‘Wallets and eyeballs’: how eBay turned the internet into a marketplace | Hacker News Reader

‘Wallets and eyeballs’: how eBay turned the internet into a marketplace

theguardian.com

58 pointsyarapavan60 comments

As of right now I honestly think eBay is better than amazon in many ways. Obviously getting anything used or rare is significantly easier but many other things are much cheaper [0]. I also like that I can actually see who I'm buying from. On amazon Its difficult to tell if its amazon selling something or a private seller.

Ebay also has good return policies. They almost always side with the buyer which makes it hard to create fake listings.

[0] (First result on both platforms) https://www.amazon.com/Neiko-01407A-Electronic-Digital-Stain... https://www.ebay.com/itm/273909941047

> Its difficult to tell if its amazon selling something or a private seller.

No it's not. The info is next to the checkout button (Sold by/ships from), and displayed during checkout.

But Amazon commingles inventory, so the fact that that says sold by Amazon doesn't mean the one you get is really from them.

You're still considerably more likely to get a defective product that came straight from the manufacturer than you are to receive a fake product.

100%! My point still stands though. I don't like buying something when I don't know who I'm getting it from!

You might not be familiar but within Amazon warehouses, they will mix and match the same UPC from different vendors. When it ships, they have no idea if they ship the one from supplier X. If it’s the same barcode, it’s all the same.

So a legit supplier might have their stock mixed with a supplier of fake stuff. And people buying from the legit supplier can get the fake products.

I keep hearing this on HN but it never seems to happen to me with Amazon, and a buy a lot from Amazon...

I haven’t had fake goods, but I’ve had it happen where a generic part seems to get substituted for an OEM part, even if it is sold by Amazon.com. Things like replacement water filters or vacuum cleaner bags.

Some parts are more common than others.

I got a grey market baseball catchers bag the other day intended for another country. I was replacing my son’s current bag that got damaged and it was like a completely different product.

It happened to me the first when buying high end skin care products for my wife.

Received a product that was in the same bottle and branding but very different from past items.

I now buy direct for expensive items and only buy crappy toys and charging cables from Amazon.

I hope you reported that to the real manufacturer.

They are probably the only people with any influence over Amazon.

Yeah I’ve def had grey market Levi’s jeans. As in, as far as I could tell, made by same company, but clearly had manufacturing defects that I’d never had to worry about from a store or said companies website. So somebody was putting factory seconds in the bin…. As another poster said, items intended for different markets are common too.

That doesn’t tell me anything when Amazon provided no guarantee that the item I’m ordering is from that vendor. I’ve been burned many times with cheap fakes. It’s clear Amazon does nothing to ensure I’m getting the original product. As long as the upc matches, they’ll ship it.

> Amazon provided no guarantee

Except for all the guarantees for refunds or returns.

> I’ve been burned many times with cheap fakes.

This is statistically unlikely, unless you're intentionally going out of your way to shop at risky merchants.

> Amazon provided no guarantee that the item I’m ordering is from that vendor.

You mean the products that all came from the same factory? How does the arbitrary partition of them by random reseller change anything?

Magic the Gathering cards come to mind! Buying MTG cards from Amazon can be a little risky as there is a non zero chance of getting a box with already opened packs [0]. Customers buy the product, take the valuable cards out, reseal it and return to Amazon. Amazon just throws it in with the rest as they doesn't know how to properly check for tampering.

[0] : https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/omj8jh/amazon_cus...

This has nothing to do with Amazon or co-mingled inventory, and everything to do with shitty customers. Non-Amazon sellers would have the exact same issue. At least with Amazon, I have regress as a customer and know that things will be made right regardless of the circumstances of the sale.

There's plenty of ammo to use if you want to take potshots at Amazon, but this isn't one of them.

Because the supply chain to an arbitrary vendor may not be secure.

With electronics, it’s common for suppliers or distributors to supply bad parts, especially in times like now where parts are constrained.

Because I'd have recourse for getting a fake if there were traceability.

I wanted to buy a Sony phone direct from Amazon. I specifically bought "Shipped and Sold by Amazon" three times and had to return it three times because they kept sending me another seller's commingled inventory. It was obvious because the box had the third party seller's sticker on it and it was a Hong Kong model phone which would not work properly in the USA.

I'm a decently big ebay seller. There are a huge amount of scammers on the buy side. Lots of fake reputation. The reason why they largely side with the buyer is there are a lot of scam sellers as well. Traditionally, ebay has been a very weird market place, its coupling with PayPal for a long time, terrible customer support, huge amount of fraud (view botting, follow botting, fake reputation). It really was the jungle for a long while, imo. The past 2 years they've very slowly started modernization the website. It is still missing lots of features you'd expect as a seller but they've come a really long way in a short time.

How do you protect yourself on that market then?

sellers can cancel and refund transactions when buyers seem shady or unscrupulous.

The most common buyer scam I've seen is when they claim they need you to ship to an odd address that doesn't match up with billing info.

I take lots pictures before I ship. The products I largely sell also go through a third party service, but that’s a very recent addition to eBay. Otherwise, like every other business fraud is just a cost/side effect of doing business.

Both ebay and Amazon get a lot of flack and bad stories/press but in the rare cases I’ve had issues both Amazon and ebay have been helpful.

I’ve had 3 issues this year.

1) eBay I bought $170 worth of trading cards from 1 seller in Germany. After 2 months I hadn’t received anything. I messaged him 2 times in English and 2 times in German. No reply. The tracking number said it was in Germany. But it never left Germany. I contact eBay. Waited 3 days for the seller to reply. He didn’t. EBay refunded the whole thing.

2) similar issue, bought some stuff off Amazon, 2 months it never arrived. Amazon said it was lost in transit and refunded me 100% as gift card to reorder. Received super quick the second time.

3) last night I had part of an order cancelled by Amazon due to damage in transit. I was confused cos I just ordered it on Saturday. So how could it be damaged. I contact Amazon and they said it was damaged in transit to the Amazon warehouse. I said I can’t reorder cos I’ll incur delivery fees on that as I had already paid $75 for shipping I didn’t want to pay more shipping. So they reordered the 3 items for me so I don’t get the shipping fee.

Donno if I’m lucky but this is why I always end up shopping at both these sites. Tho I’m Taiwan most of what I use now is PCHome/Momo/books

Edit: I do have 2 issues tho.

EBay: if the seller uses their own shipping you can request a quote which will combine shipping. However if they throw up discounts on the items you cannot ask for. Quote.

If the seller uses eBay shipping you cannot do combined shipping so you need to pay each individual items shipping, but the seller always combines anyway so it costs you and not the seller.

Amazon: sometimes you go buy multiple items but due to shipping from different warehouses you can end up paying multiple delivery fees.

All good points! I forgot to add in my original post but I also totally shop on Amazon as well; I just like eBay better. Another point for eBay is that you can combine shipping at all! Because you can see what else the seller has its easy to buy stuff that otherwise wouldn't be worth it without combined shipping.

What is the cos/tho/donno all about?

Which part needs clarification ?

I'd go one step further and say AliExpress is better than Amazon.

Anything important I get from a physical store. For cheap crap or stuff I am happy to gamble on, I'd rather cut out the useless price gouging middleman, and go straight to the source.

I've actually had very good customer service from AliExpress vendors. A NUC form factor PC I got had issues using a certain brand of RAM. They churned out a custom BIOS overnight to try get it going.

Yeah well my AliExpress NUC was stolen from me after I shipped it back for repair and never heard back. Was also a bios problem, black screen on boot a day after I received it. Aliexpress and the seller ignored me over multiple months and many messages. $600 lost.

That’s why you use a credit card. Just have the bank issue a chargeback.

That said, I agree that AliExpress is way more stingy with refunds compared to eBay/Amazon. One time it took me 4 months to get a package that would normally be delivered in 10 days to the US. Any normal website would have just issued a refund after 30 days. Still, AliExpress is incredibly cheap and I’ve bought a ton of assembled PCBs from them that are either impossible to find elsewhere or only available with a 10x markup.

AliExpress sellers may also be middlemen. You generally never really get rid of the middleman.

Not always.

Fine example is the cheap STM32 based PLC I bought. The thing was so badly designed you couldn’t plug an RS232 cable into it because the casing was in the way of the connector. When approaching the vendor, with photos, I got offered a $5 refund and told to take the casing off (which was required for it to fit on a rail). Aliexpress sided with the seller when I complained. I charge backed the whole $75 and Aliexpress blocked me as a buyer.

I said screw it and bought a second hand omron PLC off eBay.

Then there’s the fake semiconductors on there. It’s difficult to find any genuine ones.

The only reason Aliexpress is cheap is the post cost from them is low. Returns are really expensive to china so they will do everything to avoid it. If we shot some of the postal agreements Aliexpress would be dead overnight.

Not sure how relevant it is but the two examples you linked really aren't that comparable, the EBay one you linked is a significantly cheaper construction. You can find the identical thing on Amazon for basically the same price (for me, it's "on sale" and slight cheaper): https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Caliper-Adoric-Calipers-Measu...

That said I do agree, I think EBay ends up being better than Amazon for many items, I'm just not sure this is a great example. The one I linked is the second one in the Amazon search results, but then the first one is a lot better so I'm not really sure if this cheap one should be first anyway.

Amazon isn't that good now but eBay is still miles beyond horrible

I agree. I recently went looking for a car part and was able to easily find the phone numbers for sellers to check. In the UK at least they also do end of month 15/20% sales where I've scored some bargains. I got a bit fatigued of Amazon and how the minimum order price was like £10

In the UK at least the quality of product on Amazon has plummeted and listings seem akin to Aliexpress.

I can't trust reviews, cases products have caused serve health issues and claims made by sellers can be wild with apparently little to no vetting from Amazon themselves.

I don't use Amazon for any food supplements anymore and usually go to the highstreet (Holland and Barret), they've a much stricter standard to accept products into their stores.

Lots of things are just rebrands offering little value except next day shipping at a much higher cost. Anything I don't need urgently gets purchased from eBay, usually a much lower price.

eBay can be good but some of its "features" are infuriating and ultimately drive me to buy stuff elsewhere.

Multi-item listings is the worst thing they've ever done because they totally ruin search results.

Let's say you're searching for something like a box of 200 disposable gloves. You dutifully type in "200 gloves" or "100 pairs gloves", filter by "Buy it Now" and sort "Price Low to High".

Suddenly your search results are filled with dozens of pages of results all priced at $0.99. How could a box of 200 gloves be so cheap? Because it's not showing results for 200 gloves... it's showing you a multi-item listing which contains packs of gloves in several quantities. One option is indeed a pack of 200 gloves, but that's priced at $20. The $0.99 option is, in fact, a single pair of gloves, listed as a "Sample".

You can't exclude multi-item listings from the search results, so this leaves things very much open to exploitation by unscrupulous sellers.

This makes the search basically useless for anything which could be sold in multi-item listings. It makes eBay unusable for me whenever I'm buying anything except for unique, clearly-listed items.

Another point of frustration is that you can't filter by shipping speed. Some listings boast a "Fast and Free" label which indicates that the item will be delivered within three days, but you can't actually filter on this in the search results. So if you need an item quickly, you just have to manually sift through all the results for items labelled "Fast and Free".

If any developers from eBay happen to read this comment, I'm available for hire as your personal rage and frustration consultant.

I find this trend against "power users" increasingly more common in almost all software as companies have the incentive to just design for users more susceptible to the default, nudged experience. I understand the downsides of "let the user customize everything" designs but it definitely feels like more and more of a shift in that direction in the last few years.

Hence whatever ebay’s “best match” algorithm is.

Yes, this issue with multi-item listings is so prominent and long-standing that I simply must assume it is a deliberate anti-user decision by ebay, though I can't think of a good reason why. I just know that if they wanted to fix it they could have by now.

All it would take is making "quantity" a core part of the data model for each listing, enabling search by quantity and sorting by price-per-unit.

Try restricting by price range.

eBay has been great for maintaining old bikes. My hunch is that if someone is offering a used item, it's because the item exists, they have access to it, and want to get rid of it ASAP. There's less temptation to counterfeit something that maybe only one other person in the world might want.

I've also bought used industrial equipment on eBay, often for pennies on the dollar. Same deal.

For stuff that isn't second hand, I don't know what would prompt a seller to choose between eBay and Amazon, but it probably comes down to subtle differences between their fee structures and other policies.

I sure hope people aren't going to the effort to counterfeit 10 or 15 year old shimano, sram, avid and similar components. New stuff, sure, but ebay does seem to be great also for "new old stock" bike stuff.

There is SO MUCH counterfeit stuff on eBay. Things you'd never expect. If there's a buck to be made expect it to be done.

eBay provides fewer platform support and therefore has lower commission? Also, second-hand doesn't always mean used. A good niche on eBay are New in the Box items that somebody wants to get rid of. The marketplace is pretty good there with individual ads with better accountability, vs. the aggregated mess on Amazon.

Bottom line is Amazon tries to hide the complexity of the marketplace and it ends up being the wrong abstraction and becomes straight lying.

eBay commissions are pretty high for how little inventory, delivery and warehouse risk/cost they take ($0).

Dunno what I’m getting for their 10% commissions today compared to 5% in the past.

Good point. I pay a roughly 3% commission to PayPal for my tiny side business. I think I do get something. The biggest thing, which I also can't quantify, is probably that I get X percent more sales because people are confident that PP will somehow magically take care of them if I turn out to be a screwball. All it takes is a couple more sales, to completely pay for the commission.

Also, I could knock myself out trying to find a cheaper service, or I could spend that time designing the next product.

Don't know if a similar calculus applies to eBay.

I wasn't even including the ~3% payment commission.

Back in the day before eBay required everything to go through Paypal, I was happy to give a discount for anything but Paypal: COD, cash-in-mail or money order. I earned some add'l sales from the voluntarily and involuntarily un/under-banked.

Now eBay is going to automatically charge Canadian sales taxes on my Canadian sales... even though I would be exempt myself as a small supplier. Ugh.

People will pay higher prices to win at a competition.

Indeed, but I've also noticed that a lot of the sales for stuff I'm interested in are "buy it now" type. And I have no good gauge for what a price "should" be, but for instance I'm willing to pay a couple bucks more for a chainring of some odd bolt spacing, that prevents me from having to buy a whole new crankset.

You can search for sold listings to see what price an item has recently sold for. It’s not that useful though for rare items that are not in frequent demand.

Part of the reason the “buy it now” is so popular is as a seller sometimes buyers make an offer for an auctioned item then once you refuse they bid up the price so they win but then they don’t transfer the money.

Check out pinkbike's buy/sell section for bike parts: https://www.pinkbike.com/buysell/

I really like eBay, using it for more than 15 years I never had a problem.

But I really wish it has some features that Aliexpress has.

- Sort by order numbers aka how many times people bought the given item. This is immensely helpful on its own too but more sales have more reviews as well! So you can see more feedbacks.

- Photo reviews. This is the killer feature to me on Aliexpress. Chinese online retail has a negative rep but I think I bought less fake stuff on Aliexpress than from Amazon actually. Or at least you know you are buying a fake which I don’t mind in certain situations.

eBay embodied the spirit of the early internet. It's P2P. It's like a massive flea market. You never know what you'll find just looking around.

It's not Amazon. eBay doesn't have warehouses. They don't own Whole Foods. They don't show you things other purchasers bought that were looking at the same items you are. They don't try to rope you in to Prime. They aren't the modern-day Sears catalog.

The buyer/seller communities on eBay's forums were amazing. People knew each other. They quickly weeded out bad sellers and you could actually contact people. Amazon introduced 'reviews'.

But they normalized buying things from random people on the internet. My first laptop, I purchased from a person on a newsgroup and mailed them a money order. I later sold that same laptop on eBay with a photo, PayPal for payment, etc.

I've been burned by eBay enough times at this point that I generally avoid using it unless I have no other choice. Is there a good alternative with fewer scams, better customer support and a better user experience?

I've done a ton of ebay purchasing across decades. Yeah, I've gotten the wrong product, I've gotten defective products, I've gotten misdescribed products. If I look at the product in a reasonable time, & find an issue, ebay has always made it right. Given how much value I get from ebay- how much wider the selection is & how reasonable the prices are for great used goods- I cant fathom your ask. Maybe you have some other priorities, but to me, it's easy to see who trustable, & when things arent right the seller usually fixes it quickly on their own, & ebay always steps in if not.

eBay flagged a gift card after using it twice from the same account and froze it with no indication of what they had done—the balance simply went to zero.

I messaged live support, which eventually told me I needed to verify it by sending a photo of the card and the receipt used to buy it (it was a two year old GIFT card). They eventually settled for just the card.

After three days it was unfrozen only to be instantly refrozen (again, no warning) when I tried to use it. I went through the same process and a few days later it finally worked.

eBay needs to do a much better job at controlling the sale of stolen goods especially electronics

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