EBay Sellers Seek Management Change 386
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.'"
what's the problem? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:If ebay wants me back as a buyer (Score:5, Interesting)
Amazon is good because it's easy to find exactly what you want, and lots of things similar to exactly what you want. You can really drill down categories.
Ebay is tough to find what you want, but, cheaper to buy it and cheaper to sell it. EBay doesn't rape you on shipping charges (to BOTH buyer and seller) like Amazon does, and the % of price that goes to EBay is much lower than the % of price that goes to Amazon.
The biggest reason I rarely buy off of eBay anymore, though, is that I rarely find anything on there that is priced low enough to make the risk/hassle of doing an auction purchase worth it. Usually costs the same or only a little bit more to buy directly from a specialized online retailer, which is easy enough to find with google (or froogle).
Not her the problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Easy way to fix fradulent auctions (Score:5, Interesting)
From personal experience, it takes eBay anywhere from three to eight hours to kill a series of bogus scripted auction postings created with a phished account. That's more than enough time for the phisher to reel in multiple victims, all the while making the whole eBay marketplace look like a Romanian gypsy fair.
eBay needs to do two things to combat fraud. First, add a prominent, one-click "Report this auction" button to all listings. Right now the report link is buried at the bottom of the page. It leads you through the typical maze of customer-support options before dropping you at a page where you have to click yet another link to bring the auction to eBay's attention.
Second, when a user clicks "Report this auction," the notification message it creates should be transmitted, simultaneously, to several participants in a large network of trusted volunteers. These users would be recruited based on factors such as experience, feedback, and a history of accurate fraud reports. They would not have the ability to terminate auctions unilaterally -- they wouldn't be quite that "trusted" -- but they would have the ability to vet the violation report for legitimacy and forward it via a private channel to eBay, where an employee would be able to terminate the offending user's auctions immediately without a lot of additional reviewing overhead.
Formalizing the concept of community policing is the only way I can see for eBay to maintain credibility, in light of the undiminished volume of idiots who keep turning their accounts over to phishers on a daily basis. I agree with eBay management when they claim they can't police the site on their own. It's time they harnessed some of the outrage that's out there in the community, and put it to good use.
eBay is committing suicide by auction fees (Score:5, Interesting)
Increasing fees to the sellers results in sellers charging more for shipping, on which eBay does not charge fees, in order to recoup the costs. If a seller is charged a couple dollars in listing and selling fees on a low-priced item, why bother lisisting? eBay has lost its reputation as being a place for buyers to find bargain and sellers to get the highest price. Bargains are few and far between these days. No longer is it feesible to buy a book or new keyboard on eBay when the fees charged are so high that buyers are deterred due to the "shipping" fees and sellers are hesitant to list without a near guarantee of a sale.
Lower the fees and the market will have a new breath of life. Better to make $1 in fees on 10 auctions than to make $1.50 on five.
Also, acquiring Paypal hurt eBay in a way. They outright forbid vertain other payment services, such as Google's payment system, and by trying to force payment down a certain channel (for which they make more in fees), eBay is gaining more of a feel of someone standing over us beating us into submission rather than a comfortable play to spend time browsing and breathing easy and having options.
Not to mention both buyers AND sellers are being ripped off left and right these days and eBay seems to lack the inclination to do anything about it. If they're making their fees either way, why not let it continue?
Craigslist (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:If ebay wants me back as a buyer (Score:5, Interesting)
The sellers should be required, without exception, to leave feedback prior to the buyer leaving feedback. Sellers don't do anything until the buyer upholds their end of the deal (payment), and while issues can still arise (bad addresses, fraudlent claims of loss), the vast majority of issues come from sellers not upholding their end of the bargain, or providing lousy service and communication.
This solution is so obvious and so easy, and I've seen it suggested so many times over the years that I've come to the conclusion eBay actually prefers to be a den of thieves allowing sellers to threaten retribution on any buyer who dares complain about bad service. The one time I honestly had a problem with a seller and reported it (should it take 5 weeks to ship something that was paid for within 45 minutes of auction close?), I instantly got a negative feedback accusing me of all sorts of horrible behavior. What a bunch of con artists.
Community policing and honest selling (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been selling on Ebay since almost the beginning - but I haven't bought anything ordinary in a long time for precisely the reasons people have mentioned here. The one time I tried to buy a piece of electronics, it turned out to be stolen. (A laptop, I returned it to the rightful owners) The lesson I learned was never buy any sort of portable electronics or anything that's easily fenced, because that's where it ends up.
I've had great success as a seller of unique items. The most interesting and high value was a 1963 Corvette Stingray Convertible. We got a far, far higher price than what locals were offering us. Ebay is almost always a better option than anything else.
On Ebay, the entire world of internet connected citizens really IS your marketplace, if you have anything of value to sell. this is the best thing Ebay has going for it right now. Everybody checks ebay by default to see if the thing they want is on there, even if they don't plan on initially buying from there, just price shopping. Many change their mind along the way.
My selling tips are:
* Sell something unique or at least semi-rare
* Be completely honest and up front about everything, and you will have perfect feedback, unless you run into a total nutjob buyer. (I've had some close calls, so now I put more disclaimers on the auctions about things like "customs duties and tariffs are not included" etc.) Include LOTS of documentation for something that could be suspected of being stolen.
* Go way out of your way to make people happy after the auction is complete. A good business transaction is a voluntary transaction between two people who are both satisfied with the outcome. If they get the item and it's damaged, fixed the situation as quickly as possible.
* Start your bidding at $1 (or $100 for high priced items) with no reserve, no matter what the item is. If you don't believe you'll get market value or what you want from the item then you should ask yourself if you should really be putting it on ebay, or if you really want to let go of it just yet. Do your homework and research completed auctions. Low start bids drive large numbers of bidders, which will increase the chances your item will become a 'hot item' and will get people to notice it in general. The Corvette started at $100 no reserve and ended at $27,000.
* make liberal use of the bold/highlight features for any item that costs over $100. it's the cost of advertising / doing business on ebay...no big deal. If your margins are that bad, don't sell on ebay. If you don't like their fees, don't sell on ebay. They are a lot cheaper than running a brick and mortar store or selling on consignment.
* your excellent feedback will increase bidding confidence in your buyers, it works. Work hard to keep it perfect. Don't sell anything you yourself wouldn't buy at the price you are expecting for it. BE HONEST.
* despite accusations to the contrary, Ebay is still a SELLER'S MARKET. The audience you reach by listing your item on there is INSANE. Now that everybody knows that, the competition for commodity items is also INSANE. I see nothing unpredictable about their current situation - the market is finally saturated with sellers to meet the demand of the buyers. Natural forces balancing out. It was very skewed in the beginning, almost comical. Unfortunately now the sellers include all of the scum of the earth, particularly folks who make a steady living scamming people. Buyer beware. Ebay needs to take steps to keep up with this situation, or th
Shameless (though unaffiliated) plug. (Score:4, Interesting)
Google Froogle anyone? You can list there for free. As customer I in fact use it quite often.
Sticking exclusively with eBay was guarantied to screw you someday. It seems that day is nearing. And as customer I find it pretty stupid for vendor being eBay-only anyway. Now PayPal have eased most of the problems, but I just feel myself uncomfortable being so much in eBay's land.
Get real people. eBay provided you with the "shelfs". But it still owns the shelfs and can do pretty much anything with the shelfs. (Just like ordinary public market.) eBay after all has to make money too. With many crackers' attacks, tightened security and audit, eBay I expect has pretty high operational costs. What I'm getting too: you have to pay for better security higher price.
Re:what's the problem? (Score:4, Interesting)
Judging from their online town-hall type meetings, most of the vendors are complaining because EBay is reducing the number of storefront advertisements and paid placements shown when people search. Of course, as a potential buyer I'm really not interested in the store's retail products. The reason I'm shopping on EBay is because I want to get used stuff dirt cheap. If I wanted retail I'd go to the mall...
Ebay Upgrade (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Easy way to fix fradulent auctions (Score:2, Interesting)
Fraud needs to stop (Score:4, Interesting)
As long as EBay keeps willingly and knowingly cooperating with these fraudulent sellers, EBay can count on my "F**k y**!" anytime. If I could help destroy EBay, I would.
Issues (Score:5, Interesting)
1. July-August is the traditional dead-time for many kinds of sales, especially electronics. This year is no exception. Whining about slow sales in August is, well, stupid.
2. Things aren't selling as quickly because they aren't priced to sell quickly. Sellers have started to treat eBay like a storefront rather than an auction house. The starting bid and reserve prices reflect that and the sales pattern does too.
3. There are far too many 97% feedback powersellers. Old hands know better than to buy from such a seller but newbies get screwed. eBay policies should discourage the continued presence of folks who can't maintain a 1% or less complaint rate.
4. eBay is tolerating auctions where the seller does not actually have the product in question, may not be able to get it in a timely manner, and does not say so in the auction. This discourages buyers.
5. There has been a proliferation of "insane" sellers who don't bother to check the competition before posting an item on ebay. Take for example focus_technology. He has a Cisco 2509 listed for $450. 2509's have been selling for around $75. No 2509 has sold for more than $200 this year. Such behavior results in a lot of effectively invalid listings that clutter a potential buyer's view, discouraging them from continuing the search. eBay encourages this behavior by allowing sellers to relist an item cheaply or for free.
6. My personal pet peeve, they've tweaked paypal so that you have to go out through a bunch of "are you sures" if you want to pay by credit card instead of a bank draft. Its anti-customer.
Needed change, but not in favor of sellers (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:If ebay wants me back as a buyer (Score:3, Interesting)
I've never bought anything from Amazon's auction business. I have bought from their "resellers" and I've had real mixed results. I suspect that some of this may apply to the auction side of the house as well, so it may be worth sharing. Over 2 years ago, I bought an unlocked GSM phone from a reseller at Amazon. The phone was a Nokia model and Nokia's own documentation stated that it was tri-band, which means it has 1 band for the USA and 2 bands for the rest of the world. The reseller never stated that the phone he was selling was an AT&T crippled phone that only contained 2 bands - the normal US band and 1 of the bands used internationally. So potentially if I took the phone to Europe, it might not work if the local service was only available in the missing band. I complained to the reseller immediately and asked for a refund. He ignored my emails for a week, so I contacted Amazon. They refused to get involved and told me to contact the seller, which wasn't working. I protested the charge with my credit card company as it was ridiculously easy to prove that the seller had not disclosed that the phone was crippled and I thought I was buying a tri-band phone. I wrote to the reseller and told him I was protesting the charge and he finally agreed to a refund of my money if I returned the phone.
I had another encounter at Amazon where I wanted to buy an out of print classical CD from a reseller who specializes in used CDs. The price quoted was unusually good, so I jumped on it. I heard nothing from them for over a week, so I wrote and asked why I hadn't received it. They said that they didn't actually have it, but were trying to find it. They never got it. Then I learned that this company doesn't actually have anything in stock, they just list stuff on Amazon as if they have it and then try to acquire it and resell it to you after you place the order. I also found a used bookstore on Amazon who did the same thing of advertising books they didn't actually have. I am more careful now of who I buy anything used from and I pay very careful attention to the feedback of all resellers and look specifically for the negative comments to see if they have valid complaints. In the case of the CD reseller, I complained to Amazon that they didn't actually have anything in stock, despite their numerous listings on Amazon, and Amazon could not care less.
I learned the hard way that if you buy from a reseller at Amazon, they won't back you up if it goes bad. I'm sure they do the same with their auctions. Yes, they get their piece of the business, but they aren't interested at all in helping anyone to resolve disputes. They were very clear to me that any disputes I had were up to me to resolve.
It's the economy, stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
What our government is trying to hide from us is that the world economy is in the beginning of a horrific collapse, which will go down in history as being sparked by the depletion of our energy resources and resulting price spike. Our government lied to us all throughout the 1990's about how great the economy was, and the resulting crash left many people penniless. Then, the government "fixed" the problem by creating another artificial boom, this one in housing. For the past 5 years, people have been hyper-extending themselves on adjustable mortgages to buy houses they couldn't really afford. Now that the economy has seen all the benefit it can from the second artificial boom, the housing market has crashed (not in terms of value, but in terms of peoples' monthly payments on their ARM), the government has nowhere to go.
We are about to see an implosion in the housing market that is going to make the dot-bust of the 1990's look like losing a quarter in a slot machine. We are at a point where we can no longer control inflation because we have sent enough money overseas that foreign governments now control the supply of US currency in the world. We BORROWED the money we sent them against the hyper-inflated housing values we created artifically in the early 2000s. Now, all the foreign governments like China and Iran have to do is flood the world with those borrowed US dollars to drive hyper-inflation in the US. Combine that with a crash in the only assets in the US that have real value, and the rest of the world will simply be able to buy us out.
Scary... truly scary... so your ebay problems are a lot bigger than you think...
Re:While I agree, it's for other reasons. (Score:5, Interesting)
(1) Competition outside of EBay. EBay is no longer a market unto itself, the sellers there are in direct competition with other discount sellers and auction sites. I find that I can often do better by buying elsewhere.
(2) Visibility of product. I've noticed that EBay's search is no longer nearly as effective as it used to be. I tire quickly of paging through 200 items for the 2 or 3 listings that I'm looking for. Sellers have become very savvy in terms of making sure their product comes up in as many searches as possible, and this decreases the utility of search.
(3) The sheer volume of crap. It isn't about oversupply of goods that most would people actually want to buy, it's that the marketplace (not the market) is flooded with junk. I recently furnished a new condo, and looked to EBay for a lot of accessories. A colossal waste of time. Would you go to the dollar store to redecorate your kitchen?
So, what can EBay do to fix the problems?
I think the best thing they could do for themselves would be to fix their search engine. This would fix the problem of product visibility, the problem of good product dilution, and these would help solve the problem of shrinking market share for EBay.
Re:While I agree, it's for other reasons. (Score:3, Interesting)
Second smart shoppers buy elsewhere, Online shops underprice ebay auctions regularly. Newegg pricing is far better than some dimrods auction on ebay any day in price, shipping (shipping gouging on ebay is rampant) and quality. Hell my 42" LCD HD tv was $300.00 less from ecost than the lowest seller selling it USED on ebay. I got it new and with a warrenty because it was old stock yet people think their used crap is worth retail.
Ebay is falling down, they have abad reputation and the dimwits are flooding it selling crap for full retail prices and idiots are buying them!
Re:Yeah, Feedback (Score:4, Interesting)
You're bang-on. Most sellers won't leave positive feedback until they in turn have received positive feedback - So as a buyer I'll never leave negative feedback as it will turn around and slam me. One simple solution would be to REQUIRE sellers to leave feedback to get their Paypal money. Once they've gotten paid I've held up my end of the bargain.
Weeding out overpricing sellers and FREE XBOX360s (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd much rather do my business with someone who's listed auctions in which most of the items have sold.
re:Flaws in the system: What can be fixed (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Fraud is *way* too high! In some categories, it's not really a big issue. But for customers shopping for higher-ticket, more desirable goods, it's a severe problem! If, for example, you're shopping for new Apple products (from iPods to Macbook Pros), you can find obviously fraudulent auctions practically EVERY time you do a search. Worse yet, there are a lot of not-so-obvious frauds out there. EG. I recently tried to buy a used iPod 20GB from a guy that appeared to own a used book-store of some sort. He claimed he had something like 50 used 20GB iPods for sale, as well as 40-something shuffles. By the look of the photos he displayed, it appeared he had used them as loaners for some kind of audio-book rental program his store ran, and these were just being auctioned off since they were older units. I placed a bid, as did many other people. But then the auction got terminated at the last minute, and his account was suspended for fraud.
2. Too costly to sell some items! If you're trying to use eBay for its intended original purpose (sort of a flea market or garage sale to "recycle" your stuff you'd otherwise throw away), the fees usually eat up all your profits. If, say, I want to auction off a broken CD player for spare parts value - I'm only going to realistcally get maybe $5 or so out of it. That would be fine, except if the buyer pays me via PayPal, PayPal (owned by eBay) gets a chunk. eBay charges me both the listing fee and a final value sale fee too. Not to mention, re-listing fees if the thing doesn't sell the first couple times I put it out there. (And on something like this, heck - it probably won't! It's just something you want to relist until you luck into finding that person who happens to need exactly what you've got.) If you make a small mistkae on estimating your shipping costs on top of that, you can easily end up paying someone to win your auction!
3. Too much abuse in the feedback system. I really like the idea someone else posted here, where a positive feedback (with no comment) would get posted by default after X number of days, unless someone made an effort to do otherwise. I'm tired of the people who email, begging for feedback, or getting upset that you're "taking too long" to get around to it. I'm tired of the retaliation stunts people pull, where leaving a legitimate negative feedback guarantees you'll get an undeserved one in return. And I'm tired of feedback comments only being 1 line long. (On a positive, what are they gonna type anyway? May as well make a macro that says "A++++ Would do business again!" It's always something like that.) You don't get enough space to explain the reason you're giving a negative either. It's hard not to just look like a jerk with only 80 chars. or less to explain yourself.
4. eBay stores are a joke. I looked into them once, for a former employer, and they were *so* unattractive an option for us compared to practically anyone else offering e-commerce web sites with shopping carts. They just look too much like the rest of their site. Sure, the items come up in everybody's regular auction searches - but so what? That's sort of like me starting my own line of new cars, and instead of building my own showrooms, I negotiate a deal with Chevy to sell mine in a portion of their showroom space. Yeah, I get a lot of "exposure" that way - but it still makes my business look "second rate" compared to Chevy. eBay stores look like someone just had a bunch of normal auction listings, and paid to get them put under a different "eBay stores" heading. You can't even really customize the presentation of your listings.
Re:Yeah, Feedback (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:If ebay wants me back as a buyer (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yeah, Feedback (Score:4, Interesting)
From my perspective as a buyer, it is. My end of the deal is to give the money, the sellers end of the deal is to give me a product. Once I've paid promptly, and follwed instructions, I should get positive feedback. If the buyer winds up being sleazy just write a rebuttal.
As long as sellers keep holding buyer feedback in 'ransom' for positive seller feedback the feedback system remains broken.
Re:Yeah, Feedback (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Craigslist (Score:3, Interesting)
1. It is partly owned by eBay. And has no obvious source of revenue generation. So, and assuming eBay in its current form stays in business long term (not at all certain IMHO), you should expect to see changes at Craigslist eventually - like fees for example...
2. Craigslist has a significant, and growing, spam and fraud problem too. Which, as far as I can see, they are not really on top of right now. For example, take a look at any city listing outside of the United States. They are dependent on community reporting, and ouside of the US it's pretty much only a handful of English speaking ex-pats ever reading the pages - not enough for abuse to be rated enough to be taken down. It's often the same blatant spam again and again and again. It would be a piece of cake to filter it out - even easier than email spam. But they don't.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may... It look to me that Craigslist may peak in a couple of years max and then rapidly decline as soon as a better alternative comes around, and that could easily be MySpace or Google.