
Want to Understand What Ails the Modern Internet? Look at eBay - cgs
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/magazine/want-to-understand-what-ails-the-modern-internet-look-at-ebay.html
======
steven2012
I use eBay frequently. I have only bought things, but I want to sell things,
however I'm terrified of getting scammed. And eBay does nothing to ameliorate
those fears. I got as close as taking pictures, writing a description, and
stopped at the last step before putting my item for sale. Everything I've read
suggests that it's simply not worth it to try to sell things because you have
no protection from scammers.

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.

~~~
orbitingpluto
In the last two years, I've found that about 1 in 4 of my purchases from China
will never arrive. Obtaining refunds is an easy process but frustrating. Many
of the sellers will have rankings that make them seem trustworthy only to
disappear completely. And we can also lay blame on the western hemisphere.
Canada and USA postal systems bear the brunt of the costs of "free" delivery.
They will give these packages low priority. Packages will languish for months
and when items finally arrive, it can be difficult to arrange payment with the
seller after a refund.

~~~
ballenf
I wonder if there's anything unique about your situation or just a lot of bad
luck. Are you buying generally higher-end items? What does the tracking reveal
in terms of where in the process the item disappeared? In the US or China? Or
was it just never tendered for delivery?

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.

~~~
orbitingpluto
I have had good experiences with items that cost over $50. They tend to arrive
quickly. For instance, a tray of CPUs was shipped to me in less than 36 hours
for $10 total shipping.

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.

------
fyfy18
I’m not exactly sure what point this article is trying to make, but as a
regular eBay user, these are my biggest issues when using the platform. I’m
based in the UK, so some of these may not apply for other locations.

\- Delivery times aren’t accurate. When I buy something from eBay I expect it
will arrive within a week, but if I want something to arrive in a shorter time
I buy it elsewhere. There is no way to filter listings to find which sellers
will post an item today, and ship it via a method that will arrive tomorrow. A
lot of listings are marked Fast&Free, but those have an estimate delivery date
of Thursday.

\- Too many Chinese sellers. A lot of items are sold by Chinese sellers who
list the item location as in the UK, but in the description say that there is
a 20 day delivery time. If I want stuff from China I’ll buy it from
AliExpress.

\- Too many duplicate listings. If I search for a common item where there are
a few variations, I usually see the same item repeated a handful of times on
the first page.

~~~
djaychela
>Delivery times aren’t accurate.. {snip} A lot of listings are marked
Fast&Free, but those have an estimate delivery date of Thursday.

I think that's because if they don't give a pessimistic estimate of delivery
time, they open themselves up to 'it didn't arrive next day' type negative
feedback and DSR scores. I'm in the UK and am selling cars part time to earn
extra money at the moment - most of which need things doing (hence my markup).
Nearly everything I order from eBay arrives next day (if I order before 10am),
even though it usually says 2-3 days minimum. But I totally agree, it's a PITA
as you should be able to filter down to those who actually will put it in the
post that day if you order before (say) midday.

>\- Too many Chinese sellers

Totally. They are spottable for the most part, but it's a pain to have to read
the listings for the giveaways, and occasionally I'll miss it and then have to
wait a couple of weeks for something to arrive. This has happened in the past
when I've paid for it, and then they've said 'sorry... just checked and the UK
warehouse is out of stock, so we'll send it direct from our China warehouse'
\- as if there's actually a UK warehouse. These have ALL been listings
claiming 2-3 days' delivery.

>Too many duplicate listings.

Yup. It's getting crazily difficult for car parts which I get a lot (see
above) - slightly different listing, same seller, etc. Or different seller,
identical listing with slightly different price.

------
6nf
I think I missed the point because I don't understand what this article is
trying to say exactly.

~~~
thisisit
The article is a meandering and muddles it point but here's the paragraph
where the actual point is made:

 _In 2001, an eBay user might have given an eBay seller a low rating for an
unsatisfactory packaging job; in 2018, an Uber driver might be dinged if a
rider doesn’t like his personality or choice of music. Facebook recently began
ranking publishers by trustworthiness, based on feedback from users. Upon
discovering a problem, a platform company’s first instinct is to find a way to
expose it to the wisdom of a market, or at least the will of a crowd._

 _It’s a transactional platform; the transaction is very clear to both sides,”
Hagiu says. “By and large, buyers and sellers are aligned on eBay.” A seller
banned for counterfeit sunglasses hasn’t lost any rights, just his ability to
use eBay. Crucially, to most ears, a scammer’s claims to the contrary would
sound ridiculous._

The article's view on what ails the internet is the flawed idea of "wisdom of
the crowd". The recommendation based systems where companies say - "others
watched/read this so, you must like it too".

But then the article presents Amazon as something better and conveniently
forgets that Amazon too has a similar ratings system. Though only the product
level reviews are front and center. Seller reviews do not take the limelight.
And as evident by Amazon's glut of fake products this weakness of rating
systems is being gamed too.

~~~
TACIXAT
The other point was sites are often trying to address social issues with
market solutions. Facebook's mission is social connection but its profit is
attention bidding.

~~~
mirimir
Maybe "stated mission"? Do you believe that Facebook's mission is actually
social connection?

~~~
unclebucknasty
> _Do you believe that Facebook 's mission is actually social connection?_

Exactly. I laughed out loud at how insanely cynical it is that they suggest
that as their mission.

After reading it, you can almost hear Zuckerberg laughing and sneering, "dumb
f___s".

~~~
mirimir
He could have seen the light. Some sort of light. God. Landmark. Qigong. Some
Hawaiian spiritual practice.

------
waytogo
OT: What eBay is really good at:

If you want to buy a notebook with a US keyboard (which some devs prefer) and
when it's hard to get them in your home country.

eBay.com offers a Global Shipping Program where the US seller just send their
stuff to this shipping program and eBay takes care of everything else. Even
customs will be paid by eBay and the buyer just pays once and benefits from
fast processing. It's a buttersmooth way of international shipping.

I got my last notebook within just one week and it was still cheaper than the
local version in my home country. I know that some notebooks offer US
keyboards in any country (ThinkPads and Macbooks) but then you usually wait
also min 1-2 weeks because they are custom builds or they come directly from
China.

Don't know of any other entity than eBay offering this.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
The Global Shipping Program is a really fantastic thing. I've used it both as
a buyer and a seller (vintage computers) and now have all sorts of interesting
stuff from all over the world. Also no problems at all shipping CRT monitors
internationally despite couriers (probably perfectly understandably) refusing
to provide insurance on them.

------
unclebucknasty
From a senior management perspective, eBay is run like a private-equity backed
portfolio company. No offense to PE firms, but eBay has the feel of being more
worried about costs and makes very little investment in long-term growth--as
if the owners just want to turn a profit and sell the company before the debt
comes due.

This is why the UI is horrible and, in general, the site feels stuck somewhere
in the early 2000s. Perhaps this is also why the company culture is broken and
somewhat dishonest. They have frequently engaged in dramatic policy shifts
when someone got the idea that the bottom line could be enhanced. In these
cases, they are capable of totally disregarding their ecosystem (especially
sellers and affiliates). Worse, they would outright lie about their
intentions, which I suppose they felt necessary for placation when completely
screwing over their "partners".

eBay has long had a certain toxic nature, including an almost uncanny ability
to leave customers and partners feeling disappointed, if not outright cheated
at some point. Whatever the shortcomings of the people who participate in
their marketplace (including scammers), they are amplified by eBay, whose
resolution policies essentially amount to doing as little as possible. This is
what people are reporting as disappointment when they've needed an issue
resolved.

I am amazed that people still use eBay.

~~~
pritishc
This is in line with my horrid experience with them last year. I have
experienced the fallout from each point that you made. I had no idea that an
e-commerce platform as popular as theirs could be so incompetent, rigid and
downright hostile since I've had the exact opposite experience with their
competitors. Their resolution policies and guarantees are a joke.

------
pritishc
It looks like I'm the only one in this thread who has the experience of being
scammed, as a buyer, on eBay. Although admittedly, this happened on the Indian
version of the platform (which is now owned by Indian e-commerce giant
Flipkart).

I wrote about the irony of them promoting the sale of refurbished items when
it was a refurbished Xbox that I purchased last year that turned out to be a
dud, on Medium ([https://medium.com/@chakrabortypritish/ebay-india-a-
cautiona...](https://medium.com/@chakrabortypritish/ebay-india-a-cautionary-
tale-of-pain-frustration-c3f55dfd821e) \- I had to incorporate a bit of
sensationalism to try and fetch some views, which is why it's written the way
it is, didn't work anyway). Turns out that the seller lied about the machine's
warranty, and Microsoft support couldn't help me either. eBay support
consistently told me that they couldn't do anything about this according to
company policy. Never felt this helpless on an e-commerce platform, and I've
never gone back on eBay.

And yes, their platform UI/UX is horrible, I concur. The only way to show that
the Xbox was stuck in a boot-and-crash loop was to record a video, and they
did not permit video uploads on their (laughable) grievance redressal
platform.

------
jancsika
On the other hand, it's a drag that there isn't something like Yelp for FLOSS.

I would have loved to see a rating and some reviews of several development
processes before wasting my time posting patches.

~~~
voltagex_
I'm getting pretty good at working that out.

Note that this isn't a dig at any particular project, I know FOSS is hard and
free time is scarce (and so is funding).

Quick ones:

1\. Date of last commit to main repo

2\. Number of issues open on Trac/Bugzilla/GitHub/Jira whatever (note, I'm
taking a point off if you use Trac, only because there's still an instance
from 10 years ago sending me emails that I can't unsubscribe from)

Takes more time:

3\. Number of open pull requests/mailing list patches and general discussion
around them

4\. Any kind of clear and updated roadmap.

Edit: number one these days should be an up to date and working CI/CD system
with published artifacts, including for Windows.

~~~
saagarjha
I like to look at the reactions maintainers have to pull requests. Do they
usually get merged, or do they end up being dragged through a bureaucratic
nightmare and eventually closed?

~~~
voltagex_
I've never written anything popular enough to really get pull requests, but I
can definitely understand _not_ merging a pull request due to not being able
to maintain that code or it taking the project in a different direction to
what you want.

~~~
konschubert
It's one thing to say "no", it's another thing to say "later" forever.

~~~
voltagex_
That comes back to having a defined plan for where you want the project to go.

------
EADGBE
I've seen it fragment and specialize.

And I'm okay with that.

For instance with musicians - particularly guitarists (only because we tend to
be gear enthusiasts) - Reverb.com has become our new Ebay.com. It's even
replacing Craigslist for a lot of what we were doing previously (allows local
deals, too).

They essentially took all the good things that were working for Ebay and
tailored it to musicians. It's a slam dunk.

------
coldtea
The article is incredibly meandering and non-committed to saying anything in
particular.

------
Shivetya
I just cannot compare Amazon to Ebay. While I can get similar items on both
what I use Ebay for , collectibles, antiques, and hard to find items, is
outside the scope of Amazon. I never expected Ebay to be the big retail spot,
for many of us it is the world's largest garage sale.

I use Ebay for many replacement parts for items not normally found in stores
or worse jacked up on Amazon because they come bound with Prime shipping.
Amazon might be top dog from name recognition but places like Wal Mart are
trying and unless Amazon gets a grip on knock offs they are in danger of
alienating a good number of buyers.

------
mkstowegnv
What happened to the future where all our transactions were secured by trust
rated escrow agents?

------
sporkologist
Some day in the far future, eBay will invent a technology that lets people
embed Youtube videos in their listings. I'm not holding my breath though.

------
kachurovskiy
Happy to share my experience with ebay.de in Germany as a seller and buyer.

Started selling some old tech/appliances I don't need anymore on eBay: last
month 4 items for 250 EUR total, before that a few more items for ~400 EUR
total.

Items went for 50-70% of the original price, and then eBay took their
commission which at times was quite steep at ~15% of the selling price. It was
still worth it since for most items I couldn't find any takers locally on
Kleinanzeigen (Craigslist analog).

eBay has annoying limits for new sellers so to sell my old Sony camera I had
to wait a month after selling my old Canon DSLR. It's impossible to contact a
human support for this issue. They raised my limits automatically recently
though.

Don't remember any problems with my buyers or when I bought something. Some of
it I shouldn't have bought at all but that's a different story :-D Looking
forward to clearing more of those storage boxes.

------
JansjoFromIkea
eBay really should allow you to filter out items with multiple price points.
So many sellers abuse that system so heavily (e.g. the standard 99c memory
card listings that have some crappy little microsd adapter included in the
listings to drag the price range down).

Basically everything else that's bad about ebay I can deal with, but that's
the one thing that sends me racing to other sites.

~~~
moepstar
You can see the same on Amazon - just search for some 3D printing filament,
you'll get listings that vary from 10 to 40€ all in one entry...

------
tonyedgecombe
Ebay is trash but it's where the buyers are.

I've been buying and selling on eBay since they came to the UK but I have to
hold my nose every time I visit the site.

------
candiodari
Want to understand what ails the modern PSTN network ? Take into account that
we have been trying to fix it politically for 40 years now.

------
boxcardavin
I tried to Buy It Now an item off Ebay just now and Ebay responded, "Sorry,
this seller is on vacation, so this item is unavailable."

Sinking ship.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
It's usually listed very prominently on the listing page when this is the
case. That said, I have no idea why sellers would choose to use this instead
of just scheduling things around their vacations.

~~~
mlrtime
Ebay tracks shipping statistics, if you deliver late they ding you.

------
jen729w
Why do the style guides of these large organisations often insist on the
ludicrous capitalisation of "EBay" when it appears at the start of a sentence?

~~~
thomasfedb
As a writer I will jump through linguistic hoops to move uncapitalised proper
names away from the start of a sentence - for example, a medical device called
"i-gel" which I wrote a paper on. Starting a sentence without a capital is
just too jarring in formal writing I find.

~~~
adrianratnapala
Yep. For hundreds of years English has had a rule that proper nouns are
capitalised; it is pretentious to imagine that "myThingy is soooo cool that
you can't even use the rules of English on it."

Now in some fields, like computer documentation, there's practical reason to
change. It would be confusing to capitalise command-names if they are lower-
case in their (case sensitive) native language. But newspapers aren't bound by
that consideration, and it doesn't really apply to company names anyway.

~~~
FearNotDaniel
Actually, look in any book printed 18th/early 19th century and you'll see that
the rules were quite different then: _all_ nouns were capitalised, as in
modern German, and the 'long s' was frequently used in the middle of words.
Mass literacy, almost-universal schooling along with physical punishments for
children not doing exactly what the textbook said have given us moderns the
idea that the 'proper' English of our grandparents remained the same for
centuries, but really the language has always been in flux and the rate of
change just got significantly slowed by cultural pressures between
approximately 1850s to 1950s.

~~~
thomasfedb
I don't think of myself as a total sheep - case in point I put the comma
outside of the quotation mark because otherwise it parses weird.

~~~
hnal943
You are fighting the good fight.

------
TACIXAT
>Peter Thiel — an early Facebook investor and board member — with his funding
of lawsuits against media companies and his eclectic and severe right-wing
politics.

The take away of Thiel glaringly missed Palantir in favor of some digs.

~~~
zaroth
Eclectic and severe right-wing politics? Awfully colorful way to describe him
in an article which isn’t an editorial.

Would love to see the NYT describing a left winger as eclectic and severe.
Even masked antifa don’t get that treatment.

It’s frustrating to have to mentally guard against this political mudslinging.
The article is worse for it, and IMO it’s just coddling their readership and
narrowing their audience.

~~~
antonvs
Do you think either characterization - eclectic, severe - is actually
incorrect?

~~~
TACIXAT
There is a much more neutral way to write it.

>Thiel who is known for funding a lawsuit against Gawker and his conservative
politics.

Still, I think those, while visible, are rather minor notes compared to
starting a billion dollar defense contractor.

