How did eBay avoid this?
eBay does not meet the second qualifier and rarely meets the last. Additionally, it is more obviously a marketplace - the seller of a given item is highlighted and their credibility made known in the form of their star ratings. Amazon de-emphasizes the seller name for non-Amazon sellers and completely hides their rating on the product page.
Of course, the only way to know for sure is if eBay's liability is litigated.
Amazon make inefficient use of truck rolls for delivery, often sending many trucks through my small residential subdivision every day, needlessly delivering one non-urgent item at a time.
This is probably the key competitive challenge facing Amazon today: somehow keep up with the rapid growing overall demand while simultaneously improving execution fast enough to not leave the door open too long for someone else.
In all honesty, I would appreciate an excuse to stop using Amazon, because the amount that I buy from them compared to any other store makes me uncomfortable. But the co-mingling thing just hasn't come up for me...
It is rarer than on .com, I agree there, but barely exists seems inaccurate.
What does annoy, are all the reshippers which charge sometimes even 10x more for a product. 4x the price is typical.
All they do is list a product on .ca, from .com, and wait for an order. Then they buy from .com, receive amd reship.
Amazon just seems so shady. Sneaky. As if their entire platform is geared to allow others to deceive.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07ZZ3W2H8/
versus:
https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B07ZZ3W2H8/
I've occasionally seen such listings at 10x, but commonly 2x-3x is common (as with this listing, after exchange). You also lose all 'shipped by Amazon' protections, and if the listing at .ca was FBA, you'd have free shipping in .ca.
(As a note for .com / US users, Prime membership on .ca does not give any discount when shipping to Canada from .com, as Prime membership is restricted to the .XX property which you buy it on. EG, .ca in my case.
Nor does buying a .com prime membership help, for that only gives speed/discounts/free shipping for US addresses.
When I travel to the US for the winter, I basically have to axe my .ca prime membership, and buy a .com membership. So as a result, I don't buy yearly memberships. And when I travel to/from, I cancel .ca early, and .com early, upon return.
It's not like I order a lot of stuff 3 days before leaving, or while traveling, or the second I arrive.
A result of all this is that Amazon loses out on sometimes 4 months of Prime membership, which they would have if it just worked everywhere.
It's not that much of a stretch to say that the entire business model for sales and gig economy platforms is to provide investors with a legal revenue stream from dubiously legal activities ranging from civil fraud to regulatory arbitrage intended to evade tax law, consumer protection law, employee protection law, and minimum wage law.
It's long past time for a crackdown.
Was stored in an eBay warehouse: No, eBay does not have warehouses.
Had facilitated payment: Maybe, but eBay typically just links one Paypal account to another Paypal account. eBay does not actually touch the funds. (Paypal has been it's own separate company for awhile now.)
Shipped it out in eBay packaging: Unless they're using a service, typically shipping is up to the eBay seller.
So I doubt this ruling affects eBay.
It's been a thing for more than 10 years, it's very well integrated, it's not necessarily transparent that the payment goes through Paypal.
eBay used to have a service where you could take any random junk to their mall kiosk or a FedEx store and eBay would sell it on your behalf. That would pretty much require them to have warehouses.
Is that service dead?
But the program does seem to be dead.
I found some interesting forum discussion taking the opinion that eBay strangled consignment businesses by choosing to heavily discourage auction sales (as opposed to fixed-price listing). They did that because customers on average strongly prefer fixed-price sales, but I'd be open to the idea that this could be a case where giving the customers what they want turned out to be a mistake for the business.
eBay saw themselves as competing with Amazon in the "buy things over the internet" space.[1] But by emphasizing fixed-price sales so much, they arguably made themselves much less distinct from Amazon.
[1] I was surprised to learn this, as I had always thought of Amazon as being for buying things new and eBay for buying things used.
[0] At least the later version I don't know if they used a different scheme earlier. They must have because the sniping services that existed in early eBay don't really make sense with proxy bids.
They do now. They are in the middle of moving most of their sellers to a program called Managed Payments. eBay handles the payment processing through the program. Sellers do not receive money via paypal, but their own bank accounts. eBay batches the proceeds of the sales and ACHs the money daily M-F.
The transition is ongoing, but the goal is all sellers with stores will move to it eventually.
https://pages.ebay.com/seller-center/service-and-payments/ma...
> The Appellate Court didn’t agree with Amazon’s stance, noting that the product had been listed on Amazon, was stored in an Amazon warehouse, had facilitated payment, and shipped it out in Amazon packaging, proving it to have a hand in getting it to Bolger and thus being liable under California law.
That is the only way to compete with Amazon. It is a race-to-the-bottom of quality and safety for the consumers.
Amazon takes what are common rules with their customers and their retailers and has broken all of them. Amazon competes directly with its retailers using the information that got from them. Amazon brands 3rd party retailers products as if server-by-Amazon but it takes no responsibility on delivery or quality.
Or Amazon is forced into compliance or we are going to go back to the middle-ages experience where everything is a flea market and weights and measures are never correct.