I still like eBay. As far as I can tell all the changes have been additive.
As a seller, I can just list something for auction and not have to worry about figuring out the right price to ask. The market will solve it for me.
For actual rare or semi-unique items, buying at auction is still valuable. For stuff where there are lots of buyers and sellers, buy it now is more useful because you don’t have to wait as long. The reason that most stuff isn’t sold at auction is that most things have a pretty easily discoverable price and there are tons of them, so the auction doesn’t actually add any useful price discovery. It’s the same reason that individual pieces of art are auctioned off, but prints are available for a standard price.
If you are a regular buyer/seller of collectible sorts of things, eBay is still great.
As a result of this thread, I logged on to eBay for the first time in years, just to make sure I still could. I wound up buying one of my collectible things. The plan was to pay via PayPal, but before I got that far, eBay demanded my cell phone number. There is no reason in hell that eBay needs my phone number, but they weren’t going to let me continue without giving it to them.
I finally tried a phony (impossible) number I have used in similar circumstances, and eBay accepted it. Lately, merchants will immediately test the number and refuse to let me proceed if the number doesn’t work.
Fortunately, eBay let me through. If they had not, I would not have purchased the item and most likely would never again have purchased through eBay.
A large part of my collection has come through eBay, and I’ve been 100% satisfied. Actually, before the World Wide Web, I didn’t even know that anyone else collected these things. After two near-fatal illnesses, collecting started to seem stupid, so I don’t buy as much as I once did.
My recent eBay search got about 10% of the number of results it got 10 years ago.
However, the great thing about GSP is that eBay also takes the hit when the item doesn’t arrive. Sometimes that “doesn’t arrive” is a scam. I’ve been there. Letting eBay deal with international scammers is hugely attractive to me.
ETA: eBay also lets you use non-Paypal debit or credit cards for purchases. I was one of the outraged when they quit letting sellers accept checks or MO’s. But requiring electronic payment streamlines re-listing when the buyer is a deadbeat, although there are fewer deadbeats now, too.
I bought my first item in 1999. I don’t remember ever having to email back and forth with someone to discuss shipping and payment. From what I remember PayPal was what I used even then so I’m really not seeing any kind of difference in terms of payment.
I started selling on eBay in 1998 and made good money for a while. By 2004, they made a lot of changes that cut into profits and increased the hassle factor, so I was out. I’ve bought a few things since then.
Example eBay transaction: my most recent purchase.
Needed a new drive belt for my mower. Found someone selling the part new for half the price of other eBay sellers or on Amazon, etc. Tons of reviews somewhere in the 99% approval range. Free shipping. Did the BIN and got it a few days later. Was as advertised, installed it, I’m happy.
Auctions just feel so “iffy” for stuff like this: an ordinary part sold by several people. Who needs that?
Yeah, you have to be careful that it’s not a Chinese seller masquerading as domestic, etc.
A looong time ago I sold electronic stuff on eBay for auctions. Buy the stuff at thrift stores or garage sales, fix it up, maybe use it a while, sell it when the fun fades or I get sometime even better. But I wasn’t good at it and didn’t make as much as I thought I should. Plus thrift stores consult eBay before setting a price now. Another “Who needs that?”
If I have the time and want something extra cheap, I just do a watch thing. So my next previous buy was like that. Took a few months to see one at a price I liked, but I thought I could do better so a put in a lower offer which the seller took. But that’s a rarity for me. (The best offer thing was in fact my first.)
So, the auction side just isn’t for me mostly. But the BIN and such is. Don’t see how this is a bad thing to me.
This is one of the reasons I liked “Buy it Now” when it came out. I still like the ability to buy it now, but I am usually willing to go through the auction mechanism.
I accept both these statements, which is why I want to continue using eBay. It just seems so difficult to do it “the old way” that I’ve given up.
Regarding personal checks and money orders. Vendors in any marketplace should make it as easy as possible for buyers to pony up money. Checks and money orders are one avenue for that. Eliminating them as a payment option strikes me as limiting. PayPal and its ilk might be electronically convenient, but most people still have checking accounts and can deposit checks and money orders without too much inconvenience.
As for payment safety: In my transactions using checks or money orders I always told the seller they could hold the merchandise until the instrument cleared.
To me it’s the same as it has ever been - one place to look for the best deal on a specific item. I do end up using Ebay less today because of competition on other sire, but it’ s still a place to look.
Auctions were the devil’s diapers. I actively avoid anything with an auction, and probably haven’t bid in years. PayPal payment is wonderful and I don’t use anything else.
For me, eBay is much better than it used to be. Amateurs have no idea how to describe would-be collectibles, or price them, or ship them, and almost never provided useful pictures. You might get a bargain, you might get junk. Today it’s mostly professionals using it as an adjunct to their stores, much like Amazon. I like dealing with professionals.
ASGuy, why won’t you use PayPal? I think it’s the savior of the Internet, fully as important as Google.
What makes you thin professionals are any better, on the whole? I’ve seen plenty of “professional” sellers with one picture of the item, that I’m sure they didn’t even take but stole from the internet, and absolutely NO text in the description. Apparently their margin of profit doesn’t allow for more than 10 seconds spend making a listing.
Yes, it’s limiting on purpose. eBay is limiting sellers from taking funds in ways that give the buyer no protection. Because when the buyer gets jilted, and there’s no way to reverse the hand-engraved draft from the Merchant’s Bank of Kowloon, delivered by horseback, the buyer doesn’t go “wow, that guy sucks,” but “wow, eBay sucks,” and eBay has found that buyers are way less tolerant of problems than sellers are.
I’m not ASGuy, but my answer would be to question why I should use PayPal. Credit cards work just fine in this situation and offer buyer protection. Why should I give Paypal a cut of my money for a service that provides nothing that credit cards don’t and, indeed, adds a layer of difficulty between me and access to my money. It solves a problem that didn’t exist by adding a middleman to a perfectly good system.
ASGuy is a buyer though, not a seller, so it’s not any more difficult for him. I can see the complaint if you’re selling and it’s extra steps to transfer and you get fees but, from the purchaser’s perspective those shouldn’t apply.
Back to the thread title, I used to buy/sell/browse eBay when it was the 90s and it was wild and wooly and exciting to buy a coffee can of dirt just because you could. Heck, selling some unwanted stuff paid my rent a couple times. These days, the sellers are mostly professionals, half the stuff is just drop-shipped and there’s far fewer deals to be found because those professionals are more savvy than the early basement cleaners. I’ll still use it when I want something out of print or they send me a coupon but I don’t go there to find something neat. For individual sellers, eBay’s policies make it harder to compete with the professionals and easier to get scammed by people claiming items “not as described” or broken so it doesn’t feel worth it to sell those one or two things you have sitting around.
Someone has to process credit card transactions, and that someone always charges a fee. For most eBay transactions currently, that someone is PayPal. That is in the process of changing, but there will still be a middleman between buyer and seller, just like there is whenever a seller isn’t large enough to deal with the credit card companies (including at most brick-and-mortar retail stores).
I like eBay. I don’t ever buy new stuff there. I can get new stuff new, with a warranty, and with an actual company backing it, on Amazon or from lots of other places. But eBay is good for used stuff that’s not available new. My child broke my nice old pyrex pie plate. I can replace it with on exactly like what I had on eBay, for a reasonable price.
I LOVE buy it now, although I think I had to deal with an auction for the pie plate. I’m fine with PayPal. I understand it can be problematic for sellers, but for buyers, it means I don’t have to trust lots of people with my credit card number.
I see the complaint if PayPal is especially difficult or expensive to deal with as a seller, and maybe it really is, but when I see these complaints from people who sell or used to sell on eBay, it never seems to be “I wish I could use Square or Stripe or Amazon Payments instead of PayPal because they offer better service and rates” but “I wish I got 100% of revenue deposited straight into my checking account with no cost or delay whatsoever.”
I have no beef with PayPal. It provides a service many enjoy having available. I’m just not one of them. I refuse to use PayPal because I don’t want to sign up for, nor deal with, yet-another intermediary banking/credit card institution.
When it became cumbersone to use checks and money orders I was willing to switch to credit card purchases. But even they became difficult to use because eBay was pushing PayPal so hard. Using a credit card is as far as I’m willing to bend.
It seems from the responses so far that eBay is good for some, and a loser for some.
