eBay is laying off 9 percent of its workforce
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I remember when shopping at eBay was sort of sketchy to normies and Amazon was the trusted retailer. In the intervening decade Amazon has done everything to dilute their marketplace to be as wild wild west with fake goods / junk / stolen good fencing / disappearing sellers no better than eBay.
It's also surprisingly good for niche items like a fan for a particular out of production CPU board.
A coworker once bought an old iMac to use to benchmark some satellite code because the old iMac and the RAD750 are pretty close (up to a factor 2 througout I guess). All eBay.
eBay is a national treasure.
The only reason they started migrating was because it started getting too expensive and hard to find old parts.
My home is half full of things from flea markets where all of the above apply a lot. Yet they're still a great place to shop with caveat emptor shields on high.
Amazon has just become the biggest best flea market ever and the other half of my things are from there. So while all you say is true it is still a tremendous value to me. Sure you can't trust the sellers. So I don't, and it still works over all.
And without painless returns, Amazon loses a lot of appeal (over the high street, John Lewis online, etc.) for me.
If somebody put something bad into the supposed-to-be-fungible warehouse pool, and I'm the unlucky recipient, then that's one example of where the better customer service comes into play.
If you buy sold by BESTWAREZ-FOR-U and despatched by Amazon, then you get it shipped from the same pool but crapper service when you get the same amount of unluck and receive the dodgy one. (And if it's despatched by them and you've not heard of them before, even crapper, and it probably won't take nearly as much unluck for it to pan out poorly in the first place.)
If you have prime, just contact support. My experience is that it is a fairly fast painless process and they either just credit you right there, or allow you to free return the item for credit.
You should have left a seller review (on the seller's Amazon page), not a product review.
I guess there's something to be said for not chasing infinite growth, but eBay and Craigslist having their lunch eaten was entirely predictable. Not sure how many employees eBay has, but it feels like they could lay off 90% and nobody would notice. They're already coasting off the grid.
The thing with Amazon is there customer service is great, so if something does go wrong then you can sort it.
The other thing is to avoid the more dodgy looking listings and to buy only from amazon direct or shipped by Amazon and a fairly trusted brand.
Not sure if Amazon US is much worse than Amazon UK though. Ebay can be a bit more annoying to talk too, it takes much longer, amazon can be sorted in a quick 5 minute chat on there website.
> The other thing is to avoid the more dodgy looking listings and to buy only from amazon direct or shipped by Amazon and a fairly trusted brand.
Amazon's problem is that it commingles inventory in such a way that counterfeits get mixed with legitimate products across sellers. In light of which I have to ask why you think you've never been bitten (and keeping in mind that counterfeits aren't always obvious; ex. lead looks like any other metal)
I've ordered two of the same product at the same time and received 1 out of 2...
The amount of fakes in certain niches is off the charts.
Fair enough if you want the available sellers to be clearer, I'm just saying I think there's only good intentions there.
If I am buying a big name product that is likely to have a counterfeit problem, the seller is usually going to be amazon direct or the manufacturer anyway as big products are stocked by Amazon directly, the stuff that isn't, is usually more generic or niche and not usually a type of product that matters since it's something fairly generic anyway, i.e a dish cloth, tape etc.
I am not sure if it's just less of an issue buying from Amazon UK or it's the type of stuff you are buying, but from what i've read it seems like it's mostly an Amazon US issue. Most things in the UK are not from third party sellers unless you are buying a generic item that is effectively dropped shipped from AliExpress like a fancy dress dinosaur costume.
Look at the Apple Lightning cable, a typical fake product, here in the UK the only place you can get it from is amazon or amazon warehouse, so what products are there to get mixed up? Again, this seems to be more of an Amazon US issue, the reddit post you linked yet again just uses US sources.
I've not experienced this with Amazon, even when buying highly faked items, items that i have purchased from ebay however have been clearly fake. Sure I could have missed a fake product or two, but i've not been obviously scammed where it matters, but on ebay this has happened pretty much every time I buy a highly counterfeited product.
Actually I did get some Phillips LED bulbs that were a bit suss, but I'd still probably put my money on them being crap rather than counterfeit.
Counterfeits aren't always obvious but most are; if you've never seen any obvious counterfeits then it's unlikely you've missed high quality ones.
Again, how would you know? I know you think
> Counterfeits aren't always obvious but most are; if you've never seen any obvious counterfeits then it's unlikely you've missed high quality ones.
But the articles I've seen like https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/amazon-counterfeit-f... tend to lead with side-by-side pictures of visually identical products, which makes me think that's not true
I was buying a high end soap product from Amazon and when we used one from a hairstylist we realized ours were consistently fake.
Bottle and everything looked the same. But then we started buying direct from Dermalogica and it was clear the Amazon products are all fakes. Worst part is the store name on Amazon is Dermalogica products or something very similar to the real name.
Example, I bought a new high end camera on Amazon and what I received was a beat-up used camera with parts missing! Had to drive to a Whole Foods to return it and reorder the camera from a proper camera shop, wasting more than a week.
They also substitute junk quality for what was advertised as something else. I bought a power strip clearly advertised as UL Listed and what I received was some homegrown piece of junk that definitely was not. Threw that away taking the loss, not worth the drive to Whole Foods for a return.
At other times, I get the correct item. So you never know, Amazon is a probabilistic shopping site and the probability of getting what you ordered seems to be getting lower.
There are plenty of reports of 3rd party sellers subbing in rebranded/relabelled goods like SSDs/HDDs/SD cards where you take a cheaps/low one and re-market it as a high speed high price one.
Agreed Amazon absolutely has great customer service for buyers.
I will often wait until someone on FB is selling what I want within an hours drive, rather than buy the same thing to be shipped from afar. Skis, bikes, fermentation gear, Ring cameras, etc.
Mainly this is the result of being repeatedly burned on Amazon/eBay, but it's also related to the fact that I can often get the same thing cheaper when the competition is local.
You can track layoffs through https://layoffs.fyi
More to the point, tracking "tech layoffs within non-tech companies" is impossible with public data because that information is rarely broken out.
Things are worse than many think.
Which begs the question, what is a tech company anymore or a non-tech company?
Aside from the fact that they use technology (but everyone uses technology), ebay is not a tech company. They don't sell technology product.
A good complement for Layoffs.fyi (Sometimes the source of a layoffs.fyi entry will be an article written by a journalist who saw the WARN notice on WARNTracker)
They don't seem as bad as last year around the same months.
So I'd say I was surprised by the big layoff numbers from the likes of big names like Google, Discord, Twitch, Instagram, etc. this January. To me it had seemed like we had already hit bottom WRT layoffs but apparently not.
Also we aren't in 2010. You don't need to build as much in house anymore or patch up tech that doesn't scale. Modern frameworks, cloud, and open source tech makes things at least 10x easier than they used to be. We will only improve in this regard.
Maybe AI will change this, but we've seen plenty of doom-mongering before that never bore out.
LLMs amplify you quite a bit in productivity if you're doing CRUD which is what most people are doing. You just clean up the code and clarify potential improvements.
Alternatively, they could be in a crisis.
I don't. They know exactly what they're getting into when the take the top role and frankly? They get away with a lot of stuff they shouldn't.
I feel bad for all the lives negatively impacted by the leadership at companies.
If they didn’t want to do layoffs, they’d be arguing that AI is allowing them to hire more and get more business.
Not a single public layoff announcement has mentioned AI as the reason. In fact the current round of layoffs have been going on since before ChatGPT or Github Copilot even launched publicly.
Retirements, "gig" economy, etc are not reflective in the current government unemployment stats, so they do not paint a good picture IMO.
We still have not returned to pre-pandimic levels for Work Force Participation, or Employment-Population Ratio, which where already in a slump since the 2008-2010 Recession.
The employment picture is not as rosey as people citing unemployment numbers likes to believe, but it supports their narrative that the "economy is good" and it also supports government debt spending which right now what is driving inflation more than consumer demand.
We are in very unusual and troubling times economically, and the people at the switch are not looking at the correct numbers to make good decisions
As an example, if I can buy 2 units of a good this year (so demand is high) and then high inflation persists for two years and now I can only afford one unit (so demand is low) - my salary being the same, then an inflation rate of 0 in year 3 would mean everything stays the same. I can still only afford one unit and that should push prices down or at least keep them steady which is what zero inflation would mean.
Maybe the assumption is that decreased demand will necessarily cause unemployment, but this seems to be true only for domestic demand (questionable for the software industry) and in any case following this line of thought would mean the more employment the more inflation which seems absurd.
You, as an individual, might be forced to remain in that situation but in an environment with low overall unemployment, lots of your peers won't be so forced and so will demand either a raise or will change jobs to self-service the raise. That will tend to get you a non-zero raise (at least on a population-wide basis). If overall unemployment was quite high, employees are less willing/able to make such changes.
The aim is to stop inflation i.e. achieve price stability. Keeping unemployment low is a nice bonus if it can be done.
Also although the start of the inflation seemed to have been a supply shock due to the pandemic, whether that has continued to be the cause vs. the pandemic spending, isn't so clear now. Of course, the war in Russia and now the Middle East isn't helping the supply side either.
Presumably there is some point where raising the cost of investment is not desirable, despite relatively high prices.
Is it true? Hard to say really, like most macroeconomic theory.
Nine percent is about 1,000 jobs. So, a back-of-the-envelope calculation implies that about 11,000 people work there. I don't doubt that running eBay is more complex than it appears, but it's just a web site to buy and sell goods. That's an army of people!
If someone mentions that Walmart employs more people than the US Military, nobody blinks an eye. We can “Richard Scarry” imagine what they are doing, because there are lots of stores and we see what they do. (Reference: https://www.comicsbeat.com/if-your-job-wasnt-performed-by-a-... )
But a company like eBay or Google; we only see a website and can’t imagine what they’re doing. And Xitter continuing to not be completely on fire lends to this.
What do those balls of employees do? Sales, marketing, localization, etc. You can get some 50-80% of the total with a smallish group, but to get it all you need more and more people. And then you need management on top to keep everything moving. At some point it turns from “what do we need to do X” and becomes “do we get more revenue from this hire than it costs”.
eBay doesn't do fulfillment, or payment processing, or really anything other than running the website/mobile apps/api, customer service, marketing, etc. There has to be a lot of waste there.
I can't do that with Facebook and Instagram anymore as there are logins up the wazoo.
So for my use case (and I'm not a customer or even a user), it's still the same.
It's interesting that I had the opposite reaction. eBay is a _worldwide_, multi-billion dollar institution. They've been around for about 28 years (~1995) - since the start of it all...
I really thought the number of employees would be higher.
I turned to Wikipedia for some numbers (apple to oranges comparison, I know... but I was curious).
Walmart : 2,300,000 : Jan 2022
Amazon : 1,684,853 : Nov 2023
Target : 440,000 : ??? 2023
Microsoft : 238,000 : ??? 2023
Alphabet : 181,798 : Jun 2023
Best Buy : 90,000 : Jan 2023
B&N : 24,000 : ??? 2019
eBay : 11,600 : Dec 2022
I didn't realize that eBay was so small. Now they lost 1k. I haven't visited eBay in eons but a 9% reduction in their workforce from such an already low number is devastating (to me).
Are we looking at the end of eBay? They may have become staid... old in their thinking.
I constantly see Amazon, for example, open up new territories in other areas. They went from eBooks to general ecommerce to servers to hardware to voice AI to home gadgets. There seems to be nothing this company won't consider. They think like a startup.
eBay may be another Xerox (or Mozilla...) unless they can get their management team thinking outside their comfort zone.
Ubisoft : 20,665 : video games
Yandex : 18,004 : search
Equifax : 14,000 : credit bureau
Autodesk : 13,700 : software
EA : 13,400 : video games (electronic arts)
Netflix : 12,800 : video streaming
Shopify : 11,600 : eCommerce
eBay : 11,600 : Dec 2022
Unity : 7,703 : video games
GoDaddy : 6,910 : domains, websites
That is a gross oversimplification.
I swear, the new selling pages were made by people who never sold anything on eBay.
It's gone from functional to a clunky buggy mess.
Just simple things - like what qualifies for media mail, is profoundly broken. I'll see things like computer parts getting the option and books not. They're in the right categories, that's not it, it's just broken.
Then there's these comically bad features, like the generic AI description (a book description will be something like "dive into the tantalizing tale of adventure and excitement" as opposed to the condition of the book). It's such terribly unhelpful garbage. Whoever thought polluting the listing with paragraphs of generated bullshit was a good idea?
And the new templated shipping costs interface is thoroughly broken. You have to reload the page sometimes to get it to accept the values.
Then there's the api speed. Updating things like the price has gone from under .5 seconds to more like 5. If you want to do a bulk price update it's sluggish and exhausting now.
They also broke the image widget. Rotations and crops sometimes don't stick nor does rearranging the images. I'll do the work then come back days later to see it didn't actually save the edits.
If you try to void a label, not only is this now multiple extra clicks, if you try to do it from mobile, it now takes you to a broken part of the app.
I don't want to exhaust you, but this is only about 1/3 of the issues.
I mean really, it's a bunch of bugs, system slowdown, and features that will do nothing but kill your sales. New things are fine. Broken things are not.
I'm basically only catching them by chance. Yet another thing broken.
I'm sorry people have lost their jobs but I hope it's the right kind of cut here - my sales this time last year was about 8x what I'm doing now - these updates have killed things pretty bad
I make AAA video games, my industry does not add anything to society.
I used to make eCommerce websites, what does that add to society? Easier access to consumerism? Most of the eCommerce sites were selling "bullshit goods" like toys, kitsch gifts or pranks.
Very few among us do something substantial that actually improves or saves lives.
Fewer still will be reading this comment.
The culture of society is what we live for! Many games are art and bring joy and purpose to many people. It's tough having a job abstracted away from the people you affect, but you can bring a lot of joy to many people after a stressful day.
How can you say that with a straight face? You literally create art for the enjoyment and pleasure of people, literally the point of life after food, shelter, exercise and employment needs have been fulfilled.
tens of millions of us work in pharma, constructions, aviation, infrastructure, logistics, healthcare, transportation and contribute to society. Just because half of SF is just siphoning VC money doesn't mean most of society isnt
The real bullshit jobs are the jobs that are doing things that don’t need to be done even given the products - like people filing compliance reports for useless metrics.
And decoupling from PayPal a few years back looked like it forced a ton of re-engineering on the backend.
Also, FWIW, I've accessed eBay multiple times per day since 2004 and I can't remember downtime.
A good game developer provides entertainment at least. Contrasted to Twitter who under Dorsey&co shipped NFTs and 1 redesign in 10+ years. They had thousands of engineers sitting doing nothing. Imagine firing 90% of a school staff or 90% of a McDonalds staff.
Not to say that moving forward with development constantly is worthwhile either. Zuckaberg spent billions on a Metaverse which is somehow objectively much worse and buggier than VRChat.