eBay Battles Power Sellers 370
DigitalDame2 writes "eBay power sellers, angered by the recent eBay policy changes, have been hitting back the auction site with listing boycotts and now with accusations of fake listings and forum censorship. EBay admitted that a "bug" in its system had accidentally placed listings from eBay-owned shopping.com onto eBay.com late Friday night. A California-based seller's new eBay listings did not allow users to actually bid on his items. "This guy has over 35,000 items. And there is no button for a 'buy it now' and no button for making a bid." As a result, sellers are threatening to take their complaints to the Federal Trade Commission, but eBay is not backing down." Normally I wouldn't really care, but I think this is interesting because eBay is so dominant in their field, that there is no real alternative. Watching how things like this play out is interesting to me because I want to believe that the internet will require everyone to be more responsible or lose. But the real question for me is at what point does total marketplace dominance trump that.
Re:I'm still lost... (Score:5, Interesting)
Google stock info [google.com]
Ebay has had a major drop in its stock value over the past few months. I believe that, since the actual number of auctions/bidders has dropped, this was an attempt to get more money from those people still doing decent business... Power Sellers.
Seeing as to how stock is back on the rise, it appears to have worked from that standpoint. At least for the time being...
Ebay is abusing a monopoly position (Score:2, Interesting)
Why no solid competitors? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Alternatives... (Score:5, Interesting)
Everybody knows the end date/time and should know how much they're willing to pay. What's unfair or difficult about that?
I am a case study (Score:5, Interesting)
I sold jewelry $15-%50 range. Mainly silver with gemstones, almost no costume. I had a rating of about 9000 and % positive of 99.7. I was netting about 35K a year. My system worked on volume. I would make $0.50 to $1.00 per sale. At that size I ended up sending eBay about $70K a year.
The last time they cahnged their fees they essentially killed my profit margin. Now I could have adjusted at that point and probably survived but at the same time they started using some incredibly poorly written bots. These bots decided I was selling illegale stuff and even though I had exceptional records eBay refused to have a human even look at what the bots were reporting.
After over a year fighting with eBay and holding my last months worth of fees (about 2K) I finally got someone from their collections department to give me some information...I ended up settling the debt for $1600 plus a printout of what the bot was reporting.
To sum up, because eBay did not treat me fairly while at the same time demanding more money from me I have completly left them and they no longer get my $70,000 a year in fees.
While eBay is still huge, Google and other search engines provide independent sellers almost as much visibility so I predict that these sort of heavy handed tactics will only speed eBay's decline from the throne of online reselling services.
Did $6,000 on eBay Dec-Jan, stopped listing Feb (Score:4, Interesting)
Since my feedback just recently went over 1,000, eBay keeps sending me e-mail to jon the PowerSeller program. I told them what they could do with it...
Lawrence Person
Lame Excuse Books
http://home.austin.rr.com/lperson/lame.html [rr.com]
Re:Alternatives... (Score:5, Interesting)
Although I do agree - when I'm buying, I put in what I'm willing to pay and if I win, I win...
Re:the final straw (Score:3, Interesting)
But I agree 100%. If I'm looking for a used, cheap iPod I'll get 500 hits for "ZUNE IPOD 360". Thankfully ebay lets me negate terms but it's still annoying when I'm searching for headphones that i have to do 'iPod headphones -zune -mp3'.
Google could come to the table with all of these changes in place and eBay would lose 50% of their population over night. Make it easy to sell lots of things repeatedly (without doing a dutch auction), make it easy to just sell things period (without having to list everything as an auction), and make it easy to search for obscure or rare things or just used things from 'some guy' not trying to make a living on this.
eBay: We don't care, we don't have to! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Alternatives... (Score:5, Interesting)
I bought my house in an auction that allowed sniping. At 11pm I submitted a bid for a property of around $200k. The other party had no chance to resubmit a bid at that time since the auction was closing 15 minutes after that.
The property itself was appraised at $240k.
I knew that the other party would want to revise their bid if they thought they would lose it. They were trying to benefit from the seller needing to sell fast, but didn't expect someone to jump in at the last minute.
So why is that bad for the seller? Since the auction allowed for my bid sniping, the other party never had a chance to put in a counter-offer. I was prepared to go up to $215k, and, judging by their reaction, they probably would have done the same.
The sniping cost the seller nearly $15k because there was no period to re-evaluate the bids.
(Not that I feel bad, I needed the property fast too since my previous home was washed away in a flood. I was just pointing out that the seller lost out on some $ because sniping was allowed)
Not only in the US. (Score:3, Interesting)
eBay.pl is by no means dominant site in Poland. In Poland, THE auction site is allegro.pl, with more than 90% of the market. They charge very little for putting an item on auction, the percentage for a successful sale is low too. The second one is Swistak.pl, which, being much smaller, offers no fee for putting your items on auctions, and restricts all fees to people who sell lots, feature their producte etc. eBay used the same strategy until recently, keeping a firm third place close behind Swistak.pl
But last month or so, they introduced fees for putting items on auction. Result - almost all sellers from Poland vanished. It still lists some 80000 items 'from Poland' but if you check the listings, you see that over 90% of them are "e-book, electronic form, free electronic shipping everywhere world-wide." Currently there's some 8000 non-eBook offers )many of them duplicates from the few remaining desperate powersellers putting the same item in multiple categories) on eBay (vs almost 4 millions on Allegro), and essentially eBay.pl is dead.
Consider this before you yell (Score:5, Interesting)
The part of the article here that caught my eye was "One forum thread from Friday pointed to a California-based seller known as sdc_prod_434012 with no previous eBay transactions whose new listings did not allow users to actually bid on his items."
Like I said I don't have any specific knowledge of this user or case but lets consider the facts and possibilities here. Its a user with 0 feedback, who has apparently never bought or sold a single item on eBay, despite being registered on the site for almost a year now. Then one morning he suddenly wakes up and in a brilliant display of speed and efficiency posts 35000 items for sale at once. Now then, is it more likely that this is:
a) An ambitious new user who was waiting for just the right moment to post his entire inventory for sale.
b) A scammer who is trying to get as many quick fraudulent buy-it-now transactions as he can before being noticed by the security filters.
I'd be willing to bet the correct answer is b, and that the anti-fraud programs correctly detected this user and disabled his items before people were able to bid on them. If this was a legitimate user then its unfortunate and I'm sure that customer service is apologizing profusely, but in 99 out of 100 cases like this its just your garden variety scammer and the fraud detection programs at eBay worked exactly as they were supposed to.
Re:Ebay isn't the only player in that area (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:eBay has great solutions! (Score:3, Interesting)
As a buyer I don't care if I have a little negative feedback. Sellers aren't going to care since they're getting their money before they're sending me the item. (And even if they do, so what? Their loss.) In fact, it is usually pretty obvious when seller feedback is retaliatory, and sellers who do it are usually shooting themselves in the foot. In fact _how_ a seller handles negative feedback is really more important to me as a buyer than whether or not they have negative feedback. In any case, I can always set up a new account as a buyer, since reputation isn't that important except for big ticket items.
As a seller I am very concerned about a little negative feedback, since I know how that influences my decisions as a buyer. I can't exactly just abandon my seller account and expect to keep doing the same level of business.
The whole thing is already very lopsided in favor of buyers and ebay's solution has made it worse. I'm not even convinced that the problem they're supposedly solving there really exists.
Re:I'm still lost... (Score:5, Interesting)
A better idea would be that a buyer can't leave feedback for a seller until that seller has left feedback on the buyer... Crappy sellers would be forced to clean up their act while buyers can give true feedback without retribution.
Sellers will get screwed even more by this (Score:4, Interesting)
I once sold an old PC that had been in my family's possession for years. Some jackass decided to be an asshole buyer and came back with "this is missing, that's not working", apparently assuming that I was some kind of clearing house who moves too much stock to know the details about a particular item. I responded by describing exactly that PCs condition as shipped as well as the statement that my family had owned that PC for years, so I knew every detail about it. I never heard back from the guy once he realized that I called his bluff and that I could have easily slammed him with a negative about trying to scam me.
But now I no longer have that protection, thanks to this f**king moronic decision on eBay's part. So what's to protect me from asshole buyers like the idiot who tried to scam me? Ban him from future auctions? Oh, golly gee, that will certainly stop other fraudulent buyers, oh boy oh boy. And if you think that eBay will seriously consider removing genuinely incorrect feedback, you need to stop smoking whatever it is you're smoking.
This new policy of theirs is going to do one thing: make eBay a haven for scamming buyers who now know that they have nothing to fear when lying about sellers.
Re:Alternatives... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not a lottery, because I put in my max bid and so does the other sniper. Guess who wins? The guys that snipes with the highest max bid. Whether my bid comes in at 6 seconds or 5 seconds or 9 seconds doesn't make much difference unless we both put in the exact same bid.
Sniping is GOOD. It prevents stupid bidding wars with idiots that can't value an item by letting me hide my max bid until the very end. No Ebay fever. It's good for them too since it reduced "Buyer's Remorse" where they figure out after the auction that oops, they paid too much because they got "caught up" in the action.
All that does is force everyone to put in their max bid like they should have done in the first place.
I do put in low bids sometimes to signal my presence to friends. Also it keeps the seller from materially changing the auction details, which is a positive especially if a seller has misspelled anything.
-- John.
Re:eBay has great solutions! (Score:2, Interesting)
Solution: Don't allow sellers to give retaliatory negative feedback
I'm a former eBay Powerseller (off and on for the past decade), and while sometimes this is the way it works (buyer whines about how long FedEx took, or inexplicably expected more than was advertised), more often than not, nonpaying buyers would leave negative feedback after I left a negative comment for them. I guess I was one of the few who didn't care about a perfect rating, so I wound up with a few negatives, and almost all were from deadbeats who never responded to emails and didn't pay, but somehow were able to find the negative feedback button when I made good on my statements that I would leave negative feedback for them if they didn't respond and didn't pay. I never believed in letting bad buyers off the hook so easily, if ever seller left bad feedback for a deadbeat, then more sellers would see that wreck coming and cancel the idiots' bids. EBay did eventually reform the deadbeat retaliation problem briefly (retracting buyer feedback automatically if a seller filed for a commission refund over nonpayment), but it's moot now that they're just letting bad buyers run amok.
And lately, the quality of buyers has gone down dramatically. They seem to enjoy "tasting" items at the seller's expense, just forcing returns through Paypal, which refunds everything to them, no questions asked, regardless of whether the sale was as-is, leaving the seller holding the bag for shipping fees AND charging full Paypal fees on the transaction that didn't occur (the only way to avoid the double-dipping is to just give-in to the bullying and not contest the dispute) and was reversed against the seller's wishes. No thanks, I don't need those headaches. No more Paypal or eBay for me.
Re:Matter of Capital, Profit & Competitiveness (Score:2, Interesting)
The reasons are simple: they tend to be self-sufficient business people and hate being jerked around endlessly -- such as ebay does it. Also, many local auctions tend to bring even more money for the same items (ebay does not bring the high prices on most thing except the cheap stuff believe it or not) and are charging an overall percentage not much higher than ebay's considering the services they render.
Ebay might keep the bread and butter powersellers, but they have lost many mom and pop sellers that put in under a hundred items a week -- those that put in the interesting items you don't find at a 100 other sites at any given time and the mom and pop sellers have flown the coop (and way outnumbered the powersellers). All the powersellers offer is usually auctions relisted ad-nauseum with common items. They have their place but don't give a site like ebay a unique flavor.
Your analysis is that of an accountant. And as the sayings go, accountants know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Apt description for ebay, actually, as well.
Re:Alternatives... (Score:5, Interesting)
With most eBay auctions, a potential buyer is trying to judge more than just the "top price he/she is willing to pay" for an item in a given listing. 9 times out of 10, you can find numerous listings for a specific item desired. Nobody wants to feel like they paid too much for something, and you develop that overall sense of value largely by searching recently completed or auctions still in progress, for the same item you're bidding on. If, say, you want to buy an nVidia 8800GT video card, and you're personally willing to pay up to $250 for it - should you place a $250 max. bid on the first one you find? Probably so, if it's the only one you see listed. But more likely, a search would return 15 or 20 of them, at least, all with various high bids placed on them. So you might, wisely, modify your strategy then - thinking "Well, an awful lot of them only have high bids in the low $100 range right now. I'd hate to win one for $250, only to see 10 more end tomorrow at under $200 -- so I think I'll just place a $180 or so high bid right now."
Sniping, in this scenario, causes problems because when it becomes "the norm" for the "way to win an auction", all the other bid prices no longer help accurately assess what the market, overall, is willing to pay for an item. As a buyer trying to do the research, you're getting flawed numbers - because most things are woefully underbid until the last 20 seconds or so. Furthermore, since eBay auctions are computerized, sniping has gone computerized too - meaning people buying "auction sniping" software packages and using their automation features will have better results than anyone else. Seems like if eBay is going to allow sniping as "ok" - they should at least provide sniping tools as standard-issue on their web site, to level the playing field.
What about the regular guy? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have heard to many horror stories about Paypal that gives me no confidence in them at all. I don't want anything to do with Paypal. I also don't do enough business on eBay to need a merchant account at all.
So since this will affect casual users like me quite severely, I do find it interesting to see what the Power Sellers are going to do in response to the rules that are affecting them. I would also be interested in knowing how much business eBay gets from casual users like me.
There have been a lot of news articles lately about eBay and its policy changes, and I have yet to hear anything resembling a positive response.
Re:I'm still lost... (Score:3, Interesting)
My actual ebay feedback % is something like 84%, even though I've never screwed over any sellers. My feedback includes several great buyer/seller comments, a few "retracted paypal payment BEWARE" comments, and a couple "deadbeat buyer" comment. The last few times I've bid on anything, my bid was removed because of these. As a result I haven't picked up anything from ebay in ages. Reporting the sellers still leaves me with less cash and bad feedback. How many casual ebay buyers are driven away from retaliation?
I don't agree that sellers shouldn't be able to leave any feedback for the record. Maybe as others have said, force the seller to leave it first (though that just shifts the retaliation to the buyer...), but as a casual buyer I like this move. Maybe I'll actually get a power seller to email me back after I've paid them now!
Re:Alternatives... (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree to a point, that the kind of tools who nickel and dime and ratchet the price up should be allowed to fool around if it amuses them to do so. But the rest of us want to get along with things.
I go to a LOT of real-life auctions, so I know quite a bit about the dynamics of auctions. eBay is a proxy bidding system. An 'extend by 15 minutes' rule sounds like an incredible opportunity for a lot of 'gaming' that is far worse than things the way they are. Hell, nickel and dimers could keep an auction going for hours with such an arrangement. A real-life auctioneer would put a stop to that kind of bs immediately, an automatic extension just changes the rules of the 'gaming' it does not 'fix' anything.
What's your point? (Score:4, Interesting)
* *some* buyers are hyper-critical (it's not new (duh, it said that in the listing))
* *some* buyers abuse the system (I've changed my mind, don't want it any more)
* *some* buyers apparently don't know how to use email to see if the seller can satisfy them
But a seller's ability to leave negative feedback stops NONE of that.
Dishonest buyers don't care about negative feedback. If they get it, they just ditch that account and create a new one. So the ability of the sellers to leave negative feedback serves NO LEGITIMATE PURPOSE other than to intimidate honest buyers who have a legitimate gripe with the seller.
Some buyers suck. That's true in any marketplace. Part of being a seller in any market place is dealing with buyers.
When was the last time you walked into Wendy's, and they wouldn't sell you a burger because you got negative feedback the last time you bought something at McD's?