplace for books & CDs. Bad move!

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RickS
Betting the farm that mom and pop shippers can deliver a better customer
experience than Amazon is a fast track to an earned death. Cest la vie.

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oh-kumudo
Bought some stuff from EBay back then, the tracking status never works, not
even once. Until it was delivered after 2 weeks, I had no idea where my order
went. Never used it afterwards.

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apricot13
ebay is great for buying things like fabrics and wholesale items but I would
never trust it to buy or sell anything more expensive than £20.

The risk of fraud is too high and I have zero confidence in ebay to resolve
the issue if I were to buy or sell an item and something went wrong. None of
this is based on actual experience just a feeling and other peoples
experiences - and I think that may also be why people are moving away from
ebay, a lack of trust.

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philfrasty
Any idea why the stock price is 4x from 2009? Does the company own other
significant assets aside from the marketplace?

~~~
specialp
Well the entire market is up over 3x since 2009. Also Ebay does indeed make a
lot of money. The current P/E ratio is 5.6 which actually makes it a good
value. Amazon is starting to struggle with the issue of fake or defective
goods that hurt Ebay as well.

~~~
yequalsx
The P/E ratio being low does not imply it is a good value. Indeed, the most
reasonable assumption would be that the market does not think highly of its
future prospects.

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tenkabuto
I've recently been exposed to the resale community that uses eBay, and it's
quite impressive. Many people scour thrift stores like Goodwill for items to
resell, but the process seems inefficient for both the resellers and the
thrift stores.

To make the process more efficient for both and to increase demand for goods,
I imagine that there could be pre-processing services provided to both sellers
and buyers, which take photos of groupings of goods and use ML to provide
likely metadata about each good and assemble thumbnail photos of each good.
They could then be posted to a central "marketplace" area that is accessible
to buyers.

