I cant believe ebay hasnt been disrupted yet...
For a lot of stuff, as a seller, I'll just trade-in or use random hobbyist forum buy&sell sections which ad-hoc reputation systems.
I opened a seller account in about 2020 to unload some server gear and almost got scammed, but I googled the buyers name and saw he was accused of fraud by several other people. I re-routed the package and although I didn't get reimbursed for that fee, ebay made me right and paypal (I think) gave me a small credit. They even had a phone call with me which seemed like they actually investigated it (I dont remember many details, it was 1 transaction 5 years ago).
There's just no way that any online auction can control fraud. I was on ebay yesterday as a buyer, looking for a tape backup drive. The seller clearly had been burned and (bitterly) warned that the sale was final, because previously he had sold a working drive which was parted out, replaced with broken parts (heads) and returned as defective. there's no way a third party can protect against it because either way the fraudster wins. 1) sell a bad drive, claim it was good, but accuse the buyer of fraud. Or 2) buy a good drive, swap it out with bad parts and return it. how could anyone (like ebay) solve this problem?
Remember losing it a few years ago when an obvious scammer tried to bully me into a partial refund for an item he had already resold at a 50% markup.
In a way I like the more conversational forum buy & sell system where I have feedback, but also each purchase starts with a DM. I usually can suss out from a few DMs if a buyer is going to be a tire kicker wasting my time, or a perfectionist who will be a pain to sell to. In either case I let those buyers pass and wait for someone worth doing business with.
On eBay you have no choice in who your buyer is.
(I ordered a bunch of stuff, maybe 800 USD. They decided the order is fraudulent, and canceled it, without ever telling me. When I moved into my new place, there was nothing. No sheets, no nothing from Amazon. That this order was "canceled" without any email seemed to puzzle Amazon support. They told me in the chat to reorder with fasted shipping, and that they would reimburse the shipping. Of course, they did not. And the chat protocols clearly stating Amazon would reimburse the express shipping were a "misunderstanding".
When I got the package a few days later, the $150+ set of cello strings I ordered, sold and shipped by amazon, were counterfeits (and damaged due to improper packing, not that it mattered). I had to do a charge back to get my money back.
Mr. Jeff Bezos, CEO
Amazon dot com, Inc.
410 Terry Avenue North
Seattle, Washington 98109-5210
(206) 266-1000
The strings were guitar strings rather than cello strings. They're too short for a cello. The winding metal is different too. A bow doesn't grip guitar strings as well.
Most counterfeiters send super cheap cello strings with a fake label. In those cases, the best way to tell is that the silk windings on the strings will be the wrong colors.
There's a huge difference in sound. Cheap/fake strings tend to sound metallic and harsh. They also tend to break quickly, while a proper set of strings can last over a year.
In a case like this,there's not even the need for small claims - if you just contacted the better business bureau, you'd have gotten reimbursed the shipping and then something reasonable on top as 'an apology for the misunderstanding.'
Next time you have a straightforward 'they're wrong' issue with a company where you're getting outsourced flowcharts for support, try out the bbb. They're great.
Small claims would obviously also work, but that's a major investment in time/bureaucrazy, while a bbb complaint can be completed online in 10 minutes with maybe one or two brief follow-ups, but usually all it is, is them getting in contact with a human who can do things - and for cases like this, they obviously try to make it right.
I think you don't need even an oral agreement for a contract to be valid. Conclusive action is enough. Take a newspaper, but 2 USD on the table, leave. No words exchanged but valid sales contract established.
But if I am looking for something specific, it is an incredible failure. It’s so bad I suspect they intentionally don’t want it to work well. That is, I think they only want to optimize for low-effort social buying, not picky people who know exactly what they want.
For this reason I have bought way more stuff off eBay than FB Marketplace recently.
I’m not one for conspiracy theories usually, but I’m pretty sure the state of Marketplace search is, if not ‘deliberate’, at least a result of metrics-driven development. The search results are _just_ useful enough to keep you scrolling and tapping, so the vagueness increases engagement :-(
If I wanted to sell a Dewalt angle grinder, I would go to Facebook first.
If I wanted to sell a Sony E-mount camera lens, I would go to eBay first.
Most used things I buy make more sense on Facebook. Most people I know use Facebook because they are usually looking for regular things.
"Is this still available?" Yes it is - never heard from again.
I stopped giving out my address. I will give a general area where we can meet so they can gauge how far it is for them. When they are on their way, I give them the public location to meet. Only serious people will meet me. On some occasions, I still get ghosted. But ghosting has become more and more common. I don't recall it being this bad when Craigslist was huge.
Rather go back to yard sales.
I usually just give folks my home address and a time I'm going to be home anyways, and ask them to send me a message once they're on their way. Then I generally forget about it until I get a message from them. If they ghost me, oh well.
I don't take the ad down, and if anyone else asks, I just tell them to ask me again after the scheduled time.
I’m guessing investors don’t see much opportunity for growth in the online auction business to make it worth dumping a bunch of money just to take market share from eBay.
Your average normie has no interest in the hassle of selling their used stuff (which has, if anything, got harder in my 25ish years using eBay), nor of buying random used staff from anonymous individual sellers.
Etsy covers the arts & crafts coded goods (though much is now China dropship).
Amazon allows the big merchants to sell to normies who just want to click "buy" without thinking about seller rating risk, when something will arrive, etc. Basically most people have no idea they are buying from not-Amazon, because it says amazon.com and that's good enough. eBay never had the smarts to create that user experience.
Do they even do it nowadays? I was under impression it turned into an ordinary marketplace, probably with a bit more focus towards small/private sellers.
Recently I bought a chainsaw tool on eBay from China as I didn't want to buy a 6-pack for $10. I was able to buy a couple for about $0.20 more per unit. Sure, higher unit price and they'll be here slower but it's several $6ish saved.
The eBay search function isn't great, but it's vastly better than Amazon, where search results are polluted by large numbers of garbage sponsored results - this may be related to its success in these niches. (although in my case it's partly because I can avoid paying for Amazon Prime, and still choose things based on prices that include shipping)
Each of those three claims to be the largest one in some metric.
I wonder at times whether this is their game, hoping people will just tell them not to bother sending it back and they get a refund anyway.
As for ebay, I stopped selling anything on there years ago, well over a decade, when someone tried to scam me out of a laptop but failed. If something is valuable enough for me to sell, I sure as shit am not selling it on eBay.
More often than not, I give away my valuable tech that I'm done with, because I'd rather get nothing for it, and give it to someone who'll appreciate it than risk being scammed by some scumbag.
This way, friends and family get my hand-me-down PCs, laptops, phones, etc for nothing and they're still, by the time I'm done with them far better than something they'd buy with their budgets. When I buy something, I factor its lifetime in my possession into it's cost, I effectively expect £0 value left in it when I'm done or I don't buy it; everybody wins.
For old computer stuff, I gave away quite some stuff to people driving to Ukraine. This then goes to kids or their cause.
Probably indicative of not having a very good business brain. However, it always seems strange to me when when people buy things and keep track of their used values the whole time they own it - expecting at some point to trade it in.
A couple of days later I saw the same item relisted. I wouldn't be surprised if the person I was bidding against was just there to pump the price for the seller, or was an alt account of the seller. Obviously against eBay's TOS but I'd be surprised if it didn't happen.
1: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/craigslist-revenue-...
that said, general consensus at least where I am in WA and Canada is FB Marketplace is the new CL. which is a same because FB sucks
As far as I remember ebay hand waved at everything, especially scam.
Allegro is getting enshitiffied nowadays since it was bought by VC.