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Comment by s0rce | Hacker News Reader

I fell victim to this scam once, we lost our dog's favorite ball and looked on Amazon to get another, sadly, it was discontinued. Checking e-bay we saw some listings for the original ball. Ordered one and we eventually received, drop shipped from Amazon the new version of the ball. The seller clearly didn't update the autogenerated listing to the reflect the product Amazon was actually selling. I then returned the ball since I didn't want the new version and if I did I could have got it for Amazon for cheaper and easier in the first place.

Other than cases of false advertising (likely unintentional here but still annoying) who goes to ebay before just buying the item from Amazon (maybe foreign buyers?). Nearly 100% of the time the shipping will be more expensive and the return policy worse, never mind the entire experience.

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"who goes to ebay before just buying the item from Amazon"

My mom and dad. This is not tongue in cheek, it is my personal experience. I see many older people that still buy from eBay. They are a bit uncomfortable with the web already, but they got into buying some things on eBay, now they are used to it and they don't want to "learn something new".

I think eBay is a declining platform, but that cow still has a lot of milk left in it.

Most big sellers will list on both and eBay's fees are lower. So in terms of marketplace products you can likely find them cheaper on eBay.

> who goes to ebay before just buying the item from Amazon

I do, all the time. For one, the exact same products are often cheaper on eBay.

Second, it's much easier to discover the right items on eBay. Amazon search/sort/filter is absolutely terrible unless you're looking for a specific model or just want the best seller. It's a very fuzzy search, so you can't force an exact match on title.

eBay in contrast allows you to use booleans in the search terms, and makes it possible to filter by well structured category-specific data.

> who goes to ebay before just buying the item from Amazon[?]

It's not so much people going to eBay then Amazon, it's people who go to eBay and never go anywhere else because it's obvious to everyone (in their mind) that eBay is of course going to be cheaper. They're buying through their preferred retailer, and their preferred retailer is eBay.

In my experience, eBay is usually cheaper than Amazon these days, especially if the buyer doesn't have Prime. Also because many eBay sellers still don't charge sales tax.

In Canada you can often find Amazon items resold on ebay with much more reasonable international shipping. With Amazon, shipping is almost always prohibitively expensive for items not available on the regional domain (amazon.ca).

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