eBay launches visual search tools that let you shop using photos
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
If this already exists, do tell.
In my opinion, eBay for sellers (outside of maybe the power sellers. I've sold <100 items) is a nightmare.
I sold a Tiffany necklace a few months back. The buyer reported to eBay it was fake and I was ordered to refund the seller and they could keep the fake item. Long story short, over a span of a few weeks, I was lucky enough to get an original receipt from Tiffany and supply it as evidence, which almost still did not work.
More recently, I listed an old iPhone with a "buy it now". Sold in like 30 minutes to someone with an "@god[dot].com" email requesting I send the phone first and then he will pay me. It took a week or longer for me to challenge this. I even have settings to disallow certain types of eBay users based on ratings etc. eBay still charged me a listing fee.
I had success doing a non buy it now sale after that. Maybe that is my only option now.
I don't even feel like getting into how slow their seller admin tools are ...
Yes, it does exist, and it's completely open source. It's called OpenBazaar, and it's a fully decentralized marketplace. There's no middlemen at all.
It's backed by the OB1 company, which has raised $4.25 million from a16z, USV, and BlueYard.
It uses IPFS so that stores don't go offline, and all payments are settled in Bitcoin.
We love code reviews and pull requests. The back end is done in Go:
https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-go
The front end is an Electron app:
Bitcoin is a barrier but our goal is to eventually be currency agnostic. It does enable us to do escrow properly though with 2-of-3 multisig, and it also ensures that people control their own money.
No, I'm not going to install software just for accessing a marketplace. That's just silly, because now I have to worry about compatibility with my OS and a wealth of other problems that comes with running applications natively (e.g. is it compromised by a 0-day, since I doubt it gets as much attention as one of the big browsers)
How do things like privacy policies, terms of service, contracts between parties work?
Because this is a protocol for decentralized trade, and a network to engage in trade, there's really no terms of service or privacy policies that can be enforced between users. They connect to each other completely P2P, the devs or anyone else can't enforce anything between them (and don't even know a transaction is happening).
No awareness by the company and no easy ability to enforce terms before users make me wonder why the heck I'd ever want to try to sell or buy something on that platform. Seems like craigslist but with too high a bar of entry for the good-intentioned non-fraudster non-tech-savvy users.
But could an IPFS distributed system provide reasonable search, e.g. competing with eBay's new search-by-image?An open, distributed market can be worked by closed, centralized search engines. If they design the market they are a prime candidate for becoming the dominant search engine layered on top.
1. A direct order. The Bitcoin goes directly from buyer to vendor. There are no protections. This method is only used for small value transactions or transactions where the buyer trusts the vendor.
2. A moderated order. The Bitcoin goes into an escrow account (a 2-of-3 Bitcoin multisig address) and there is a third party moderator who will resolve a dispute if one of the parties feels wronged.
Note that if there is no dispute opened in a moderated order, the buyer and the seller can release the funds without the moderator even knowing they were chosen for an order.
There's nothing to prevent listing flooding, but the rest of the network will just ignore nodes that are abusive. There are also third party search engines that crawl the network, and they'll block spam themselves for their users. Rawflood is an example:
If a vendor only offers unknown moderators a buyer just won't buy from them, or will ask them to add a moderator they trust.
How is the moderator's reputation visible to a buyer? If there's some kind of rating system, why would the reviews be useful at all? After all, any situation where the moderator has to act will leave one party pissed off.
This seems like a lot of complication just to buy something on the internet... unless what you're buying is heroin. In which case the whole 100% p2p thing starts making more sense.
Regarding “reputations”: Remember Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Large companies like eBay have to take fraud and customer support costs and weight it against their company vs you as a seller. It would take a company that cared more about sellers than their own bottom line.
The customer is always right. Middle men like eBay have two customers though: the buyer and the seller. They support the one that helps them the most and let the other get burned occasionally.
Note: I mostly buy "buy-it-now" items on ebay
You know - what Ebay was originally set up for.
I mean - one time I found a bucket of bolts for auction; just a bunch of random rusty bolts someone had in the back of their shed, they decided to auction off. And wouldn't you know it, a bidding war happened. That bucket of bolts went for close to a $100.00 by the time it was all over.
Those are the kind of stuff I like to see, and the kind of stuff I like to bid on and/or buy. Not the mass-produced junk from China - if I want that, I'll get it from Amazon or Ali Express (and I do).
You can still find this on Ebay, but it isn't as ubiquitous like it was in the beginning. I personally think their decision to compete with Amazon instead of sticking to their core users really changed perceptions and user base. Maybe it's better for them, but for users who like auctions, finding something similar that is trusted as much hasn't been easy (there are a few).
Edit: Forgot to mention that their search is so bad, they mix search results with search phrases previously so it's impossible to find things I am looking for.
My account was suspended for fraud even though I provided proof of purchase for the item. I left ebay/paypal and stopped using it when I realized that they could arbitrarily hold my money for 6 months even though I provided legit proof they were wrong.
I wouldn't argue too strongly with you there. I've sold loads of stuff on eBay (about £50k worth over the years, apparently!), and there are problems too often. People try it on, so I have to send -everything- via recorded mail, which is expensive, so then people complain about the postage cost, even though I always put them up front.
I've had quite a few completely fatuous claims made against me when selling, one of which said there were parts missing, when I'd actually said those parts were missing in the listing. eBay refunded him and let him keep the item.
Whenever I have an issue now, I just say 'send it back, I'll refund it' as this is invariably the path of lowest friction. Dealing with muppets is a cost of selling on eBay that has to be factored into the equation, alas, and it's worse than it ever has been; here in the UK around 2000 it was pretty 'niche' and only serious people seemed to be on there. But after a few years (and a few newspaper articles along the lines of 'quit your job and make a living on eBay') it started getting like it is now.
Non paying bidders are a pain to sellers, but it means nothing to eBay so they don't do anything about it.
The upside, at least, is that when you buy on there, you're well covered. Had a dodgy 'reconditioned' cylinder head turn up a few weeks ago. Returned it without even having to pay postage, which was a relief - in the past that would have been £400 I'd never have seen again.
There are definitely ways to improve the process. Maybe a "middleman" has to provide an appraisal or validation for the jewelry/electronic before making the listing. The true obstacle with any new competitor is network effect. When normal people want to sell local, they use Craigslist, when they want to sell nationally, they use eBay. Any chaff has already been taken by the big guys, and what is left isn't worth the fight.
I know there are a few fashion-related sites like this out there and I'd guess there are other "Reverb for X" sites as well.
I'm sure there is still a fortune in the long-tail but specialty sites seem to be more of a concern than a direct competitor.
Some alternatives to Ebay are Ebid, Etsy, Rakuten/buy.com, Amazon, Bonanza(allows cross listing with Ebay), Swappa for phones, uBid, Jet.
mercari.com, swappa.com, letgo.com, offerup.com, snapsale.com, wish.com local, varagesale.com, listia.com, carousell.com, shpock.com, 5miles.com
Believe it or not, eBay has even made their own local selling app close5.com
That being said, its not really in their lane.
Problem is you have plenty of scammer sellers too.
There isn't any marketplace without fraud on iPhone and jewelry.
When we started building OpenBazaar we specifically avoided using a blockchain apart from Bitcoin for payments. It was the right call I think. There are plenty of other decentralization tools to use apart from blockchains, like IPFS, which OpenBazaar 2.0 is built on top of.
I'm still looking for the browser extension that lets you filter out any listing with a pure white or gradient background from your eBay, etsy, pinterest, etc. searches.
Would be a HUGE indicator of an actual real used item sold by a human, vs. a new dropshipped item from China. You know, what I want to use eBay to buy.
If I'm buying vintage/antique items on etsy or eBay I want to see the real item, not a stock photo.
[0] https://www.chinainternetwatch.com/1189/taobao-imagine-an-im...
I mean, how many relevant listings are you going to find for a stock photo of a 7x7mm QFP32 chip? Still, that's a risky thing to buy on taobao anyways, and it is useful for things like specifically-shaped buttons, connectors, etc.
I wonder whether eBay will beat Amazon in this category as the types of photos they have access to (amateur/home vs. professional/stock) are very different. Either way, I am not confident that taking a picture is a better solution than just typing in the name for the vast majority of items.
I call this the Minority Report effect. When an idea seems cool but in practice is much less usable and practical. And tries to solve a problem that never existed. Do I want to wave my hands in the air to control an interface or rest them on a table? Obviously the latter. It's worked very well for decades.
It's a great solution for "I want another one like this one but searching for it returns 10000 different items"
Looking around my house, I only see a few items that don't have unique identifiers like furniture or plates/utensils. However, I suspect the majority of things sold through Amazon/eBay are more likely to be video games, books, toys, etc. with very visible and highly unique names.
Image search could be useful if you want to find all the listings for a specific Chinese product and compare prices or revisions.
You have something. You like it. You want another one. The service gets it for you. This doesn't have to work from a picture -- it could use a UPC barcode or a text description.
Idea originally inspired by a school friends of mine who wore the exact same type of boots for years and years. When the old pair wore out, he'd buy another pair the exact same.
Over the years I've noticed many instances where I really want another one of something I have but it turns out to be either painful or impossible to find. You know however that somewhere someone has a warehouse full of the things.
Also like the electronics industry brokers who can track down an old component for you to repair gear or re-start manufacturing on some old product. Those have existed since at least the 1970's.
A few years ago I tested Amazon's visual product search feature to see if it would do what I wanted. It didn't. I showed an image of some brown boots I was wearing, and certainly the suggested products were also brown boots, but not the same kind.
Maybe the service should be like FlightFox, but for people who are really good at finding stuff. You pay a commission to the individual who helps you find the item.
That being said though, the eBay buying and selling experience is a hit or miss. It sucks how there is group of people preying on the site to rip people off. I had an selling experience so bad that I vouched never to sell anything via eBay anymore. Craiglist tends to be a much better transaction.
"Fashion-MNIST is a dataset of Zalando's article images—consisting of a training set of 60,000 examples and a test set of 10,000 examples. Each example is a 28x28 grayscale image, associated with a label from 10 classes. We intend Fashion-MNIST to serve as a direct drop-in replacement for the original MNIST dataset for benchmarking machine learning algorithms. It shares the same image size and structure of training and testing splits."
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/search-by-image/cn...
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search_by_ima...
Your reply should have been 'oh really, why is that?'.
I don't think of ebay highly, desides what they did to Craigslist.
They had Skype. They could have been Facebook, but no. They had Paypal. With Skype and paypal they could have easily made micropayments on cell phones, but no. I hardly ever see a company with so many wasted chances. They are in a "winner takes it all" niche but sooner or later someone (Open Bazaar?) will challenge them and I don't see any innovation from this company.
So, there we were, needing exactly this feature. If I didn't know that it's impossible for them to have developed this in such a short time, I'd be a little freaked.
Thankfully, though, TinEye served the exact same purpose...
Disclaimer: I did both of them so, I'm a little bias :)