
EBay Valet - zengr
http://ebay.com/valet
======
mootothemax
_New or like-new designer shoes and handbags: Brands like Hugo Boss, Gucci,
Nine West, Ralph Lauren_

I wonder if eBay are potentially setting themselves up for a massive headache
with this.

There is a quite staggering number of people who falsely believe that their
counterfeit designer items are genuine.

~~~
beambot
FWIW... this is exactly why we launched Lollipuff (YC W13):
[https://www.lollipuff.com/](https://www.lollipuff.com/)

eBay is _notoriously_ plagued with fakes. For some designer brands, fakes can
account for 75% (or more) of the items sold [1,2].

The key for Lollipuff: We have brand experts authenticate each and every item
-- ie. real, human experts augmented with sophisticated software to make
things scalable. We like to think of it as "eBay without the fakes", or if you
prefer "Palantir for designer goods" (software-augmented humans).

[1] [https://www.lollipuff.com/blog/41/ebays-counterfeit-
epidemic...](https://www.lollipuff.com/blog/41/ebays-counterfeit-epidemic-
herve-leger-edition)

[2] [https://www.lollipuff.com/blog/123/ebays-counterfeit-
epidemi...](https://www.lollipuff.com/blog/123/ebays-counterfeit-epidemic-
alexander-mcqueen-edition)

~~~
001sky
Conceptually, how do you guys triage the fakes? The spectrum of quality seems
so broad, in that they are convincing enough to be worn on the red carpet (and
presumably picked by stylists) etc. Or are all those shots authentic pieces
that were then used in fake listings?

~~~
rickyc091
I can spot fakes for sneakers, but I assume it's the same process. Material,
spotting the stitchings, logos, etc. Certain things line up, there's a certain
distance between stitches and logos, etc. With purses, some are easy to spot
by looking at the pattern, loose threading, discoloration, etc. Once you have
an eye for it, it's pretty easy to spot cause it stands out like a sore thumb.

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anigbrowl
_You get 70% of the sale price if your things sell._

30% commission, and the valet's incentives are for a quick sale rather than
the best price, if the behavior of existing bulk listers is anything to go by.
These people are usually not especially knowledgeable about the items they
sell and so have a poor grasp of pricing - often good for me as informed
buyer, but a real pain in the ass for sellers.

~~~
roel_v
The alternative is 'throw out not completely useless stuff because I can't be
arsed to sell it'. It's win win the way I see it, I'd dump half a truck of
stuff on their dock if they'd offer this in Europe.

~~~
atwebb
Are there not currently businesses that do exactly this? You drop things off
and they list them. I ran one for a while (albeit in the states).

~~~
bebefuzz
This was exactly what I was thinking too. In a weird way, eBay is competing
with itself. There have always been companies where you can drop/ship your
stuff off at and have them list it for you.

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isomorphic
You can't set your own price, and you only get a two-week run. On the other
hand, you don't have to deal with the cesspool that is being a seller on eBay.

I wonder how eBay will deal with the "yes, please iPad to vacant lot near
warehouse Miami" folks, other than immediately transferring buyer's funds
without the possibility for reversal. If they did that for ordinary sellers,
I'd quite happily ship my iPad to the sketchy address and go on my merry way.

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sjtrny
40 year old virgin did it first
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEHD6jHXt58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEHD6jHXt58)

~~~
hellweaver666
well... the "we sell your stuff on eBay" type shops have been around for ages.
I don't think that movie invented them.

~~~
sjtrny
Oh really? I thought it was a unique idea. Thanks to you I would never have
know others had also thought about and created such a business. You have
thoroughly changed my perspective on the world.

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sinzone
FOBO (YC2011) has a similar model and it takes only a 15% fee.
[http://www.fobo.net/](http://www.fobo.net/)

~~~
zengr
Unfortunately its only in SF and you can just list Electronics.

~~~
kidlogic
Gone! (Techstars company) has been testing in a few areas and is not specific:
[http://thegoneapp.com/](http://thegoneapp.com/)

Affiliated as they are my friends and have a solid team

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jakozaur
Isn't amazon already doing something similar with "warehouse deals" and
"fullified by Amazon?

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Warehouse is all Amazon returns, AFAIK. But you can do used sales off of the
main purchase page, and mail in your stuff to have it Fulfilled by Amazon.
I've been looking into this quite a bit lately since I have about $7,000 of
Canon gear to sell off.

I think I'll stick with Amazon. Ebay's 30% seems ridiculously steep.

~~~
zengr
For $7,000 of Canon gear, 30% is surely steep. I think you should just sell
your stuff directly on ebay. They just charge 10%. I think ebay valet's
customer base is people who have something around but don't know its value and
just want to get rid of it.

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ghobs91
30% commission on top of lower than market pricing in order to sell quickly.
Sounds like a steep price to pay for some added convenience that should be
part of the experience from the start.

On top of that, like others have said, it's not far fetched for eBay to give
Valet listings higher priority in search results, due to their higher profit
margins. Punishing users for wanting a streamlined experience, not cool.

I've been dealing with these pain points as both a buyer and seller for over
10 years, and I'm willing to bet I'm not alone here. I'm currently building a
p2p marketplace app, and plan to enlist the features of startups like Shyp to
make it an all around awesome experience. If anyone has input, feature
requests, or would even like to join me, let me know, I'm all ears :)

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dendory
I think the most likely outcome of this is valet items being given
preferential treatment on eBay. Just wait until your items are a tiny spot at
the bottom while the valet items take the main spots, and that 30% commission
will be the least of your issues.

~~~
ekianjo
Seems like the Appstore 30% fee model is becoming standard everywhere now.
That's not a very positive thing...

~~~
jzwinck
If you think 30% is high, I would like to introduce to you Getty Images, the
juggernaut of stock photography. They take 50% now.

~~~
throwaway2048
Filthy peasants, you should be glad your taxes for living on the Kings land
arnt even higher I say!

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vijayaggarwal
Will it not create conflict of interests? On one side, eBay should make their
listing and selling processes as easy as possible for individuals, and on the
other side keeping them somewhat difficult will promote Valet service.

~~~
jychang
It would not be a conflict of interest if the Valet service does not generate
more profit per sale after everything is factored in.

~~~
vijayaggarwal
I believe it is fair to assume that Valet service will be costlier for the
user. So, if eBay makes the same profit on Valet as on direct selling, then
eBay may not feel motivated to push through usability enhancements in direct
selling, even though it is definitely beneficial for its users.

Of course, I am over-simplifying things, but I have been in a similar
situation wherein the customers of our service started offering to pay us to
help them use our service. Instead of accepting payments, we helped the users
for free and took their problems as problems with the usability of our tool
which we needed to fix. We believed that accepting paid service as a revenue
channel would deviate us from making a good tool in the first place.

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azernik
I've seen quite a few local businesses in the LA area that do this already;
maybe eBay can do it better, but they won't get to eat the entire market by
just showing up.

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dsplatonov
"If you send in something that valets can't sell, there's a return fee to have
it sent back to you." Not very good for me if i send a big amount of items

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DigitalSea
This is not going to end well for eBay, I can see it now. Some fake items are
surprisingly good, you'll be reading stories of people being ripped off
because valets were told they were given designer brand items only for them to
be discovered as fakes later on. Somewhat cool idea I will admit, but when
you're dealing with e-commerce and allowing users to get other people to sell
their items, it'll open up a rather complex wound.

~~~
easytiger
Isn't this just a rebranding of something that already existed? This service
has existed for a long time.

~~~
DigitalSea
eBay Valet is a new application. Easy there, tiger. Unless I'm misinformed, it
is a new service leveraging eBay's existing auction/commerce platform.

~~~
atwebb
It's a new implementation of a common service. You have a point with the
auction house providing the service it blurs some lines. Similar points have
been brought up regarding some of Amazon's services. I think it will rely on
eBay's willingness to shutdown bad vendors (something they aren't known for at
the moment).

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kidlogic
the Gone! app does this for you, but it's even easier and you don't have to
ship anything out (they'll supply and even pick up the boxes for you).

definitely worth a try, but eBay Valet is interesting:
[http://thegoneapp.com/](http://thegoneapp.com/)

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Waevian
Like some people mentioned already, I mostly worried about the pricing of
items. Looks like to me like they will poorly judge value of items.

Overall, this is not the worst idea eBay had so far, I would love to see how
this plays out.

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davedx
Goes to show how seller-hostile EBay is if they need to provide a service like
this.

Imagine if you needed to provide a "valet service" for your SaaS. Wouldn't
that say something about your UX?

~~~
awendt
This has nothing to do with UX. Yes, eBay has a terrible UX but some people
have stuff to sell and no time on their hands.

Does Instamotor exist because of the terrible UX of car dealerships?

~~~
pessimizer
>some people have stuff to sell and no time on their hands.

The quality of ebay's UX is the main determinant of how much time you need to
have on your hands to sell something on ebay.

>Does Instamotor exist because of the terrible UX of car dealerships?

Yes.

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sirdogealot
I remember ebay consignment stores that existed locally years ago. They took
on the order of 50-60% of the total sale price.

It was a horrible deal, and every single one I knew of is now closed for
business.

------
alaskamiller
One of ebay's Cottage industry got absorbed into the mothership. I wonder if
they made consideration for consolidating all the various auction listing
businesses across the country.

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machbio
hardly any innovative things come out of ebay, nice to see something new...
can other sellers become valet ? or is it the ebay itself serving as valet ?

~~~
zengr
"How do I become a valet? Valets are carefully screened for inclusion in the
program. Requirements include, but are not limited to: (1) ability to list
100,000 listings each month, (2) storage capacity sufficient to hold and
manage items received for at least 21 calendar days, (3) ability to list items
across all eBay categories, (4) physical presence in all major metropolitan
hubs in the U.S. and (5) demonstrated ability to reach Top Rated Seller status
on eBay within 90 days of starting valet services. "

[http://pages.ebay.com/sellforme/faq.html](http://pages.ebay.com/sellforme/faq.html)

~~~
stevewillows
How do they expect people to post just over 4700 items per day?

~~~
Jochim
From the looks of it this is something they expect to be run by a small
business with a few people.

Not many individuals have space in their home to store and turn over 100,000+
items in a month. Or have "Physical presence in all major metropolitan hubs in
the US".

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Thirsty
Some of the valet-service users will become regulars sellers. Some people who
would never use ebay might become users because of this.

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uptown
"Valets accept like-new items worth $40 or more"

So are they committing to getting you at least $40 on what you're selling?

~~~
resurge
70% of that, no? So $28.

    
    
        You get 70% of the sale price if your things sell.

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ps4fanboy
ebay doing its hardest to be like amazon, while their actual auction
experience is getting worse and worse.

~~~
thaumasiotes
They're doing that on purpose. I think a major turning point was discovering
that "buy it now" auctions (i.e. normal, fixed-price sales) were massively
more popular than auction auctions.

~~~
ps4fanboy
Thats because they failed to ever fix bid sniping, switching to dutch auctions
would have been better for everyone.

Edit: Dutch auction is the wrong term and I cant track down the actual name.
But essentially the auction gets extended by 10 minutes every time someone
bids if the auction is going to end in less than 10 minutes.

~~~
bato
Beaten to it.

Sniping is hugely frustrating and the main reason people either use buy it now
or plain old ads (cf gumtree/Craigslist etc)

~~~
aianus
Why is sniping frustrating? How can sniping make me lose an auction if their
snipe bet is lower than what I entered as my maximum?

~~~
michaelt
While it does not frustrate me personally, it does seem rather pointless to
list an item for several days or weeks when the actual sale takes place in the
last five minutes, and to show a 'current price' which has little relevance to
the final price.

Ebay might as well call it a sealed bid second price auction and be done with
it.

~~~
justincormack
You need to list it for a while for discoverability. Having a low price makes
it seem more attractive while you browse.

~~~
michaelt

      Having a low price makes it seem more attractive 
      while you browse.
    

I can see how buyers would find that - and by extension sniping - frustrating.

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bangbang
I wonder if this will depress the market. Perhaps they will start all items at
$1.

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jefreier
I wonder what the username(s) are for the Valets, is that public yet?

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aniketpant
Interesting idea. Would love to see how it works out for them!

