How Amazon and Google are taking eBay's Business 289
prostoalex writes "Wall Street Journal says many online sellers who started on eBay are now going solo, being helped out by 'name-your-own-price' Amazon Marketplace and Google's and Yahoo's advertising programs, which allow small businesses to direct their ads to search engine users interested in specific items. The article discusses several companies where online sellers, being disappointed with eBay's falling profit margins, increasing fees, disruptions coming from PayPal account freezes and high fraud rate, are leaving eBay. Many start with setting up their own sites, continuing to do business on eBay, but then switching to solo e-commerce entirely after looking at profit margins."
eBay will fail unless it... (Score:4, Insightful)
curious.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Bizzare.
Maybe eBay will finally start policing it's own (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention the huge number of grey market items on eBay. I don't want to buy anime off of there because a majority of the DVDs are Chinese bootlegs. I would rather download them than buy the bootlegs....
Ebay will still rule the online garage sale (Score:4, Insightful)
I would be interested in what percentage of ebay auctions are from full-time sellers. It seems that these folks probably drive a sizable percentage of Ebay's revenue. Losing them could hurt the bottom line of the company very badly.
Amazon and Google still have a ways to go to become all that popular with full time sellers. There are a ton of guides [treasurefish.com] for becoming a full [amazon.com] time Ebay seller [ecommerce-guide.com]. But I find very few for Amazon and Google.
If anyone can do it, Google and Amazon Can (Score:2, Insightful)
eBay is a JOKE (Score:5, Insightful)
As for Paypal, it's practically a crook's paradise (eBay is too actually). They force you to enter in your checking information if you wish to perform any transactions over a few bucks (forget the exact $). Once you've done this you are completely at their mercy to screw you over however they'd like.
With credit cards, you always have the option of a chargeback. Once you have linked your banking info to Paypal, good luck! Now they get all the say as to when/if they will give you credit back if something goes wrong. If a seller sends you a box of bricks, screw you.
Here's a personal experience I've had with Paypal. A while back I posted an ad to sell some stuff. Someone bought them and paid via a "VERIFIED" Paypal account. The buyer came by my house and picked them up in person. Everything looked legit until Paypal reversed the transaction saying the "verified" account was stolen. I emailed Paypal and all I got was one runaround after another. In fact I started getting the same replies over and over again!
My problem is, either Paypal is an escrow or they are not. If they're not, they have no right to refund the money. If they are, they have an obligation to re-imburse me for my losses. However, they took the coward's way out, refunding the money to the user to avoid being sued and losing in court for failing to protect their user accounts, and screwing me in the process saying that only orders sent by mail are protected under their TOS.
I really hope eBay and Paypal die off in really horrible deaths.
uh huh (Score:1, Insightful)
Ebay is gunning for Ebay alone (Score:5, Insightful)
Ebay doesn't care if the seller has problems as long as the percentage cut is in Ebay's bank account. They do little-to-nothing to make the seller's life easy, in fact it's a very customer-unfocused setup.
As long as Ebay keep their current modus operandi, I'll not be using them again, and they have to run out of sellers eventually...
Simon
Re:curious.. (Score:3, Insightful)
And for years people established businesses there, and it was a good way for people to make a business selling stuff without the overhead of having their own web site. This article says that's changing and examines why.
So maximizing profit isn't news, but abandoning eBay sure is.
Why doesn't Google index eBay? (Score:3, Insightful)
The current eBay robots.txt includes the text
# eBay may permit automated access to
# access certain eBay pages but soley for the limited purpose of
# including content in publicly available search engines.
So Google could get away with doing such indexing - which would be of very high value to many people, since eBay makes old auctions inaccessible after a certain period - at least under the current robots.txt.
I'm aware of the legal and technical problems that might arise. (Recall the 2000 Bidder's Edge lawsuit where an online auction aggregator was prevented by eBay from using their data.) You'd need a large company and a lot of machines with different IP addresses to quietly check every auction, and I can think of at least twelve different ways such a database of prices, bids, times, durations, titles, and descriptions could be important.
So why hasn't anyone done it?
Re:I look at it as *cheap* Advertising. (Score:2, Insightful)
Example:
1) Post something on their sites
2) Advertise the hell out of your own website on each post
3) Browsers become buyers and watch the shoppers from all of the above auction/sales sites come to you next time and buy direct
You can also ship more advertisements for your own website with catchy phrases like. Buy direct next time at [Your URL here] etc.
There's a cost to using third party services (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're on the internet you're a technology company. The same way that if you're a retail store you're to some extent in the storefront design, logistics, human resources and interior design business. At least in retail you can get into a franchise where someone has figured all this stuff out for you. With technology though there isn't a really good reason to franchise because there isn't the limited trade area issue.
Re:I don't know about other people... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Maybe eBay will finally start policing it's own (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Also... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:eBay will fail unless it... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sellers routinely advertise what the different shipping rates are. As a registered user my location is known to the site- why can't it just indicate the shipping costs for items I'm looking at, or say if they are not mentioned?
eBay already allows you to view by availability to your locaiton, they just need to take it one step further.
Re:eBay will fail unless it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don't know about other people... (Score:4, Insightful)
Slight modification: Paypal wants the respect that real financial institutions command, but without the very real legal liabilities that go along with it.
Cheers,
-l
Re:eBay will fail unless it... (Score:3, Insightful)
What really sucks ass are the fricking mega "powersellers." I just bought something the other day (promedia ultra 5.1) and not only am I pretty sure that I was shill-bid up to a higher price, but I got the thing and of course it doesnt work (dead amp, clearly dropped hard and not in shipping). I'm out return shipping and I plan to issue a chargeback if the guy wont give me back the full amount I payed him (no way am I paying for him to mail me broken goods).
He is one of those sellers that has tens of thousands of feedbacks and they roll in fast enough that the front page is always positive but the negatives are quite negative (and there are negative ones listed as positive to avoid feedback retaliation which is another shitty part of ebay). He clearly makes it a habit to screw customers but ebay wont do shit becuase he is a powerseller. The BBB in his state has apparently stopped taking complaints because they have recieved so many without a response from the business but they cant really do anything. I havn't even been able to get a direct response, I only get automated mails telling me to leave feedback (but I plan to wait until 90 days are up to leave a nasty feedback and hope he cant retaliate before the link is taken away).
It's shit like that that makes ebay suck. The company wouldnt survive on their own, they require ebay's services along with the fact that customers are more trusting on ebay. If they had to fend for themselves, that 7% or so of pissed off customers is all it takes to screw the business because the happy and mildly satisfied people dont show up to support them, only the angry people go to complain. I am perfectly happy buying my item from some guy who has somethign to sell, I dont care if it takes a little longer to ship because I often get better documentation and communication as well as a product that works.
I hope that the other places take away the megasellers because the assholes wont survive outside of ebay (the froogle link to resellerratings wont help that). The good megasellers would leave and survive and the bad ones would be all that was left. Ebay would have no choice but to change their policies and deal with ALL bad sellers (not just the ones who arent powersellers) or else the customers would get mighty angry.
P.S. The seller in question is bargaindepot04, they have some other names and they operate auctionlogistix.com. It's not worth it to try no matter how low the price is because its probobly broken or lied about in some other way(and even if you get it for half of what its worth, you were probobly shill-bid to that level). If anyone else has had a bad experiance with this guy (and many have) and want to get together and try do do something about it...lets give it a shot.
Re:eBay will fail unless it... (Score:2, Insightful)
I remember the time when ebay charged nothing for listing items. That was back when it wasn't the dominant online auction house. People would put in stuff with unrealistic minimum bids, and when nobody was willing to pay that much, they'd just put it in again, hoping for a sucker. Any search would turn up at least 75% such overpriced items. Then ebay installed the listing charge. There was a terrible outcry and people were urging a boycott of ebay. But the reasult was that ebay became a lot more attractive to the BUYERS, because they didn't have to wade through pages upon pages of overpriced stuff. In the end, it was not ebay but its competition that died out.
Re:eBay will fail unless it... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure what the problem is. When you view his profile, you can clearly see the total amount of negatives he has (5772 out of 80908 transactions, which is a HUGE proportion in my opinion - I'm wary of anyone with less than a 99% satisfaction rate). He sucks, his customers have said so, and eBay displays the fact. Buyer beware and all that.
P.