I mean they make a good point -- ebay isn't a serious company anymore. It really needs someone with a vision to rebuild it. That its limping along and executives are essentially bleeding a previously valuable internet asset dry is kind of sad.
I like to pay the cheapest price humanly possible but there’s often value in just paying the shipping and online premium. As a seller, it’s easier to put up a posting whenever I feel and stuff it in a box and label it only when I have cash in hand.
+ there’s some geo-arbitrage for sellers: chances are the person willing to pay the most isn’t local to you.
EBay is still more friction than Amazon and eBay commissions are like 16% these days so eBay’s completely lost the giant pie that is mass-manufactured goods.
As opposed to GameStop, which is a literal meme?
eBay’s biggest issue is their declining online shopping marketshare. They’ve gone from owning nearly the entire market to just losing it.
The reason why it’s worse now is that automation of the scammers got better, it was more of a manual job back then.
So, if they have a ton of scammers now, I would think customers are not being that impacted, and I would have also thought that eBay wouldn’t have too hard a time getting the sellers to pay the refunds, since they tend to withhold the funds from sellers until a little while after the delivery is confirmed.
I can't believe all those hundreds of thousands of listings would continue to exist if there weren't some kind of pay off. Somebody's got to be making money somehow, as it's been happening for ages.
Also, it makes searching difficult. Can't really sort by price anymore, because the lowest prices are almost entirely scams.
It's just a much less pleasant platform when half the listing are fake. This is most extreme on GPUs and RAM, of course, since that's where the feeding frenzy is happening, but it's true of many categories with expensive goods.
The buyer protections don’t really vary much, but it’s true in some countries they get more protections but it’s more regarding to buyer’s remorse rather than Items Not As Described.
> or otherwise get paid via some unprotected method
At least in North America (and maybe everywhere else), you’ve been required to pay via eBay for all transactions for the last decade or more. No more money orders, bank transfers, cheques or wire transfers or cash. And you can’t easily contact sellers/buyers directly anymore, it’s all through the platform and they block a lot of suspect messages/keywords.