EBay Is Slowly Losing Its Soul | Hacker News Reader

EBay Is Slowly Losing Its Soul

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8 pointsreazalun19 comments

I stopped using ebay a long time ago. You can't find any deals on there any more. + now the difference in cost on the "deals" is so little, that its not worth it to take the risk of dealing with a possible scammer when you can deal with an actual company and have the added protection you get from using a credit card.

You can still use a credit card with eBay.

most sellers don't accept them

and thats another thing, thanks to eBay used things end up costing almost as much as they do new. In fact about a year ago I was bidding on something second hand, and the final price ended up being about 15% more than the thing cost new(both online and in stores).

>most sellers don't accept them

That's not true. Very very few people are willing to pay by cash, so it's basically paypal or nothing, and eBay requires paypal accepters to accept credit cards.

I can't speak to the price, except that I find ebay items by using google product search, and price is king.

I continue to use eBay, but only for obscure collectibles and art that can't be found anywhere else. They're still irreplaceable in that respect.

Still, it's hard to imagine why they think spamming themselves with fixed-price auctions is going to be beneficial. If anything, it hurts them by drowning out traditional auctions. Fraud and flaky sellers are too much of a problem on eBay to use them for any item I can find elsewhere.

Simple: They make money on the listing fees.

Lower the prices, increase the volume.

It's self-defeating if the end result is drowning out the unique and used items that attract eBay's core customers.

Are you sue that 'unique and used items' is the core of ebay? I have a feeling it's not anymore.

Plus with categories and search, I don't think they'll be drowned out. It's not a physical store - there's no space shortage.

Maybe not drowned out, but from what sellers tell me, there's a good chance that low volume sellers just won't be able to afford to continue selling on eBay because of the new fee changes that favor BIN pricing. Those are the types of sellers who generally sell 'unique and used' items -- so variety may indeed decrease on eBay as a result of these changes.

It's possible you're right, though I honestly don't understand why anyone would buy something through eBay when they can get an identical item through Amazon for the same price without the hassle and risk of fraud.

I feel that ebay "lost its soul" when it didn't respond to sellers gaming the feedback system. If you are not familiar with this, sellers would withhold feedback to the buyer until the buyer gave positive feedback to the seller. Now, there are buyers who give negative feedback to sellers without just cause, so part of this behavior is defensive but the essence is that there grew this distrust and ebay's "karma system" just broke down. I never saw ebay doing anything to fix this and bring a better sense of trust and goodwill in the community. Anyone else have a different experience?

Sellers can't leave anything but positive feedback these days. I imagine the next step is for the system to add those "fast payment good ebayer AA+++" lines to your profile whenever you do anything.

I've not been on ebay in many months, so this is news to me. Just goes to show the trust mechanism that helped make the site popular is broken.

eBay are just there to get more and more money out of you.

Every few weeks I get an email from them, I got one yesterday from them in fact. They generally contain something like this:

>> Fee changes

>> We will be making changes to our overall fee structure, including Insertion Fees and Final Value Fees.

With a link to the full changes: http://pages.ebay.co.uk/pricechange08/

Even with my bad math skills, I know that if I sell a £50 (ok, £49.99) item on eBay UK currently, I would have to pay them £2.25 which is 4.5%, soon though, I will need to pay them £4.95, 9.9%, thats more than double, and doesn't even include listing costs!

What I want to know, is how they dare?

Though, I'm the fool, because I'll be using them to sell stuff in future, when selling things on auction sites, the more visitors means a higher price I will get for an item. (and the more I will need to pay eBay - god dammit!)

Sounds like a good opportunity for someone to come in and make an auction site that doesn't take 70 steps in order to sell something.

Not really. From the sound of the article, Ebay is moving away from complicated, unique, one-off auctions precisely because there isn't a huge opportunity there.

"huge" is relative.

I was wondering when someone else was going to figure this out and write about it. I abandoned the site about 2 years ago.

If anything, they're rearranging deck chairs on the Hindenburg.

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