I first learned of eBay in 1999. Looking around, I thought it an excellent implementation of the communication technology the internet provided. I felt that way for about ten years.
By 2011 I was becoming disillusioned. PayPal had developed, and eBay was actively promoting it. Then eBay bought PayPal, and quickly made it enticing for sellers to use, but difficult for buyers like me, who utterly refuse to use PayPal. As time went by it seemed eBay was actively discouraging sellers from accepting personal checks and even money orders.
At some point eBay introduced the “buy it now” element. At first I liked it. After five years “buy it now” became the norm, with the “auction” element declining.
eBay now seems to be nothing more than vendors selling on-line. In the last four years I’ve looked for items to purchase, few seem to be true auction items, just “for sale, buy now.”
eBay started as a great on-line service, but for me has deteriorated into a no longer useful internet site.
I have no idea how popular eBay is these days, but for me, the current implementation of eBay is a loser. What are your thoughts?
I love it. It’s basically Amazon but with discontinued/collectible items (which were the main draw in the old days) that Amazon doesn’t have so much of. I like having the Buy It Now option rather than having to wait a week to see if someone outbid me…waiting until the final seconds to outwit those filthy “snipers,” who I hate with the passion of 1000 burning suns. And heaven help me (an Orthodox Jew) if an auction for something I wanted ended on a Saturday. Buy It Now rocks!
I very rarely use eBay – so rarely in fact that my account was closed once from lack of use, taking my history with it, and it may happen again. But when I have used it, it was generally for items that were otherwise impossible to find anywhere else. As long as I get what I need, I don’t care if it’s becoming mostly a marketplace for professional sellers. Latest example: a specific type of HDD mounting bracket for a Dell commercial workstation. The particular eBay vendor was recommended by … Dell, who basically said “you don’t want to buy it from us even if we still sell it because the price would be outrageous – check out this vendor on eBay”. I think it was around five bucks, plus shipping.
I agree with the OP. Used to be, a buyer and seller would exchange e-mails, work out a payment method, discuss shipping, etc. Now you have to “check out” with a computer-generated payment platform; computer-generated invoices; computer generated e-mails–often from an eBay “store.” So many of these transactions can be accomplished without any interaction between buyer and seller at all. It’s just shopping.
It’s this impersonal aspect of eBay that turned me from a very frequent user to a very infrequent one. It’s basically no different than any other web store. This is much to eBay’s detriment, in my opinion.
Plus the whole “buy it now” / Paypal monopoly *really *put me off eBay. You get nicked for an eBay fee AND a Paypal fee–and its the same damn company! Or at least it was. They might have divested from each other by now. But in any event, best I can tell, you must use PayPal. You can’t get around it.
I listed a few items for my wife a few years ago and in the auction text I said something like “check or money order” and the eBay bot threw up red flags and said something along the lines of “we note that you have used the term “money order” which is a forbidden practice…blah blah blah, not acceptable, blah blah blah.” WTF???
The only thing wrong with a money order is that eBay can’t double dip for fees, which are ridiculously high to begin with.
In today’s world there are numerous methods to exchange payment. eBay basically says “screw all that, you have to use one method only–and guess what? We own it!”
The selling process is hella easy, from the ability to post pictures for free (yep, that’s “new”) to the crazy easy shipping process (along with discounted rates), to the easy payment process (sorry man, PayPal is fine) they really make selling a no-brainer.
I use it to sell clothes that I no longer fit in or no longer want. I sell clothes for my friends. I’ve sold some toys that I bought locally and people didn’t realize they were retro or worth money. I sold most of my grandma’s Golden Books there. My brother’s Transformers. One time I sold a huge Little Tikes washer/dryer thing and it cost a ton to ship but the buyer paid all the shipping. Done and done!
When shopping I have used it to buy clothes that were sold out from my favorite plus-sized ladies’ store - people buy a ton of stuff there for cheap using coupons and resell. Once the pieces are gone from the store they’re gone, but they’re always on eBay. I use it to buy this one kind of stupid cheap watch I like to wear, every few years when I break it and need a new one. I recently set an alert to look for trinkets that mention my hometown and recently scored some sort of sesquetenial coin. It’s a real boon for replacement parts - people rip toys and stuff apart and sell the parts separately so you can fix stuff for cheap. It’s also a good place to buy and sell promo items from the ballpark if you really want that one bobblehead but couldn’t make it to the game, or if you find yourself with 4 bobbleheads that you really didn’t need.
There are definitely tons of vendors. Heck, vendors buy my clothes to re-sell. Don’t care - I get it out of my house and I get what I am asking. But there’s still tons of people selling bits and bobs from their houses or their collections and it makes it easier to piece things together without having to buy new or hope the right thing can be found in your town.
The auction process has never appealed to me. I was never able to “snipe” or sit around and bid strategically. I love Buy it Now. It’s more like a garage sale for me. Or a flea market, I guess. But whatever…I still get my stuff.
I don’t think the core functionality has gotten any worse. I still find it to be useful. There aren’t as many bargains as there used to be, but I think that’s just because more people use it and drive up the price. It’s still a great way to sell off stuff I don’t need anymore, especially almost-obsolete electronics.
Since the majority of stuff is sold out of the US, US-based buyers might not be aware of another scam that eBay is running under the dignified name of the “eBay global shipping program”. This is one of their relatively new ways of collecting extortionate fees, and AIUI vendors are strongly encouraged to use it for all international shipping. Basically the vendor sells you the item for the agreed price, and has no worries about shipping because “eBay takes care of all that”.
I believe he uses a postpaid label to send it to some central eBay “global shipping warehouse”. The bottom line is that these shipping costs are collected directly by eBay and, in the guise of “expedited” shipping and customs clearance, they justify enormous fees that often exceed the cost of the item itself, while the actual value-added is little to none, including often slow shipping times. Essentially where “global shipping” is offered, that’s actually the only option for international shipping. eBay basically collects an exorbitant fee, and then drops the item in the mail or some low-tier courier.
EBay had great initial success because it tapped into a huge previously unused resource; unwanted stuff.
A lot of people had a lot of stuff that they had accumulated over decades. It wasn’t stuff they wanted in particular. But it wasn’t outright junk. People knew that somewhere out there, there were other people who wanted to own this stuff.
And eBay made it possible for the stuff sellers to connect with the stuff buyers.
But an equilibrium was inevitable. The people who wanted to clean out their attics and basements and closets and garages have done so. They’ve sold their stuff to people that wanted to buy it.
Too much inferior Chinese crap. I bought 2 amps for my Dog Jeep. Both defective. One didn’t work at all, the other has 1 of 4 channels out. That seller didn’t even want it back, so refunded the purchase price and I run it with 3 speakers. Dogs still rock out hard.
Gee, I guess it ain’t so bad after all. I got a free 3 channel amp!
I guess I’m in the target market for these changes. I stayed away from eBay from a long time even when it popped up in Google searches for things I was trying to buy, because I had a vague idea (my mom used it a lot in the 90s) that it was all being stuck in auction limbo and, as it was put earlier, exchanging e-mails to work out payment and shipping. I finally broke when I found something there that I really wanted and wasn’t available anywhere else, and wow, it was just as easy as any other online store. I use it all the time now.
(I feel the same way whenever anyone talks about how lovely and quaint and personal it is to stay in a B&B. Whatever’s whatever for you, I guess, but I’ll take a beige hotel room please.)
They’re actually moving away from PayPal now, to handling the transactions themselves (which I guess is how PayPal started). Most sellers are still using PayPal, but they have a goal of eventually ditching it.
that and once people realized they had rare stuff they’d get some sort of “what its worth” price and then tack on 40 percent above that as the starting price …
the online yard sale appeal died quickly …
I use eBay professionally. It’s a great source for discontinued and obsolete parts for the automation systems I sell and service. And I’ve been doing this a long time and a lot of the stuff I sold early in my career hasn’t been manufactured in years.
And I need “Buy it Now”. If someone has a part I really need now listed, it is beyond frustrating to have to wait a week and win an auction.
I found the inclusion of Paypal as a Godsend when it came to receiving payments. No more trips to the bank to deposit checks or money orders. Recently Ebay started adding my state’s sales tax to all my sales and I believe this is the reason they have dropped to a trickle. I only list 10 to 15 items a month, my sales rate was about 75%, it’s dropped to 2 or 3 sales a month. It’s almost to the point I’m considering quitting.
Yes, that was my point. The people that just wanted to get rid of things have done so. Those things have been sold to people who wanted to buy them. There’s probably still a lot of old stuff out there. But anybody who hasn’t put it up for sale on eBay by now must be somebody who has no interest in ever doing so.
Now we’re seeing the next generation; things that are regarded as collectibles by the sellers and are priced much higher. Alongside newly manufactured merchandise. The infrastructure is still the same (albeit with the changes others have noted) but the product has changed.
That’s basically…not true. I find old things all the time. Used toys, electronics, records and CDS that aren’t new, car parts, signs, books, collectibles. I buy them all the time.
The biggest changes over time I see is that everyone “thinks their shit doesn’t stink” - the prices are often outrageous, with insane shipping ($80 shipping on a plastic model kit? Are you fucking crazy?) Good deals can be had, but they aren’t as common.
I also quit selling. ebay’s rules just pissed me off too much to bother. They’re biased against sellers, but those of you who still sell, thank you. I just won’t deal with them any longer.
Again, that’s my point. EBay is no longer full of people selling things because they want to get rid of them. Now most people on eBay are selling things because they want to make a good profit. So the era of finding lots of bargains on eBay is over.
The few times I check EBay versus Amazon, EBay has prices as high or higher and less selection.
I’ve thought of selling stuff, but when I check the prices of the stuff I’d want to sell the hassle is not worth it.
Haven’t used it in years.
The only thing I buy not on Amazon are pre-WW II economics books as Christmas presents for my daughter. EBay has nothing, there is a site called Biblio which has the stocks of many rare book dealers and that works fine.
Still an eBay user. It’s a bit like going on a treasure hunt, and you can find some good deals. I don’t mind buying pre-owned clothing or a partially used bottle of perfume that is too expensive to purchase when full. I also like looking for some antique items and antique jewelry.
There are more retail sellers on eBay and they are not necessarily a bargain, but there are still a good number of unique items that you can’t get anywhere else. I like Paypal and Buy It Now. In fact, on the rare occasion of an actual auction (usually jewelry around the holidays), I sometimes forget that I was interested until the auction is over.
