Welcome to the new eBay
ebay.com
ebay.com
I have something that due to the niche of the product, makes it very hard to sell to anywhere BUT eBay. There are a lot of attempted alternatives in this niche but none provide the instant kind of payment you'd get from using eBay or have the quantity of buyers. It is truly the network effect at work.
What's my point about this? It's that the problem with eBay isn't because it doesn't have a Pinterest-esque style layout. No one really cares about eBay's dotcom style layout, or the fact that it the logo until recently was schizophrenic about it's capitalization. It's because they completely bone the sellers. If you're a seller on eBay, you're constantly juiced on every little single thing. You also have little recourse if a buyer rates you poorly (I guess punish him back by rating him badly too?). It's been a slow methodical shakedown of sellers and quite frankly people are sick of being nickel and dimed to death. So I hope this blows up in their face and that they continue to lose market and mindshare.
And I find it funny that eBay is now promoting that images are the way to go with this layout when for years they nickel and dimed sellers on photos (Is the max 3 without paying? I forget) and the photo quality of those images was always terrible, like someone set JPG compression to 50%
It's not really an infographic, it's just some somewhat suspectly typeset data and some icons.
I get the impression you assume the network effect is something that just happens over night. The network effect is extremely hard to master and takes a lot of money/time to do so. Hence why the fees are as high as they are.
> So I hope this blows up in their face and that they continue to lose market and mindshare.
Care to elaborate? I wasn't under the impression ebay was doing either.[1]
[1] - http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=EBAY+Interactive#symbol=E...
Network Effect as in they use their sizable userbase to prevent any other competition in the space. For online auctions to work you need a large buyer base so it can attract a large seller base.
I never said it was easy or difficult, not even sure you need to "master" it, but who cares? That wasn't even an important point of that sentence, which was that it's difficult to sell anywhere BUT eBay because of the Network Effect
Fees are high because eBay has no idea how to keep earning money except to gouge people. They certainly can't make buyers pay anything so the sellers essentially get dumped with more and more "fees". I am still confused how that relates to the discussion about the Network Effect. They worked hard initially and now they deserve to gouge people who are using their site?
> Care to elaborate? I wasn't under the impression ebay was doing either.[1]
I cannot prove either but how does showing a stock price disprove what I said? They can still lose marketshare and still have a positive stock price. And they continue to make profits because they continue to bleed their sellers dry.
Ask anyone (or I guess, just sellers would be more accurate) if they would use eBay if they had to. They would say, "Fuck No", so why do they use it? Because, Network Effect.
That's not network effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect). I think you mean to say: "It's unfair that a service, which provides more value than a coompetitor, charges a higher fee"?
The Network Effect does not imply monopolistic behaviour.
That's two distinct issues. Although large successful companies tend to do both, it does not imply causality.
It is true that the need for the network effect is a Barrier to Entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barriers_to_entry), which is what keeps your "competitor" from entering, and which leaves Ebay with monopolistic situation - intented or not.
And how do you propose companies should attain a large buyer base without spending large amounts of money? eBay is NOT forcing you to use their platform, much like google is not forcing you to use their search engine. Customer acquisition is EXPENSIVE.
> They worked hard initially and now they deserve to gouge people who are using their site?
I don't think I follow your logic? Software development and marketing don't just all of the sudden stop as soon as a company attains a substantial network effect. Should facebook stop developing now that it has a substantial network effect?
> Fees are high because eBay has no idea how to keep earning money except to gouge people.
How do you propose they protect their network effect then?
> I cannot prove either...Ask anyone (or I guess, just sellers would be more accurate) if they would use eBay if they had to. They would say, "Fuck No", so why do they use it? Because, Network Effect.
Classic case of Cognitive dissonance.[1] If I read between the lines all I hear is "complain complain complain", with no substantial evidence to back it up. If this is that big of an issue, you (or anyone for that matter) would see an opportunity and steal market share yourself. I'm sure you would find the costs of establishing and maintaining a network effect exponentially difficult.
Hilariously, sellers can't leave negative feedback for buyers: http://pages.ebay.com/services/forum/sellerprotection.html
If you're selling on eBay and something goes wrong (buyer claims she received a box of rocks), there really isn't much to do. PayPal and eBay favor buyers so much that if the buyer really wants her money back, she'll certainly get it.
- The logos all have red, blue, yellow, green (that was
true before, but the shades they use seem more
similar now)
- flat styling with minimal drop shadows
- using lots of white background and light grey lines/panels
- more hard square corners than rounded
- san serif fonts (very similar if not identical)
- hovering over links underlines
- full width backgrounds
They're going for "clean" but to me it's starting to look a little bland.
Yet you attempt to critique using phrases like "sleek" and "clean".
First, eBay doesn't need saving. As long as they don't choose a UI that is needlessly onerous, they will do fine with or without. It will boil down to whether they are facilitating new users or pissing off old users; a better UI can increase growth, a bad one can reduce it, but when you're in the position they're in, a nice UI is practically a kindness rather than a necessity. Look at Craigslist.
Second, how much of Pinterest is essentially shopping without the purchasing? I'd venture quite a bit of it. I know my wife and sisters-in-law use Pinterest extensively, and they're mostly looking at things they want to buy (and recipes). Both Pinterest and eBay are about tapping into your greed as quickly as possible. It seems like a move in the right direction--and perhaps an implicit acknowledgement that they are Pinterest's principle competitor.
Finally, and this is kind of a technicality, the old layout didn't punish bad photos as much as it should. If you uploaded a shitty little photo, in the list view it looked the same as a nice big photo until you clicked through. Switching to an image-heavy master layout will encourage people to take better photos, and better photos will increase sales.
All things considered, this is the only site I've seen since Pinterest that really should be using this layout.
unless this is on purpose (to lower the amount of users somehow to let the system avoid a spike or something) then I really don't get it.
and after you go in, it's a pinterest wall.
The feed's popups are too high for a 600px screen. And since it is javascript, you cannot scroll up and down the whole window frame. You cannot open items in tabs using ctrl, javascript will capture the mouseclick, you have to rightclick and choose from the menu. Did I mention how much I love javascript and its improvements to user experience?
It doesn't 'look' or 'feel' good at all.
Almost every change I see is a step back, instead of forward, which is crazy considering how awful it was before.
Then again Ebay's strengths were never in anything product related.
I do believe that Ebay is very strong in the business side of things which is the real reason why they are still here today.
Sadly the product has always been in a state of neglect, so maybe I'm crazy for actually expecting something different from them this time.
Amazon take 15% but let you list as much inventory as you want, they will likely restrict your account until some feedback comes in but after a few weeks this is lifted.
So amazon makes way more money off us and is a lot easier to manage. One of eBays problems I guess is that in some ways they are still rooted in the traditional model of small personal sellers and don't support big sellers that well.
If it were a free-for-all everyone with a massive inventory would drown out all of the individuals (the core of the site).
That said I like the design a lot. The old design was showing some age. I see they kept most of the layout so it should be semi familiar to all the power users.
Today, its the Interface that sells. My mom and sister love Pinterest the most in the web. I consider that - web is all about giving greater user experience for super easy discovery!
eBay has done a nice design change, and the Pinterest like Interface sells well for shopping sites.
The change is happening fast, users consume lot of content from tablets, mobile devices so Pinterest, Wookmark and masonary like plugins create beautiful grids and layouts for easy discovery.
But eBay should work more on their recommendation algorithms. It keeps showing me Tablets, even after I bought a tablet recently in eBay. It should stop showing me Tablets again. May be it should show Tablet accessories - Screen-guards, pouches and Connectors? I may be interested in buying them.
Also an option to personalize the shopping experience by showing Items from WishLists and Research-Lists is also missing.
Still not digging that new logo though...
(Had to read through the whole thing to find out where it is!)
No connection to my purchase history that I can see... o_O
Am I the only one to find it out?
I would sell on Craigslist but everyone wants to undercut or bargain the hell out of you. I guess I'll just put it there anyway. The phones have GOT TO GO.
Funny how a decade can change things.
I know Stripe is good. But It will be interesting to see when they can match PayPal's features.
I mean, those legs look interesting but I'm guessing that's not what ebay's going for.
edit: wow, I was dropped into the middle (basically right at the end) of the page. I didn't realize that... Is Chrome acting incorrectly? It goes to the top of the page without the '#' at the end. Also, those orange bag jpeg artifacts are not good. I would absolutely shudder to see what that looks like on a Retina display.
I actually quite enjoy it otherwise, but it really has to start at the top. (Surely I'm not the only one this happened to, it happens every time for me)