Ask HN: What's wrong with Ebay? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's wrong with Ebay?

7 pointshobin15 comments

I'm completely serious. One of Y Combinator's startup ideas they'd like to fund is something that will be better than Ebay, because "[a]uctions seem boring now because EBay is doing a bad job". I also hear many people complain about this site, and how things could be done much better.

My question is simple: why? I've never experienced any problems with Ebay, and (IMO) it works quite well. I'm curious what people's reasons are for thinking Ebay is doing a bad job.

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For me, the pain point is simple: searching for a true, used auction has gotten far too difficult.

While that answer is simple, the reasons for it are not. In my personal opinion, the proliferation of "professional" eBay sellers is its downfall. If I am going to buy a product online, then I will just go to Amazon or Newegg or some of the other awesome internet retailers. I go to eBay to try and find something used and, hopefully, for a discount to new.

I would love an eBay like it was in the old days: all person-to-person. Get rid of the pro sellers. A cool project in and of itself would be an eBay filter that got rid of Buy-It-Nows and people who make their living selling stuff on eBay.

I felt this pain acutely yesterday. I am developing an Android app but I use an iPhone so I needed a used tester phone. It took me 30 minutes of searching and wading through crap before I found a suitable candidate and even then I probably only saved $50 of just buying from a traditional internet retailer. The hourly value of my time far exceeds $50, so for now, I do not see myself using eBay again.

I feel that eBay changed their business model to compete with Amazon, and now I have no idea what their value proposition is. In short, Amazon offers the same things, but with a much, much better experience. Compare [1] to [2]. Both offer the same thing (an iPod), and from a mulitude of sellers. But the Amazon version is cheaper and the page is much easier to understand.

[1]: http://www.ebay.com/ctg/Apple-iPod-classic-7th-Generation-Bl...

[2]: http://www.amazon.com/Apple-classic-Black-Generation-NEWEST/...

eBay was originally a great place to get deals on used goods from their owners, but they mostly abandoned that model several years ago, and became a place to buy things from random sketchy stores. Several times when I've looked on eBay, I've found that many sellers were offering prices greater than normal retail, but with the added “bonus” [sarc.] of being a much bigger hassle.

Beyond that, auctions were kinda fun at first, I guess, but really, because of bidding wars, you often don't save any money, or at least you don't save enough for it to be worth waiting longer, and dealing with greater hassle.

For example, if you look again at the eBay page, it looks like if I buy an iPod at auction, I can expect to pay from $210-$220 for it--I don't understand why I would spend the extra time and effort when I'm ultimately only going to save about $10-$20, plus deal with the fact that I'm buying from some random.

The thing is, people are still interested in buying used stuff from other people (who are real people). Look at how popular and fun garage sales and flea markets are. There are a lot of challenges to doing this well online, which is why there's no clear winner in this space. (Craigslist is a little different—they avoid a lot of these challenges since they're local.)

Selling on Ebay sucks. If you want to receive payment fast you have to use Paypal. They set all the rules and the seller is at the whim of Ebay, Paypal and the buyer all three of which can potentially screw you over. Right now I have over a 100$ being kept by Paypal for 21 days, a standard ebay policy if you haven't sold a ton of stuff yet and the item you're selling is over 100$. That is despite having a 100% squeaky clean record with both Paypal and Ebay. Selling stuff for emergency cash is not advisable unless you do a cash payment with local pickup.

In the UK we have Gocardless which would be ideal for receiving payments, except there isn't a marketplace I know that supports it.

1) Ebay / Paypal take too high a cut. 2) Forced use of the Paypal payment method. 3) The auctions aren't real auctions - if they extended the bidding time each time a bid was placed, it would eliminate sniping software. 4) Instead of fraud prevention via software triggers placing arbitrary limits, they should devote some money to a team that would buy and sell igconito and seek legal prosecution of people who commit fraud. 5) A specific kind of fraud, shill bidding, is actually in Ebay's interest in the current setup, because it tends to raise prices overall.

If you start a competitor, you will face the chicken-and-egg problem of all social or peer to peer businesses - no sellers will come if there are no buyers, no buyers will come if there are no sellers. You might be able to break through this by focusing on products that Ebay currently bans, such as guns or used software.

Another method of breaking in might be to focus on people who are doing well on Etsy but moving up and out of craftsman to small manufacturing. To get them you would offer a combination of capital ( pre-pay for the product, for example ), connections and advice in dealing with various manufacturers, and a fullfillment service. That presumes you can get capital your self, of course.

From a seller's standpoint, Ebay has one significant issue.

Ebay pushes the use of Paypal really hard, to the point where many sellers won't accept any other form of payment. Ebay convinces sellers that Paypal is a safe, secure form of payment to accept, but they don't support sellers at all.

Basically, if you want free stuff from Ebay, all you have to do is pay through paypal with a credit card and then claim the purchase was fraudulent. 100% of the time, paypal will refund your money because they don't have the clout required to argue with major credit card companies, and they sure as hell aren't going to be stuck with the bill.

This complete lack of support for retailers is slowly killing the site.

Don't forget they may also require the buyer to DESTROY the item and submit proof to get their money back. You should never sell an expensive collectible on eBay.

Is this true? (Do you have a source?) I have never heard such a thing before, and it sounds incredibly stupid.

I think he's referring to the violin case. You can find it over at regretsy:

http://www.regretsy.com/2012/01/03/from-the-mailbag-27/

It's slow, poorly designed and a hassle to use. Aesthetically it is poor too and the submission process is way too complex and time consuming. Think about what you would make if you were going to build an auction website. I bet it'd look totally different to eBay.

The few times I've had to use it recently, the search was so awful I had to type in three different ways of saying essentially the same things to get it to show any results. Additionally it's visually disorienting, I don't trust PayPal and I'm always skeptical of sellers.. as in the event that something does go wrong, they don't care about making sure things get handled appropriately or timely. There are certain things that are not their responsibility, but ensuring their customers don't get burned or shuffled through the hell that is PayPal claims seems a pretty obvious one that a competitor could beat them at.

Auctions ending at a set time encourages little activity until the final moments of the auction and then a flurry of bidding. Buyers don't get an idea of what the actual price is going to be and sellers are left wondering if they could have gotten more. How it should work is like a real auction, every bid extends the auction and the item is only sold when there have been no more bids for a period of time.

While this would be ideal for sellers, I don't think many buyers would want to adopt this model, as it would only serve to increase prices.

I started selling on eBay a year ago. The problem I have with eBay was that they only allowed me to list 50 items to start with. I had close to 2000 items. I pretty much had to beg and beg them every month to increase my limit. A year later, my limit was 250. I can't compete so I left eBay after a year of losing money.

Coming from New Zealand, I've always wondered how eBay became so popular while being so hideous, even ignoring paypal.

www.trademe.co.nz is our 'local eBay', and is both intuitive and attractive. It's totally baffling to me that the auction giant with tons of money doesn't have a clue how to hire competent designers.

isn;t most o fthe stuff on ebay fraudulant?

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