Comment by DrPhish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DrPhish | Hacker News Reader

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Not only is it useless, it can be actively harmful. My wife had her account "suspended" for reporting too many fraudulent cases when she went on a buying spree from Chinese sellers. Normally you lose about a 3rd of the things you buy from China due to: -Non-shipping of items -Loss of items in transit -Counterfeit items -Damaged items -Completely wrong items -Wrong quantity items

Turns out she opened too many cases and they "suspended" her account, which is an eBay euphemism for being banned for life. That means that her account that she'd been using since 2000 was dead and gone forever, and she was no longer welcome on the site.

I agree with other posters. The eBay of old is effectively dead. You are better off buying things from Amazon or Ali Express 99% of the time. The days of great deals on items are pretty much gone. You can still find some rare and unusual stuff that is worth buying, but the dominance of eBay now means that most things are very close to market rate unless (or even if!) they are counterfeit or some other scam. More like a dollar store than an online auction house.

Had an almost identical experience when I bought a bunch of electronics.

In my case, they sent a warning saying I would not be able to contest any more purchases for some period of time and that my account was at risk of being suspended.

I try to avoid eBay as much as possible now. When their response to rampant fraud is "we're gonna suspend your account if you point it out again," it's time to move on. The only people left there seem to be scammers who know how to navigate the system.

AliExpress is usually cheaper for the China-direct items anyway, and those seem to comprise most of the listings on eBay nowadays.

Much of the time things from Amazon are actually from Aliexpress.

That is why for a lot of things I prefer Aliexpress: no issues with refunds. The sellers usually even do not care about proof but just refund.

I've bought quite a bit from AliExpress, and the sellers have always send a new item or refunded. It can be annoying to keep track of, but that's what you get for the extremely cheap prices.

> You are better off buying things from Amazon or Ali Express 99% of the time

I wouldn't say that. I buy from both, and it's a matter of know what you're getting into.

For example, in eBay, it's much more obvious which the location of the shop is (although, it can be tricked as well). At the same time, the client protection process is somewhat simpler in Amazon.

> The eBay of old is effectively dead. ... The days of great deals on items are pretty much gone.

Were they ever there? Back when I could be bothered regularly dealing with the irritation farm that is eBay I found that buyers tended to pay a little over the odds. Both when I was selling or trying to buy.

Back between 2000-2002 I decided to acquire all the machines I had drooled over in the 90's, so I purchased Alphaservers, Ultrasparcs, RS/6000s, PA-RISCs, SGIs, and others. I was getting non-trivial configurations, usually quad CPUs, lots of memory, multiple NICs, and I was getting these things for anywhere from $20 for an Ultra1 to $200 (top price I paid) for a quad CPU Ultra Enterprise 450. That same machine is on eBay now for around $2000.

There was definitely a time between early eBay hitting a critical mass of sellers and eBay getting saturated with professionals and robots, when the deals COULD BE incredible. You still needed to suss them out, but they were a regular occurrence

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