I hope Amazon crushes Ebay/Paypal<p>Ebay/Paypal has a long history of screwing sellers and buyers and users of Paypal, just search the internet for horror stories. Their support is staffed by drones (ha) unlike Amazon support who are swift and efficient and seem to go out of their way to make me feel good as a customer.<p>What is more surprising is that Ebay hasnt been brought to court here in Europe, its quite obvious majority of sellers are not charging or paying sales taxes (VAT) which are as high as 20 to 30% here depending on state.
I usually only ever shop on Amazon; recently I got a little into drones and aerial photography, and some addons can only be found on eBay.<p>Man, shopping on eBay is a friggin' nightmare.<p>1. For some reason, eBay logs you out completely every time you restart the browser (whether or not you check the "stay connected" checkbox). Curiously, the page says "hello {my name}" but I still need to reconnect to do anything, and when I do, I have to retype my email address!! If the system can remember my name why can't it remember my email address?? (This is the most annoying detail imaginable, probably because it seems so easy to fix).<p>2. Product descriptions are a mess; they usually contain many pictures but the text is more about what the buyer NEEDS TO DO AND VARIOUS OTHER WARNINGS IN ALL CAPS (and red font) than about the product itself. I feel like I'm being yelled at by an angry cop every time I read those.<p>3. Paying is a pain. Buying and paying are two very different events on eBay, whereas they're just one and the same on Amazon. You have to go to Paypal (completely different website -- eBay owns Paypal, can't they integrate it to the main eBay site??) and then you get a deluge of emails (around 4 I believe, sometimes more when the seller decides to write too).<p>4. Sellers are often unprofessional and obnoxious. They send you emails telling you to rate them 5 stars and that "FOUR STARS = FAILURE"; they add a paper saying the same thing in the package; they very rarely respond to emails; shipments are made via non-traceable systems.<p>5. Products are of uncertain quality; some are very good and some are cheap rip-offs (but it's hard/impossible to tell from the product description).<p>I would very happily pay 30% more (or even 100% more for some products that are very cheap anyway) to shop on Amazon vs. eBay; I can't understand how they're still in business (it can't just be me buying a couple of filter adapters for GoPro cameras, can it?)
The best thing eBay could do is copy Amazon in how a third party listing works. On Amazon we can throw up a feed of our entire inventory. On eBay you need to create a separate listing for each product you want to list. In effect it means more complicated software and overhead to maintain the same level of listings.<p>Additionally it gives customers the impression that one unit of a product listed on eBay is one physical unit the merchant has and is specifically holding for an eBay listing, which are rarely the case.<p>Basically this is the result of eBay shoehorning fixed price multichannel merchants into the traditional auction listing model that they started with.
Could you change the link to the single page view: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/magazine/ebays-strategy-for-taking-on-amazon.html?pagewanted=all" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/magazine/ebays-strategy-fo...</a>
Interesting read. A few months back eBay change their affiliate cookie from 10 days to 24 hours. Revenues for most affiliates dropped across the board and lots of those pushing BIN products jumped ship to Amazon. Lots of those pushing auctions are stopping active development on their sites - it's incredibly tough to make a 24 hour cookie work. Shame really, it was a great program.