EBay Sellers Seek Management Change

BlueCup writes to tell us that even though some seem willing to let eBay's Chief Executive Meg Whitman slide on recent problems, many eBay sellers are calling for a change. From the article: "'EBay's core (auction) performance is suffering tremendously,' says Steve Grossberg, a longtime videogame seller on eBay. He says he now lists an item four times on average in order to sell it, up from two listings two years ago. Adds Andy Mowery, an eBay seller of home and garden gear: 'It is time for new leadership at eBay.'"

While I agree, it's for other reasons.

[Pitr]

Ebay's management is in serious need of a kick in the pants. More for customer service, support, and the way it deals with fraud (which is all part of the same thing really).

Just because it's more difficult to sell on Ebay does NOT mean the problem is management, it means there's more traffic (buyers and sellers), so you have more competition. It may take twice as long to sell a game as 2 years ago, but I'm willing to bet there's well more than twice as many video games on Ebay now, as there were then.

Re:While I agree, it's for other reasons.

[DoorFrame]

You are contending that there are twice as many sellers but the same number of buyers? That doesn't seem likely.

If ebay wants me back as a buyer

[antifoidulus]

They are going to have to get rid of fraudelent auctions. The last time I bought anything off ebay was a year ago, and the only reason I did that is because it was an uncommon item(English-Chinese electronic dictionary) that is hard to find elsewhere. If I search for anything that isn't eclectic, at least half of the items are fraud, if not more. I have to do a lot of slogging through(usually by sorting by highest price first and then trying to find the items I want) just to get to legit auctions. No, I don't want a "free xbox 360, powerbook and more!!!!!!!!!!" which just turns into a bid for "information that is 110% legit on how to find free items online!". I end up having to do a lot of work just to find the item I want. If you can't be bothered to get rid of fraudelent auctions, then I can't be bothered to bid.

Whiners

[GomezAdams]

Looks to me like these losers need to learn new marketing techniques, not whine about ebay. If you have a product that used to sell in two listings and now it takes four you need to ask yourself is there more competition? Better copy writers for the same products? Better prices from other sellers? Fewer buyers for the product?

These people need to put more effort into selling rather than blame someone else for their shortcomings.

What ebay needs.

[Frogbert]

What ebay needs is for people to stop selling stuff on it as if it was their own store. I go to ebay to pick up a bargain not to pay RRP for something I could get from the store for the same price. ebay needs to get back to what it used to be, a place to pick up rare items for a premium or second hand items for cheap.

Try searching for mobile phones on ebay, it's become a joke. There are people trying to sell new phones with plans included. Why bother, there is a shop near by that can do that and not charge me for postage.

Don't even get me started on items that are clearly in the wrong category. I don't want to sift through 18 pages of leather cases for PDA's before I find the cheapest listed actual PDA.

Re:If ebay wants me back as a buyer

[dfn_deux]

Ebay needs a 'list auctions by seller rating' or some such.

This is a terrible idea. The core seller rating and reputation system of ebay is greatly flawed. Sellers will not give buyers a positive feedback until after they themselves have received one, seems in cases where the purchaser uses paypal to complete the transaction that ebay should automatically positive feedback/reputation points as they have successfully confirmed that the buyers has fulfilled their part of the transaction. Instead sellers hold the positive feedback out as a carrot to buyers whom are forced to leave positive or no feedback in order to protect their own rating. In the end you get sellers with artificially high feedback scores.

Furthermore ebay gives no additional weight to people who complete high dollar transactions with positive feedback; such that a seller can do 1000 transactions for a dollar each and have a crazy high rating for when they decide to run a scam and screw someone out of several grand for a car or a piece of real estate.

A serious revamping of ebay is needed to increase buyer seller relations. My first recommendation would be to introduce a meta-moderation and abitration system whereby in cases of transactions gone bad both sides would have an opportunity to write a short summary of their view of the events (maybe 500 words or so) and then those stories would be available to be viewed side by side by random third parties who could declare fault and/or present an abitration suggestion which could then be presented back to the original parties, if the parties are able to resolve their issues through the arbitration suggestion the suggesting party might be given some additional positive feedback... In this way there is a benefit to all involved parties to act above board and behave responsibly, and even in cases which do not end with positive feedback the damaging effect of wrongly issued negative feedback could be minimized.

any how that's just my .02 I suppose their are others out there with more/better suggestions. In the meantime I'll stick to my mix of Brick & Mortar/Craigslist/Amazon shopping and only veer to ebay for items for which I have historically experienced little drama, such as used car parts with significant value and very low price (read 1972 pinto hatchback hubcaps)...

Re:The biggest problem with eBay is this:

[dbc]

Damn straight. I don't frequent E-Bay anymore. Too hard to find what I want. Way too much fraud. The feedback system is a joke.

E-Bay has had this crazy idea that their customer is the seller. Well, their direct customer is the seller, but the seller's customer is the buyer, so E-Bay needs to start focusing on making buyers happy. If the buyer is not happy, the buyer will not come back. The whole system then colapses in a smoldering heap.

E-Bay keeps trying to police the buyers, and gives the sellers a free pass when ever they can. Thus, they have created the first planet-wide den of theives.

It's pretty damn simple. Follow the money. The buyers are the only ones feeding money into the system. How can E-Bay be so blind to that?

My formula for turning E-Bay around:
1. Stop treating buyers like thieves, treat them like valued customers.
2. Stop treating sellers like customers, treat them like sub-contract employees.

Re:While I agree, it's for other reasons.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are contending that there are twice as many sellers but the same number of buyers? That doesn't seem likely.

You are contending that if it takes twice as long to sell an item that means the ratio of sellers to buyers must have doubled? It doesn't seem likely that you have a good understanding of markets.

Re:Remove Whitman

[KDR_11k]

EBay supports net neutrality to prevent ISPs from "regulating" the access to websites unwilling to pay for "higher tier service" while claiming they are just unclogging the tubes. Sure, removing access to Google is going to reduce traffic...

Re:What ebay needs.

[KDR_11k]

That last bit is what really annoys me. Ebay needs to introduce a policy that gets people banned for listing in the wrong category twice.

Sell somewhere else

[tod_miller]

Oh you think I am being tetchy?

If you think about it, stop whining about wanting new management, if all you do is keep adding auctions to sell something, and complain about new management, why should anyone change anything?

If you do sell somewhere else, and they get less wodge, then they may listen.

Vote with your money. Not with your whining.

Yes, look at auctions

[SuperKendall]

Obviously seller growth has outpaced buyer growth. I've seen that in some items I sell as well.

Furthermore there are other alternatives to eBay now, especially for video games. When they guy started on eBay I'll bet a lot of people were not picking up used games at the EB, since they didn't stock them as they do today. eBay made that happen.

Re:If ebay wants me back as a buyer

[Sircus]

The feedback system is definitely flawed. My solution to this: neither side sees the other side's feedback until both sides have left feedback. Nobody will currently leave negative feedback for a seller because the seller will then leave negative feedback for them. If the seller doesn't see what you've left before he leaves his feedback, a more honest feedback climate should prevail.

One potential disadvantage I could see to this system: sellers might find it convenient not to leave feedback if they fear that the buyer's feedback could be negative. This could easily be worked around by automatically turning "no feedback left by seller within 30 days" into "seller left positive feedback", with no comment (and vice-versa if the buyer's not left feedback).

A system for both sides to leave their view of a failed transaction might also be useful.

Re:If ebay wants me back as a buyer

[muftak]

Sellers have more to lose by getting bad feedback, so with your system buyers could blackmail sellers into giving them refunds or whatever when they are not due. A lot of buyers treat ebay like a shop and bitch when it takes you a week to post an item or doesn't fit them, etc. What they should do is keep the feedback private untill both sides have left it, and feedback from newbies with 0 feedback is worth less than feedback from someone with 200 feedback.

Re:If ebay wants me back as a buyer

[TheRaven64]

There's a more obvious solution. Require both to leave feedback before anyone can see it. If one doesn't leave feedback after n days, then the other's feedback becomes public. This would make it completely impossible for either party to force the other to leave good feedback.

It is completely broken though, I agree. There's someone selling about 30 MacBooks on ebay.co.uk at the moment. He has 10 feedback, all for items that sold for about £1 to other accounts with 0 feedback. If he had just waited until eBay stopped archiving the auctions before starting the scam, it might have been more credible. This brings me onto the next thing that is wrong with eBay. I get the same feedback whether the item is a laptop or a pen lid. There is no record of the value of each item kept. This makes it very easy for someone to buy a reasonable amount of feedback.

Re:Remove Whitman

[geminidomino]

Net neutrality is 'evil'? You don't think the fact that YOU'RE paying for your internet access is sufficient and that the other end should have to pay too?

Re:If ebay wants me back as a buyer

[NMerriam]

Absolutely, a blind system is better than my idea and eBay's current system.

They do need a Google pagerank-ish weighting system of feedback value -- a $1,000 purchase from a guy who has been on eBay 5 years is worth more than a thousand purchases of sharpie markers from a brand new seller.

Re:If ebay wants me back as a buyer

[NMerriam]

You're correct on both counts!

A blind feedback system would be vastly preferable to both the current one and my suggestion of seller-first feedback. I'd even heard the blind system suggested before and somehow forgot!

And yes, there should be some account of monetary value and buyer's reputation when a seller gets a feedback score. I've sold several thousand dollars of expensive electronics and photo gear on eBay to other eBayers who've been there for years, yet have a feedback rating in the double-digits. Scammers can come on with new accounts and sell bubble gum to each other for high feedback in a single day. Similarly, the buyer should get more credit for a good high-value transaction with a longtime seller.

Re:The biggest problem with eBay is this:

[reflector]

these fee-circumventing, high-shipping auctions. It's strange.

it's not strange at all, ebay themselves created the situation, by trying to squeeze every penny they can from sellers, and by only charging the sale cost, not the shipping fee.

consider, if ebay final value fee is 5% (for the sake of argument), then would you rather have a seller charge $0.01 and $10 shipping, for a total of $10.01? or charge $10.50 for the item and $0.01 shipping, for a total of $10.51?

the seller makes the same amount of money in both cases, but i would guess (call it a hunch) that buyers would prefer to pay $10.01 rather than $10.51.

the seller who moves as much of the cost over to the shipping side as possible, is able to sell the item for the lowest total price.

sadly, many ebayers are not very bright and dont understand this basic concept.

I stopped buying on Ebay because...

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Fraudulent auctions. While I've never suffered from them, they are too easy to spot (for us humans) and they make doing business on Ebay risky. I've never seen EBay do anything positive about these (nor take enough care regarding them), which to me is a signal that EBay does not care about "us", just their profit. In that case, I don't care to use EBay any more.

2) EBay shops. Create a new web site or something. Whatever, get rid of them. In the beginning, Ebay was for random people to sell random stuff they no longer wanted, not shops in Hong Kong or some place you've never heard of trying to push their wares. EBay shops are at odds to the original EBay experience.

I'm not sure if the EBay shops or auction fraud causes more "noise" on EBay, these days.

But maybe I've just grown up and realise what I want isn't on EBay any more: goods with a warranty/guarantee that can be easily returned if defective.

It's been years now since I last bought something on EBay and I rarely go back there to look for things to buy now.

So can EBay do it?
Cut down on fraud *and* find a way to seperate EBay shops from people like you and me?

Re:While I agree, it's for other reasons.

[Alioth]

Why ever not? It's clear that supply has increased significantly, but demand hasn't kept pace.

That's how a market works - the fact that sellers need to list something multiple times now on average is a bloody good signal that there's massive oversupply in that market, and the seller should try flogging something else. It's how a market works, and sellers kvetching about it won't change the fact that there's massive oversupply.

Re:If ebay wants me back as a buyer

[reflector]

Sellers will not give buyers a positive feedback until after they themselves have received one, seems in cases where the purchaser uses paypal to complete the transaction that ebay should automatically positive feedback/reputation points as they have successfully confirmed that the buyers has fulfilled their part of the transaction.

this is a terrible idea.

if a buyer has received a feedback from a seller, and it can't be changed, a buyer will feel free to leave negative feedback for any reason they feel like.
if a buyer knows a seller hasn't left feedback for them, they are more likely to be civil and try to resolve any issue they have.

an arbitration system like you suggest, on the other hand, is a great idea, but the arbitrator's decision should be binding to be of value.
right now there is an arbitration system in place, via square trade, it is not effective because it is non-binding.

Re:If ebay wants me back as a buyer

[Eivind]

Furthermore, the most prominently displayed number on Ebay is the sellers "score", which is simply the number of different people who gave a positive feedback, minus the number of different people who left a negative feedback.

This tracks activity, not customer-satisfaction. Who'd you rather buy from, a seller with 1000 transactions, all with positive feedback, or a seller with 2000 transactions, 1600 of them with positive feedback, and 300 of them with negative ?

Thougth so !

Guess which of the two sellers will have the highest number attached to their name, get the nicest "star" etc ? Why, the ony lining Ebays pockets the most naturally ! Which would be the one with most transactions, not the one with highest customer-satisfaction.

Some simple improvements:

• Give stars etc based on *percentage* of positive reviews rather than number of reviews.
• Make feedback invisible for everyone until both parts have given feedback (or until the time-limit for doing so, a month or whatever is past) This prevents retaliation against honest customers in the form of negative feedback.
• Let us know how many % of all transactions the seller receives and gives feedback. (A seller that consequently gives and receives feedback, with a high score, is preferable to one that tries to discourage feedback)
• weight the feedback by moneyvalue of transaction. A person who has sold 98 $10 items with positive feedback, and 2 $1000 items with negative feedback should not be listed as 98% positive. By money-value he is 33% positive.
• Give people the possibility of rating auctions entered by the seller. Random people rating random auctions, similar to slashdots meta-moderation-system would work best. (it'd prevent people from getting sockpuppets and using those for rating their own auctions up) Make it possible to sort search-results and listings by sellers average auction-rating, or by auction-rating.
• Actually police the categories. Delete auctions, and warn sellers, that improperly spam obviously wrong categories. Cancel their accounts if they repeat the behaviour.

Re:While I agree, it's for other reasons.

[Chanc_Gorkon]

This is true, however I wanted to move my e-mail address to gmail and they said I could not do that unless I paid a "service fee". I told them that having a e-mail from a non-free service is something very easy and cheap to do and trivial and they did not care. They told me that it was for my own protection.....ooook. They are screwed up. One thing that is very much needed is a fraud department. How many times do we have to hear about horror stories of eBay purchases gone wrong? When they try to do something, it fails to do what they want and they ignore some of the stupid stuff that happens on ebay.

Re:The biggest problem with eBay is this:

[SillyNickName4me]

fraud is a problem, for sure, but mainly for clueless newbs.

Spoken like a true experienced ebayer...

their feedback system has flaws, yes, but it also works.
i've bought over $100k of electronics on ebay this year, haven't gotten scammed at all.

Absolutely, it works for you so it must work..

I have never gotten scammed on ebay either, but I only have a few transactions there. My girlfriend however has hundreds of transactions, and only ran into a few issues that usually got resolved. That said, she has decided to move her selling somewhere else. Selling prices are much better, no ever increasing fees, and no organisation that scares away 'clueless newbies' (let me give you a hint, for a seller those are potential new customers), and far less efford.

Re:While I agree, it's for other reasons.

[Pollardito]

it could easily be the case that high-volume sellers have moved onto EBay where it was mostly small inventory sellers before. each high-volume seller offsets lots of new buyers, so even if the number of new buyers was a lot larger than the number of new sellers it might be becoming a tougher market to sell in.

Re:While I agree, it's for other reasons.

[FiveDollarYoBet]

Or it could be that all of the people who used to shop at ebay finally got fed up being overcharged for shipping.

Waddya mean $24.95 to ship a PS2 game first class USPS?!?!?!?

Re:While I agree, it's for other reasons.

[bitt3n]

Ebay's management is in serious need of a kick in the pants. More for customer service, support, and the way it deals with fraud (which is all part of the same thing really).

And the best way to kick them in the pants would be a decent competitor. without some legitimate alternative, their focus is going to be entirely on not rocking the boat.

Re:If ebay wants me back as a buyer

[Andrewkov]

You're assuming that E-Bay wants to to fix this .. I tend to think that the rules favour sellers by design, since they are the ones paying E-Bay for the auctions.

Grow Up

[brunes69]

He says he now lists an item four times on average in order to sell it, up from two listings two years ago.

Well duh, of course it does, there are about 10 times as many listings on eBay as two years ago.

eBay has exploded in popularity, and that means competition. *OF COURSE* it's going to be harder to sell your stuff when there are 10 times as many people selling the same thing today, often cheaper, than 10 years ago. It's called competition in the marketplace, and it's the very concept that makes eBay so popular.

Re:If ebay wants me back as a buyer

[FireFury03]

seems in cases where the purchaser uses paypal to complete the transaction that ebay should automatically positive feedback/reputation points as they have successfully confirmed that the buyers has fulfilled their part of the transaction.

This is a terrible idea - there are many cases where _after_ the buyer has paid they cause trouble. For example, on one of my auctions I clearly stated that if you paid by cheque I wouldn't dispatch the goods until _after_ the cheque had cleared. The buyer posted me a cheque and then left negative feedback against me just 2 days after the cheque had arrived because they hadn't received the item yet.

I mean I don't know where to start:
1. they ignored the conditions stated in the auction for paying by cheque (they could've used paypal and avoided the problem)
2. they didn't give it enough time for the item to make it through the post even if I'd sent it as soon as I received the cheque
3. they didn't even bother to contact me to discuss the "problem" before dropping negative feedback on my account.

In this case I would've been very annoyed if the system had forced me to leave positive feedback for a buyer who caused nothing but trouble after "fullfilling their part of the transaction".

FWIW, I think feedback should be left by the buyer before the seller - that way by leaving positive feedback the buyer has confirmed that they have received the item with no problems. If there is a problem then it can be resolved before either party has left feedback. Remember that negative feedback should be fairly rare for legitimate sellers and noone should be leaving negative feedback without first trying to resolve the problem. (Maybe it would be worth publishing the communications that occurred between the two parties when leaving negative feedback so people can read the whole story and make their own minds up who was responsible for the bad transaction).

Re:While I agree, it's for other reasons.

[MBGMorden]

Ebay has competitors. Yahoo has auctions and Amazon does as well. There are a lot of smaller outfits too. And Ebay hasn't really don't anything particularly nasty to keep them out of the game. It's just that Ebay is so popular that the market just doesn't care that there's competition.

Re:If ebay wants me back as a buyer

[boingo82]

Serious question:
Why should buyers get feedback AT ALL?
Buyer feedback means nothing* - you bid, you win. Sellers aren't sitting there comparing buyers A, B, and C and deciding who to go with.
*Unless it's negative, and you're blocked.

Call me crazy, but I don't think that buying feedback and selling feedback should be on the same system. I've seen too many cases of a person joining eBay, completing 50 or so low-price transactions as a buyer to build up FB (score 50! 100% positive!!) and then putting up a stack of their imaginary XBOX360s and completely SCREWING a lot of people.

Buyers' feedback is a nice back-pat for them, but means NOTHING on eBay, unless they're a really crappy buyer who didn't pay for his first transaction. Seller feedback is what matters, since it can solely make-or-break his business.

So how about, when selling it shows ONLY your selling feedback in the score on the front page? Does that make sense to anyone else? Quite frankly, I don't care if my seller pays for stuff ontime. Does he SELL well? That's what matters.

Re:If ebay wants me back as a buyer

[aussersterne]

I am an eBay seller, and I can tell you as someone who used to work at eBay that this would drive sellers off of eBay. There are an awful lot of buyers (maybe 20% of them) that hold THEIR feedback back until sellers give them perks, realizing that a seller who has 2,000 feedbacks that are 100% positive is going to go to great lengths to protect that. They demand free accessories, issue credit card chargebacks after receiving the item, demand that sellers accept a return (after they've swapped half the parts out to fix their own possessions and send you back a non-working item that has clearly been tampered with), claim that the $1,000 digital camera they bought doesn't work and then demand a replacement--while REFUSING to return the original "broken" one... They sue, launch Internet campaigns against specific sellers or against eBay, and all because they didn't get something for nothing.

There are even cases in which after failing to get free item(s) by demanding "no ship replacements" or other perks, such buyers have pulled the seller's contact information and proceeded to stalk them, traveling several states in order to be threatening. If seller's were to lose their ability to even leave a negative about such people once they'd made the initial payment, eBay would lost most of its major sellers who, let's not forget, actually pay eBay's bills.

Fraud is rampant on both sides, and nothing short of government regulation limiting just who is allowed to buy and sell in a society, period, is going to stop it. eBay doesn't do themselves any favors when they screw legitimate buyers or sellers, but to assume that sellers are responsible for all the fraud is to make a very incorrect assumption.

Re:While I agree, it's for other reasons.

[laffer1]

Not only that but people are paying higher gas prices and have less money to spend on crap on ebay. Sure everyone is selling as they need money for gas!

Re:While I agree, it's for other reasons.

[Pharmboy]

the fact that sellers need to list something multiple times now on average is a bloody good signal that there's massive oversupply in that market

or their asking price is simply too high based on simple supply/demand. Capitalism works and is quite simple: If supply rises higher than demand, the price will go down or you won't sell anything.

After all, isn't that why people BUY on ebay, to save money? The sheer volume of people who are trying to sell new goods for the exact same price (or higher) than I can buy on NewEgg or other sites is amazing. Same for used goods, where sellers are reserving the price at 80%-90% of new price. The market is simply catching up and normalizing.

We have been selling on ebay since 1998, and have seen and dealt with all the problems, fixes, etc. in real time, but when it comes right down to it: If you have a widget for sale, don't expect to get more for the widget than the current market value. Management can't do anything about market forces, they can only make sure the site always works, is easy to use, and everyone has a fair shake at displaying their wares.

Getting pissed because a game that sells for $10 at EB will only bring $10 on ebay is rather silly.

It's a worse experience as a seller, trust me...

[ackthpt]

Just because it's more difficult to sell on Ebay does NOT mean the problem is management, it means there's more traffic (buyers and sellers), so you have more competition. It may take twice as long to sell a game as 2 years ago, but I'm willing to bet there's well more than twice as many video games on Ebay now, as there were then.

Ebay's BLOAT has got out of hand. Pages are enormous now and even when I'm shopping or browsing it is limiting the number of pages I can load on a dial-up line in a give time span. I eventually lose patience with staring at white screens loading and do something else.

As a seller, I can't believe how huge the selling pages have become. I dread listing any more than 10 items at a time, because the bandwidth is so fsking thick. I'm taking a break from selling things because I just can't stand the time necessary to go through it all.

Other issues: I bought something from someone who maintains an online store and a storefront on eBay. They turned out to be out of the item and asked if I wanted a refund while I was waiting for shipping confirmation. Damn. They say eBay doesn't offer decent inventory interfaces for store owners. So clearly there's a problem there as well.

Then I also hate being asked for my password repeatedly when shifting between eBay and PayPal, buying and selling, etc. There are some simple tricks to keeping the last login active, but still. It's a bit Microsoftie the way these groups don't seem to talk to each other.

eBay has become a giant overpriced fleamarket

[kschoenberg]

eBay has become overrun with power sellers dumping loads of items at prices higher than available elsewhere. Couple that with the high fraud rates and what once was an enjoyable experience picking through lists of interesting and unique items has becomea crawl through a crappy flea market full of pick pockets and con artists.

Yeah, Feedback

[ackthpt]

Don't listen to parent! Parent has bad ratings and doesn't pay for auctions! Seller beware!
Grandparent is A+++++ first poster. Will recommend to all. Will read grandparent's post again

Is there anyone who think eBay's feedback system is truly useful or even fair? I get slammed when people don't pay and think they are funny. People ignore terms of auctions and think I'm unprofessional for not bending over backward. People don't ship my stuff because they found out the postage is way higher than they thought and decide to just keep my money. It's a sin how bad it is.

Re:Prices!

[Dun Malg]

On the other hand, I haven't had any problem selling stuff on eBay, because I pick a reasonable starting price and charge fair shipping rates.

Yeah, people don't understand ebay. You can usually make more money starting an item off at $1.00 with no reserve. The possibility of a "great deal" sucks people in. They'll end up paying $75 for an item because they're determined to get it, while a similar item starting at $65 won't get a single bid! That and, as you say, charging fair rates on shipping helps a lot. Nothing bugs people like $35 shipping on an item that comes in a $4.85 flat-rate USPS box.

Put it up for a penny

[vitaflo]

"He says he now lists an item four times on average in order to sell it, up from two listings two years ago."

Here's a tip, set the auction price at $0.01 to start, and let people bid it up to what *they* think it's currently worth. You'll sell your items the *first* time.

Re:Maybe no one wants your used crap anymore

[Duds]

That's actually the opposite of the problem.

When ebay really was thew world's garage sale it worked.

It's when the power sellers running a business on there, the scammers listing fakes and the people selling pirated software got involved it became worse.

5 years ago if i wanted a gfx card one behind the curve I could pop on and buy it for half-retail because somewhere in the UK someone was upgrading to the latest one.

Now those people might still be on there but I'll never find them because there's 5million Dabs, scan, cdw, komplett, buy.com, amazon wannabies selling them for the same price as the afore-mentioned sites.

Re:Yes, look at auctions

[saskboy]

Those are classic examples of what's wrong with eBay. I saw those things dozens of times in my years on the support forums. It's insanely frustrating how eBay treats loyal sellers. Sellers are their only income [other than PayPal etc] so it's not surprising they are in the toilet when they lost their customers [since eBay customers are not eBay's customers, they are the seller's].

Re:While I agree, it's for other reasons.

[Pharmboy]

I tire quickly of paging through 200 items for the 2 or 3 listings that I'm looking for.

Exactly! Ebay IS allowing people to put garbage in catagories it doesn't belong. If I am looking for engine parts, I don't need to see auctions for antique books and memorabilia that is remotely connected to the brand of car that I am trying to find parts for. This is one area I agree that ebay has fallen down, by diluting their catagories so that it is harder to find what you are actually looking for.

Another example is the deception in the title. Try seaching for a "Fender Telecaster" and see how many auctions you get with the phrase "not Fender" or "like Fender" in the topic, where the guitar is obviously NOT a Fender, and the topic is simply misleading to get more traffic. This should be made against the rules, with a penalty. You might find 200 items, and over half are NOT "Fender Telecaster" related on any given day. Or someone selling stick-pins that "look" like Fender guitars (see above paragraph...)

They need to attract BUYERS

[ChrisA90278]

I can tell you why sellers have to list the items multiple times to sell it. All the smart buyers have gone gone gone.

eBay knows that it is the sellers who pay the bills so they set things up to favor them. This has the effect of chasing away buyers. Almost everyonr I know agrees that ebay is a good place to sell because you can take advantage of dumb buyers who will over pay just so they can "win" But no one I knwo would buy anything there. So what you have is an army of sellers all chasing a limimited number buyers

Me and I'm sure most people concider eBay a "high risk" market place. You have a good chance of fraud or otherwise getting ripped off. If you do find something being sold by a "real person" not some shoe string reseller then some other buyer will over bid. Good for the buyer but a pointless waste of time for me. The other total waste of time is "reserve price" Why don't they say what the minum price is? Total waste of my time

The bottom line is that thee are few good deals on eBay I figure half the sellers are people unloading crap out of their pawn shops while posing ast private party sellers

If the sellers want to sell on eBay they will have to figure out how to attact a more buyers. Here is how: (1) Make it easy for buyers to REALLY find out who they are buying from. Require EVERY seller to have a VERIFIED Name, street address and phone number. That is the only way to get rid of fraud. (2) Eliminate secret reserve prices. A minimum bid is OK. (3) spot check a higher percentage of the item descriptions (4) Base fees on the total transaction amount

Re:While I agree, it's for other reasons.

[tompaulco]

Ebay is a very sick marketplace today, prices too low to sustain any sort of valid business.
Well, you aren't really SUPPOSED to make money on ebay. You are supposed to sell stuff you don't want anymore, and that somebody else may be interested in.
If you MAKE something or ADD VALUE to something, then you may be able to make money on ebay, but if you are just trying to insert yourself as another middleman, people are going to find it is cheaper to buy direct.
The problem isn't with ebay management, the problem is that people have tried to make this AUCTION website into a retail storefront, a bulletin board, and everything else.