EBay Valet
ebay.com
ebay.com
I wonder if eBay are potentially setting themselves up for a massive headache with this.
There is a quite staggering number of people who falsely believe that their counterfeit designer items are genuine.
However, I don't have a problem with eBay as a third party as the benefit of the larger market and capital gain versus the risk pays off[1], but when it comes to being the middleman as well, the buyer and the seller have a lot more to lose.
[1] There are always chancers, fraudsters and complete muppets (idiots).
eBay is notoriously plagued with fakes. For some designer brands, fakes can account for 75% (or more) of the items sold [1,2].
The key for Lollipuff: We have brand experts authenticate each and every item -- ie. real, human experts augmented with sophisticated software to make things scalable. We like to think of it as "eBay without the fakes", or if you prefer "Palantir for designer goods" (software-augmented humans).
[1] https://www.lollipuff.com/blog/41/ebays-counterfeit-epidemic...
[2] https://www.lollipuff.com/blog/123/ebays-counterfeit-epidemi...
I'm impressed by how much engagement you've built over such a small number of items. Is there a reason you don't seem to have implemented typical search filters like size, price etc? It seems difficult to find anything if I'm just browsing, so I assume I'm missing something as to how people are using the site.
This seems to be a good example of a vintage A-11 military watch (it's listed as such). It looks correct. It's got pictures of the movement, which seems to be correct. The seller has almost perfect feedback. So no problem right?
It is 100% fake (or at least, a frankenwatch made from old and new parts). And this is for a watch worth, perhaps, $200.
The real problem with watches is that fakes are so difficult to recognize that buyer feedback means much less, since a buyer is unlikely to recognize the fake. And often a seller is unaware he's selling a fake, so deception can't be detected in the description or the title. For the watch above, I think the seller knows what he has, and has very carefully described it to imply that it is an original, while not technically lying (he only claims the CASE is original).
It's a very, very difficult problem to solve.
A friend of mine bought a cheap "Rolex" in Thailand.
It was only after he brought it home, he recognized that the calendar has 40 days, instead of 31.
But, I think that most people do not want to buy a counterfeit on eBay. Ioffer provides much lower prices on fakes, oftentimes direct from China. For instance, on eBay, the average fake Chanel le boy still sells for over $1500, and a Celine mini luggage will sell for around $1400. There is no way that people are paying this kind of money knowingly for a counterfeit.
There are very few counterfeits that are 99.9% accurate. Most of the time I can spot a fake dress or bag on someone from <5 feet away. But, then again, I'm very familiar in this space.
I'd be worried about survivorship bias. Perhaps you only "see" a sub-set of fakes (the un-convincing ones) and the good ones walk right on by. Isn't this problematic?
30% commission, and the valet's incentives are for a quick sale rather than the best price, if the behavior of existing bulk listers is anything to go by. These people are usually not especially knowledgeable about the items they sell and so have a poor grasp of pricing - often good for me as informed buyer, but a real pain in the ass for sellers.
I wonder how eBay will deal with the "yes, please iPad to vacant lot near warehouse Miami" folks, other than immediately transferring buyer's funds without the possibility for reversal. If they did that for ordinary sellers, I'd quite happily ship my iPad to the sketchy address and go on my merry way.
Affiliated as they are my friends and have a solid team
I think I'll stick with Amazon. Ebay's 30% seems ridiculously steep.
On top of that, like others have said, it's not far fetched for eBay to give Valet listings higher priority in search results, due to their higher profit margins. Punishing users for wanting a streamlined experience, not cool.
I've been dealing with these pain points as both a buyer and seller for over 10 years, and I'm willing to bet I'm not alone here. I'm currently building a p2p marketplace app, and plan to enlist the features of startups like Shyp to make it an all around awesome experience. If anyone has input, feature requests, or would even like to join me, let me know, I'm all ears :)
Whatever the case, there is a large category of people for whom selling on consignment has always made a lot of sense, even if their margins are terrible. Their economic substitute to selling on consignment is throwing things away. Better to make a few bucks per item than none.
Secondary consignment markets have been really big on eBay for many years now. Makes sense that eBay would recognize the pattern, and attempt to own a piece of it. Meanwhile, big-time and category-specialized consignment sellers are still going to do just fine.
I do pretty well (£600+ a month) out of just buying items in auctions which are rather well hidden then selling them via the storefront/buy it now process.
Oh and "most current and in demand Disney film merchandise" (usually snagged from Disney stores and held onto for a bit) :)
Of course, I am over-simplifying things, but I have been in a similar situation wherein the customers of our service started offering to pay us to help them use our service. Instead of accepting payments, we helped the users for free and took their problems as problems with the usability of our tool which we needed to fix. We believed that accepting paid service as a revenue channel would deviate us from making a good tool in the first place.
definitely worth a try, but eBay Valet is interesting: http://thegoneapp.com/
Overall, this is not the worst idea eBay had so far, I would love to see how this plays out.
Imagine if you needed to provide a "valet service" for your SaaS. Wouldn't that say something about your UX?
Does Instamotor exist because of the terrible UX of car dealerships?
The quality of ebay's UX is the main determinant of how much time you need to have on your hands to sell something on ebay.
>Does Instamotor exist because of the terrible UX of car dealerships?
Yes.
It was a horrible deal, and every single one I knew of is now closed for business.
Not many individuals have space in their home to store and turn over 100,000+ items in a month. Or have "Physical presence in all major metropolitan hubs in the US".
So are they committing to getting you at least $40 on what you're selling?
You get 70% of the sale price if your things sell.Edit: Dutch auction is the wrong term and I cant track down the actual name. But essentially the auction gets extended by 10 minutes every time someone bids if the auction is going to end in less than 10 minutes.
Sniping is hugely frustrating and the main reason people either use buy it now or plain old ads (cf gumtree/Craigslist etc)
Ebay might as well call it a sealed bid second price auction and be done with it.
Having a low price makes it seem more attractive
while you browse.
First, with eBay's current bidding system items are already auctioned for a very full price, and it's better for eBay for prices to be high. Theoretically a sealed-second bid auction would cause people to provide their maximum willingness to pay, but as a matter of uninformed consumer behavior I wouldn't be surprised if prices were actually lower with sealed bids. Second, with the current system people are much more engaged with eBay than they would be with sealed-bids, because eBay gets to send them status updates on their auctions when they get outbid, which can cause them to either go back to the site and increase the bid (and potentially bid on something else while they are there), or bid on an alternative item which decreases the cycle rate for bidders. Third, bidders may actually prefer the current system, because they can know before the auction ends whether they have been knocked out or not and can move on to acquire goods through some other means.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction
Edit: Actually, it turns out that if everyone on eBay were using sniping, it's essentially the same as a sealed second-bid auction, economically, because of the proxy bidding (or very close, due to the way bid increments work). But time extension is a different issue. Given that prices would be open still, I would expect that the prices end up near the same place that they do with sniping. Potentially the prices would be slightly higher because all of the bids would be open rather than just the bids made before the deadline which could foment more competition, so that criticism doesn't apply.
In any case, from the consumer's perspective if you want to win the auction it doesn't really change your strategy. You should bid the maximum amount you would be willing to pay and make sure its more than anyone else would be willing to pay. With proxy bidding you can always win by paying too much. If you've ever lost because of sniping it's because you didn't set your bid high enough to beat the snipers. (What, you thought you would get a deal on an auction site? No, this is winner's curse territory.[2])
However after one "Free" re-listing ebay demanded that I pay them, even though the item had not sold. So in effect ebay has created an economic model where they benefit from scammers and fraudsters.
I never sold anything on the site again.