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Comment by shmatt | Hacker News Reader

eBay is dying, new competitors are being created constantly, and the big ones like Poshmark are getting more North American buyers and sellers. eBay has barely grown since their post covid slump

Maybe eBay survives as an international site but even at that point, with $20B in debt this will just follow the regular PE playbook of shutting down after many layoffs and pivots

The entire concept of, "I have $1,000 in the bank, im going to buy a $10,000 company, but the debt will be on the companies name, not mine" needs to pass. Can you imagine if the mortgage was owned by our home, not ourselves. And we could stop paying it without any personal consequences

If you want to buy a $50B company, you should pay $50B (loans are fine, but not putting the new company in debt)

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> Maybe eBay survives as an international site

I don't really know what alternative there is to eBay as an 'everything shop'. I can get specific screws there, or diff fluid, or a customised motorhome name sticker, or an old baseball cap for an airshow I attended in 2008.

And if I bought the wrong diff fluid I can sell it.

The main value over Amazon, though, is that the search works.

> The main value over Amazon, though, is that the search works.

Super true. You can actually search for the exact brand you want and not get a search result page full of brands XIAOLE, LLKAPOO, JEMROK, QPPNSS, VRINHH.

Also, I don't really know why, but I have much greater confidence on eBay that I'm not going to get something counterfeit or unsafe.

> I have much greater confidence on eBay that I'm not going to get something counterfeit or unsafe.

On eBay, sellers control their inventory, listings, customer service, and resulting reputation end-to-end. On Amazon, the incentives are backwards.

EBay does do search well. Exact phrase matches, negation, ORs

A search for this works exactly as you expect:

(Lamborghini Urus, Audi RS Q8, and Volkswagen Touareg) “stereo wiring harness” -untested

It’s gotten a bit more fuzzy if you do something wrong. I used to have an alert for a mis-spelled brand name to snipe stuff :)

Facebook marketplace is an everything shop, though a bit more local in nature. Also, it's much easier for small businesses that ship to have an online store thanks to Shopify, etc.

The last few times I've used EBay is to get parts for old garden tractors, and even for that I've found cheaper options with small retailers that specialize in that stuff. Most ebay shipping pushes the cost up too much, and with the small retailers usually I can get a bunch of things I need at the same shipping price.

FB Marketplace is full of scammers too. Every time we've tried to sell something, we've had people try to steal our phone number and register it with their Google Voice account.

How do they try to steal your phone number?

I've only contacted buyers/sellers in FB Marketplace via FB Messenger so they don't even have my number ..

Interesting you think that because my main experience is the search is horribly broken and they do nothing globally to fix it. Most of it saved searches are full of exclusions because a positive search includes so many irrelevant items. And they don’t enforce categorization so listers constantly put in better categories for their items, when they aren’t just lying with things like “calculator not HP”.

At this point, online fraud control is getting absurd, and AI is just making it untenable. I simply won't use ebay for anything above $50 anymore.

Having physical locations that you have to come to pick up your Thneed protects both buyer and seller. Buyer can verify that what was described is delivered and seller can verify actual pickup with ID.

If they apply a bit of logistics for shipping between stores, Gamestop could crush it.

Fraud is forcing the pendulum to swing from everything-online back to everything-in-person.

> Can you imagine if the mortgage was owned by our home, not ourselves. And we could stop paying it without any personal consequences

To a large degree you can just stop paying your mortgage.

The biggest personal consequence is you will be evicted and lose both your place to live and any equity you built up.

The other main consequence is it will show up on your credit report for 7 years. Maybe some specific forms ask "have you ever been foreclosed on" in the future.

This depends entirely on your local laws and the kinds of loans banks offer.

In most places, you can only get recourse mortgages. You will be liable for the rest of the mortgage, if the value of the house drops so much that selling it doesn't cover the remaining debt.

House values dropping a lot is something that happens fairly rarely, but it tends to happen exactly during the times when you are most likely to be unable to pay your mortgage (recessions, industry downturns, etc.)

Even in recourse mortgages, banks tend to write off the remainder owed. Especially since it is cheap for them to offer to forgive the remainder to shorten the eviction process and prevent damage to the home. At least historically

Of course, if it's not your primary home, they don't need you to waive your rights to stay in the property.

As a side effect of bailing out banks they have a lower risk profile than entities that don’t get bailouts. It’s essentially an additional subsidy on top of the already generous ‘money creation’ they’re allowed to do. It’s impossible to compete against this. The riskier the bets the stronger the subsidy so of course they’ll crank risk up to 11. Since the fate of banks and pensions are tied you can’t punish the banks without also punishing pensioners and pensioners are a strong voting block. It’s a distorted economic system that can only either crash or become more distorted. Since becoming more distorted enriches the already wealthy then that’s the only option that will be taken. The only thing that can stop it is to run out of resources to spend trying to save it. Importing a large number of foreigners is a rather creative (desperate) solution. I don’t know how long this will last but I’m confident I will see a major economic calamity in my lifetime.

I mean I don't love eBay, but it's certainly not dying, where did you get that idea? Its revenue has continued to grow every year post-COVID, and competitors all face the central challenge of eBay's network effect.

It's not experience massive growth but that's because it's a pretty mature market by this point. People who want to sell their stuff already use eBay. It works. It's mature.

Revenue peaked in 2014. Pretty much flat for the past 15 years.

Markets are built on eBay and then leave.

Kinda weird for an online shopping site to… miss the absolutely massive growth in platforms that let 3rd parties sell their stuff online.

Others grew out of their niche, best eBay can do is acquire a handful of their new competitors to keep up.

Once you own the company you take out loans to pay a onetime dividend to you to pay off your purchase loans. Same thing perfectly legal

Who is going to lend you money to pay a one time dividend? (without putting up quality collateral such as real estate, which Gamestop does not have)

Leveraged buyouts are a fucking disease

Who should take out the loan if not the new company? The old company? What would be the difference?

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