

EBay Is Slowly Losing Its Soul - reazalun
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/08/21/ebay-is-slowly-losing-its-soul/

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vaksel
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.

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ars
You can still use a credit card with eBay.

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vaksel
most sellers don't accept them

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).

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ars
>most sellers don't accept them

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.

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gamble
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.

~~~
ars
Simple: They make money on the listing fees.

Lower the prices, increase the volume.

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gamble
It's self-defeating if the end result is drowning out the unique and used
items that attract eBay's core customers.

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ars
Are you sue that 'unique and used items' is the core of ebay? I have a feeling
it's not anymore.

Plus with categories and search, I don't think they'll be drowned out. It's
not a physical store - there's no space shortage.

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gamble
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.

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blogimus
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?

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dylan
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.

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blogimus
I've not been on ebay in many months, so this is news to me. Just goes to show
the trust mechanism that helped make the site popular is broken.

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ashleyw
eBay are just there to get more and more money out of you.

Every few weeks I get an email from them, I got one yesterday from them in
fact. They generally contain something like this:

>> Fee changes

>> We will be making changes to our overall fee structure, including Insertion
Fees and Final Value Fees.

With a link to the full changes: <http://pages.ebay.co.uk/pricechange08/>

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!)

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iamwil
Sounds like a good opportunity for someone to come in and make an auction site
that doesn't take 70 steps in order to sell something.

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ambition
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.

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stcredzero
"huge" is relative.

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petuniapredator
I was wondering when someone else was going to figure this out and write about
it. I abandoned the site about 2 years ago.

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shadytrees
If anything, they're rearranging deck chairs on the Hindenburg.

