Want to Understand What Ails the Modern Internet? Look at eBay

I use eBay frequently. I have only bought things, but I want to sell things, however I&#x27;m terrified of getting scammed. And eBay does nothing to ameliorate those fears. I got as close as taking pictures, writing a description, and stopped at the last step before putting my item for sale. Everything I&#x27;ve read suggests that it&#x27;s simply not worth it to try to sell things because you have no protection from scammers.<p>As a buyer, however, it&#x27;s great so unless you have enough margins to protect you from scammers, and if you just want to sell one-off things like eBay from the 2000s, then don&#x27;t bother.<p>As a technology platform, eBay is an embarrassment. They released features like collections that didn&#x27;t work on their production website and it looks like they got rid of it entirely now. They have a half-built API that has confusing documentation, and their APIs that do work aren&#x27;t very useful. Nothing about their site has changed in 20 years, and they&#x27;re waiting to die, like Yahoo. I&#x27;m surprised Amazon or even etsy hasn&#x27;t been able to destroy them yet, since they&#x27;re a stationary target that hasn&#x27;t done anything meaningful in over a decade.

I’m not exactly sure what point this article is trying to make, but as a regular eBay user, these are my biggest issues when using the platform. I’m based in the UK, so some of these may not apply for other locations.<p>- Delivery times aren’t accurate. When I buy something from eBay I expect it will arrive within a week, but if I want something to arrive in a shorter time I buy it elsewhere. There is no way to filter listings to find which sellers will post an item today, and ship it via a method that will arrive tomorrow. A lot of listings are marked Fast&amp;Free, but those have an estimate delivery date of Thursday.<p>- Too many Chinese sellers. A lot of items are sold by Chinese sellers who list the item location as in the UK, but in the description say that there is a 20 day delivery time. If I want stuff from China I’ll buy it from AliExpress.<p>- Too many duplicate listings. If I search for a common item where there are a few variations, I usually see the same item repeated a handful of times on the first page.

I think I missed the point because I don&#x27;t understand what this article is trying to say exactly.

OT: What eBay is really good at:<p>If you want to buy a notebook with a US keyboard (which some devs prefer) and when it&#x27;s hard to get them in your home country.<p>eBay.com offers a Global Shipping Program where the US seller just send their stuff to this shipping program and eBay takes care of everything else. Even customs will be paid by eBay and the buyer just pays once and benefits from fast processing. It&#x27;s a buttersmooth way of international shipping.<p>I got my last notebook within just one week and it was still cheaper than the local version in my home country. I know that some notebooks offer US keyboards in any country (ThinkPads and Macbooks) but then you usually wait also min 1-2 weeks because they are custom builds or they come directly from China.<p>Don&#x27;t know of any other entity than eBay offering this.

From a senior management perspective, eBay is run like a private-equity backed portfolio company. No offense to PE firms, but eBay has the feel of being more worried about costs and makes very little investment in long-term growth--as if the owners just want to turn a profit and sell the company before the debt comes due.<p>This is why the UI is horrible and, in general, the site feels stuck somewhere in the early 2000s. Perhaps this is also why the company culture is broken and somewhat dishonest. They have frequently engaged in dramatic policy shifts when someone got the idea that the bottom line could be enhanced. In these cases, they are capable of totally disregarding their ecosystem (especially sellers and affiliates). Worse, they would outright lie about their intentions, which I suppose they felt necessary for placation when completely screwing over their &quot;partners&quot;.<p>eBay has long had a certain toxic nature, including an almost uncanny ability to leave customers and partners feeling disappointed, if not outright cheated at some point. Whatever the shortcomings of the people who participate in their marketplace (including scammers), they are amplified by eBay, whose resolution policies essentially amount to doing as little as possible. This is what people are reporting as disappointment when they&#x27;ve needed an issue resolved.<p>I am amazed that people still use eBay.

It looks like I&#x27;m the only one in this thread who has the experience of being scammed, as a buyer, on eBay. Although admittedly, this happened on the Indian version of the platform (which is now owned by Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart).<p>I wrote about the irony of them promoting the sale of refurbished items when it was a refurbished Xbox that I purchased last year that turned out to be a dud, on Medium (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@chakrabortypritish&#x2F;ebay-india-a-cautionary-tale-of-pain-frustration-c3f55dfd821e" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@chakrabortypritish&#x2F;ebay-india-a-cautiona...</a> - I had to incorporate a bit of sensationalism to try and fetch some views, which is why it&#x27;s written the way it is, didn&#x27;t work anyway). Turns out that the seller lied about the machine&#x27;s warranty, and Microsoft support couldn&#x27;t help me either. eBay support consistently told me that they couldn&#x27;t do anything about this according to company policy. Never felt this helpless on an e-commerce platform, and I&#x27;ve never gone back on eBay.<p>And yes, their platform UI&#x2F;UX is horrible, I concur. The only way to show that the Xbox was stuck in a boot-and-crash loop was to record a video, and they did not permit video uploads on their (laughable) grievance redressal platform.

On the other hand, it&#x27;s a drag that there isn&#x27;t something like Yelp for FLOSS.<p>I would have loved to see a rating and some reviews of several development processes before wasting my time posting patches.

I&#x27;ve seen it fragment and specialize.<p>And I&#x27;m okay with that.<p>For instance with musicians - particularly guitarists (only because we tend to be gear enthusiasts) - Reverb.com has become our new Ebay.com. It&#x27;s even replacing Craigslist for a lot of what we were doing previously (allows local deals, too).<p>They essentially took all the good things that were working for Ebay and tailored it to musicians. It&#x27;s a slam dunk.

The article is incredibly meandering and non-committed to saying anything in particular.

I just cannot compare Amazon to Ebay. While I can get similar items on both what I use Ebay for , collectibles, antiques, and hard to find items, is outside the scope of Amazon. I never expected Ebay to be the big retail spot, for many of us it is the world&#x27;s largest garage sale.<p>I use Ebay for many replacement parts for items not normally found in stores or worse jacked up on Amazon because they come bound with Prime shipping. Amazon might be top dog from name recognition but places like Wal Mart are trying and unless Amazon gets a grip on knock offs they are in danger of alienating a good number of buyers.

What happened to the future where all our transactions were secured by trust rated escrow agents?

Some day in the far future, eBay will invent a technology that lets people embed Youtube videos in their listings. I&#x27;m not holding my breath though.

Happy to share my experience with ebay.de in Germany as a seller and buyer.<p>Started selling some old tech&#x2F;appliances I don&#x27;t need anymore on eBay: last month 4 items for 250 EUR total, before that a few more items for ~400 EUR total.<p>Items went for 50-70% of the original price, and then eBay took their commission which at times was quite steep at ~15% of the selling price. It was still worth it since for most items I couldn&#x27;t find any takers locally on Kleinanzeigen (Craigslist analog).<p>eBay has annoying limits for new sellers so to sell my old Sony camera I had to wait a month after selling my old Canon DSLR. It&#x27;s impossible to contact a human support for this issue. They raised my limits automatically recently though.<p>Don&#x27;t remember any problems with my buyers or when I bought something. Some of it I shouldn&#x27;t have bought at all but that&#x27;s a different story :-D Looking forward to clearing more of those storage boxes.

eBay really should allow you to filter out items with multiple price points. So many sellers abuse that system so heavily (e.g. the standard 99c memory card listings that have some crappy little microsd adapter included in the listings to drag the price range down).<p>Basically everything else that&#x27;s bad about ebay I can deal with, but that&#x27;s the one thing that sends me racing to other sites.

Ebay is trash but it&#x27;s where the buyers are.<p>I&#x27;ve been buying and selling on eBay since they came to the UK but I have to hold my nose every time I visit the site.

Want to understand what ails the modern PSTN network ? Take into account that we have been trying to fix it politically for 40 years now.

I tried to Buy It Now an item off Ebay just now and Ebay responded, &quot;Sorry, this seller is on vacation, so this item is unavailable.&quot;<p>Sinking ship.

Why do the style guides of these large organisations often insist on the ludicrous capitalisation of &quot;EBay&quot; when it appears at the start of a sentence?

&gt;Peter Thiel — an early Facebook investor and board member — with his funding of lawsuits against media companies and his eclectic and severe right-wing politics.<p>The take away of Thiel glaringly missed Palantir in favor of some digs.