I don't agree. As a buyer I have never had a problem they did not settle to my satisfaction. I did make sure in each case to have my facts in order. I tend to buy mostly antiques, glass and china, and have had three bad purchases which were fraudulent in some manner. This out of nearly three hundred purchases.
I also purchase consumer items like batteries, dog toys, beef jerky, a DJI drone, and whatnot off the site.
Now as a seller I have no clue, but I have no clue what it is like to sell on Amazon either. I do find ebay easier to navigate by leaps and bounds over Amazon. amazon fills my pages with more trash than I ever want to see.
As a seller, I'm exposed for 30 days, because you can, for any reason, choose to return the item with a full refund, and just say it doesn't work. Ebay does not take evidence from the seller that this patently untrue. I've been burned twice this way and lost hundreds trying to sell two laptops.
One of my friends in college would buy stuff at auction. He said electronics were a shitshow for many sellers.
He said you're asking to get screwed unless you list serial numbers and have photo proof of functionality and mention it in your listing.
In the hundreds of transactions conducted by the university club I was a part of (we sold IT stuff that went missing on its way to the dumpster). Based on his advice we generated packing lists that included the device serial, tests performed, by who, when and screenshots. We never had a problem. Our biggest worry was the accuracy of the fish scale we used to weigh shipments.
There's people out there who make a business out of buying stuff from sellers who are far away, claim warranty and then resell the working item.
> As a seller, I'm exposed for 30 days, because you can, for any reason, choose to return the item with a full refund, and just say it doesn't work.
This is simply how eCommerce works. You have to accept returns... and 30 days is just about as short of a period you can reasonably make.
> Ebay does not take evidence from the seller that this patently untrue
Neither does Amazon, or Walmart marketplaces. This is simply standard for there marketplaces. Buyers get peace of mind, which encourages more purchases.
This "scam" works on Amazon too - so it's not just eBay or something about how eBay has done things.
As a seller, it can be a pain sometimes - but it's a cost of doing business and must be accounted for, and planned for before you sell the item.
If you're trying to just sell something and walk away, CL or your local classifieds section is the place to be.
Yup...I sold an iPod on eBay years ago, and the person I sold it to claimed that I only sent him cables and a rock, so eBay gave him all of his money back and he got to keep my iPod. Never used eBay since.
Nice, I finally get to do work by having to find similar items and write an email to be able to save exactly.. well, nothing.
Are they seriously expecting anyone to put effort and wait just to buy something from their place? Granted, I hate how Amazon doesn't support Paypal, but last I recall ebay doesn't do 1-day shipping, let alone 1-day replacement when opening an RMA.
Besides, they don't even actually lower the price to match the competitor, they just give you a one-time coupon with the difference. They're not even trying.
This might be the first time someone has been upset that paypal support is lacking. I am surprised by this considering the general distaste for paypal typically.
What makes you wish paypal was supported if you don't mind me asking?
I understand some people prefer Paypal because Paypal can assist with disputes, i.e. if something doesn't show up. At least that's why some of my friends prefer to use it.
However Amazon has always resolved problems to my satisfaction. I don't imagine it would be necessary in this situation.
I thought credit cards provide the same protections that Paypal does. Any time I run into trouble I can call my credit card company, reverse the charge and move on with life.
They are no questions asked easy and my credit card company cannot hold my money for 6 months for arbitrary reasons without providing proof. I see no benefit to Amazon using Paypal and only a less than good customer experience.
This is true. Lots of people don't know you can do stop payment. You also can do it 60 days on one rule or more than that if you tried to resolve it with vendor.
I don't have a credit card, just a bank account and a prepaid card that I need to fill up manually.
Paypal supports billing to my bank account while Amazon only supports credit cards and debit cards. The act of having to log-in to my bank account (and therefore involving their broken website and having to fetch the physical TOTP token) and fill up my card before being able to purchase something was enough to drive me away from buying stuff from both Amazon and Aliexpress multiple times.
I do realize I'm probably one of very few people to have a problem like that, though.
Some people still have to do business with paypal... and getting paid via paypal is still a thing with a lot of businesses. It is easier to use paypal directly to pay for things in a lot of cases. Then again, if you're serious about paypal, you'll have their debit card... so that point becomes moot.
Fulfilled and shipped by Amazon.com items can still be intermingled with rando sellers from China whereas Walmart will source directly from a manufacturer or a large, billion dollar wholesaler who cares about reputation (I think)
I've been spooked by intermingling and default to BestBuy for big ticket electronics
What I don't get about eBay is they found initial success in being an auction site then they almost immediately decided they wanted to be an online retailer instead. Why not just be the best auction site you can be rather than be yet another Amazon wannabe?
Interestingly Amazon has done the same thing except they want to be Google (Android) and Netflix (content bundling with Prime).
I get the desire to grow but honestly more often than not trying to do too much just makes you mediocre at everything.
> What I don't get about eBay is they found initial success in being an auction site then they almost immediately decided they wanted to be an online retailer instead. Why not just be the best auction site you can be rather than be yet another Amazon wannabe?
I recently read a book [0] that outlined some of the reasons why that happened.
Two of the main reasons outlined were: (1) As more and more people started selling on the site, items started to become commodities with fixed prices. So even old antiques started to have a fixed value. This encouraged more people to just buy it now. (2) Even by the mid 2000's, when ebay was still considered mainly an auction site, only a very small fraction of sales were made by auctions. Something around 90% of sales were buy-it-now new items. This meant that their real success was in buy-it-now and they started to focus on that. (Don't quote me on the numbers in the second part, I will try to get more accurate ones later).
So they had a lot of initial success in being an auction site, but there isn't really much of an market for a general purpose auction site. And once you become a succesful auction site, you basically stop being a auction site.
[0] I cannot remember the name right now and I cannot find it. It was about providing real world examples of famous economic papers. It covered wide ranges of topics about used cars prices, trading in prison camps, ebay. It was released in 2016.
That's interesting. But, paradoxically, I stopped using eBay when it stopped being an auction site. The possibility of getting a rare deal, plus the "game" of bidding, was what made it attractive.
Amusingly, seeing eBay's profitability early on, Amazon tried to build on an eBay wannabe product and failed miserably at auctions. eBay has had the segment to itself ever since. Why didn't Amazon solely focus on being the best retailer it could be, instead of pursuing a foray into auctions? They couldn't help themselves, they saw the $$$ eBay was earning, as Bezos did with the iPhone margins.
And while I fully understand the reasons for the valuation difference, I still find it hilarious that eBay is generating roughly as much net income annually as Amazon, at 1/12th the valuation.
Reasons I use ebay for:
1. Discounted gift cards,
2. Cheap imports from China.
As a buyer I have been happy with ebay, things take a while to come but are generally well before the estimated time and a lot of stuff is much cheaper than Amazon.
As per returns/bad goods, Sellers are generally willing to send a replacement item if the original has an issue
This doesn't make sense to me except as a marketing move.
For new items eBay's advantage is that you can buy in low volume straight from china (if you don't mind waiting a month) or from an importer who's running their operation out of a storage locker or basement. The prices are reflective of the decreased overhead compared to selling on Amazon (or some other "less flea-market like" option).
If you're shopping for something and don't want to wait for it to ship from China odds are you could already find it on eBay cheaper than Amazon in the first place.
This move is just publicizes and existing advantage.
>Found it for less? Here’s what you do: (... list of too much work ..)
Why would i go through all that work for just a match? If I'm only going to get the same price, I'm buying from Amazon/Walmart where I dont have to 1) contact someone, nor get the difference as a "coupon".
Pretty weird. I sure wouldn't buy food from Ebay. Or mainstream electronics, or razor blades, since almost 100% of the stock on Ebay are counterfeits. That doesn't leave a lot, mostly just durable goods, like tools, lab equipment, etc.
I've only spent single-digit hundreds on Ebay in the last ten years. Not because the prices were too high, but because I didn't trust the goods. This is a big splashy initiative solving precisely the wrong problem.
Definitely read that title as "Ebay will match Amazon’s, Walmart’s and others’ prices on over $50K items" or put another way "Ebay will match Amazon’s, Walmart’s and others’ prices on items over $50K".
But I don't buy on Amazon only because of price. I buy for 2-day shipping, peace of mind on returns, and a consistent experience across the app and website.
That's cool. I still won't buy or sell anything on ebay as long as scammers are so prevalent.
I had a sealed collector's edition of StarCraft II that I wanted to sell a few years after the game came out. I knew that there was a very significant chance that if I sold it on ebay, some scam buyer would get it, open it, redeem the codes for all the in-game loot, then file a claim saying the item was not as described and that the codes were already redeemed.
Instead, I sold it through Amazon, using their Fulfilled by Amazon service. That way, Amazon will have verified that the game was still sealed and refuse a refund. It cost me a considerable amount in fees (IIRC, I sold it for $350 but only received $300), but it was worth it for piece of mind.
Though FWIW, some people have told me I still could have gotten scammed, it just became a little less likely.
I have found eBay to be the best way to get the maximize money selling stuff. If you can wait the auction week, just let it run and get the most money. I have sold the most random stuff on there and found buyers. I only use eBay to buy used cell phones (Android testing), but for selling it pays off.
Phone cases and batteries are usually selling much cheaper on ebay than Amazon Marketplace. A lot of them are obviously fakes, but even the real ones are a good 20-30% cheaper.
Amazon is even worse, because sometimes there's no way to tell if items is original or fake and end up getting fake for same price as original. On eBay you can mostly safely assume it's fake, so at least you get what you pay for.
Here's what I don't get. Why do a price match guarantee? Why not just price your items lower? Or do a "match" where you guarantee every item for 10 cents cheaper than your competitors?
> Why do a price match guarantee? Why not just price your items lower?
MAD [1]. Price-match guarantees are meant to deter price competition. If you cut your price below a price-matching competitor's, the time you have the best price will be short. After that, less profit for everyone (assuming similar cost structures). If, on the other hand, you match, everyone keeps their market share and margins.
Price competition in a price-matching market happens when someone has lower costs. It also happens when someone uses cheap capital to buy market share, intending to make up for lower margins with volume, e.g. to cover fixed costs.
> Don't we want companies to engage in price competition...?
The literature is mixed on the effects of price-matching guarantees [1][2]. The most compelling resolution I've read says "price-matching guarantees can facilitate monopoly pricing only if firms automatically match prices. If consumers must instead request refunds (thereby incurring hassle costs)...any increase in equilibrium prices due to firms’ price-matching policies will be small; often, no price increase can be supported" [3].
In any case, enforcing an automatic price-matching ban would be difficult. Would you prohibit firms from lowering their prices to match competitors'? If not, it would just take a few turns of the ratchet to send the message to would-be competitors (and consumers). Whether the consumer surplus from those ratchet turns are worth the enforcement cost is an open question.
>In any case, enforcing an automatic price-matching ban would be difficult. Would you prohibit firms from lowering their prices to match competitors'? If not, it would just take a few turns of the ratchet to send the message to would-be competitors (and consumers). Whether the consumer surplus from those ratchet turns are worth the enforcement cost is an open question.
Couldn't you just make a law saying "price-match guarantees are illegal"? Firms who explicitly move prices to match each other is fine with me, but the match guarantee is problematic. It seems that your conclusion is that companies use matching guarantees to implicitly collude but that even if we got rid of this they would still collude. But we should still stamp out collusion wherever we see it even if that puts us in a whack-a-mole situation.
What OP is saying is that this isn't competitive, rather it's a way to signal to other participants not to cut their prices. They can't do this outright because that would be collusion and violate anti-trust laws. OP referenced MAD which is the cold war tactic of mutually assured destruction. Basically, if you nuke me I nuke you back and we all die...so nobody nukes anyone. This is the same but with price competition. If you cut your prices to try to gain market share, I'll cut mine too. You'll gain no market share but you will lose revenue.
We want companies to engage in price competition. Companies don't want to engage in price competition. They want to be able to sell items for as much as possible. Price match guarantee is a legal way for companies to collude on prices.
> Don't we want companies to engage in price competition though?
As consumers, absolutely we do. But the person asking the question asked why companies don't do that, and the answer is that it's a bad business decision for them.
Because not only can advertise your price matching feature and get more customers, but you charge your normal prices to the 90% of people who don't bother to price match.
Basically you can have your cake and eat it too. (To some extent)
Doesn't that seem like some form of tacit collusion though? In this case it seems the price match flips the competitive environment so that competitors raise prices instead of lowering them.
Agreed. Prices being equal, why would I go with eBay? Their customer service and return policies are awful. It's 10x worse if you pay through PayPal. Amazon is basically no questions asked.
I agree with you. Many of my racing friends get prices online and then have Discount Tire price match. I think that's stupid. I'd rather support the vendor that prices things "right" in the first place.
We sell on eBay and have seen a slight uptick in sales with their last media campaign. However, I still question the company as a whole. For instance, I wonder if eBay will ever enforce their "prohibited goods" policies.
There is a huge market for "discounted" lego on eBay and the bulk of these are probably "stolen" (from Walmart to boot). If you don't believe me just google stolen lego and read up.
I think this is going to lead to some interesting pricing conditions in the market, ones that don't work well for retail locations like Walmart.
I wonder if heating up competition and shakeups in the retail sector means that margins have gotten so thin that the only way to survive going forward is through massively-scaled automation and innovative presentation and delivery that limits real-estate footprints as much as possible. Another factor I've been unsuccessfully trying to nail down is if disposable income and velocity of money has declined for a broad enough swath of the population that we're seeing a gradual collapse towards an increasing percentage of incomes going towards essentials over time.
All this excitement in online retailing reminds me of yield chasing investors; the excitement appears as growth- and margin-chasing, and in the meantime the "plodding" sectors (and their associated populations) are overlooked. For example, I don't see a shift to online with dollar stores.
The only reasons I even think about going through the ebay process is because either their price is significantly better than I can get on Amazon, or it is an unusual thing I can't get at Amazon (mostly used stuff). Most of that irritation comes from their desire to get me to use Paypal.
yeah sucks to be ebay: No innovations for auctions over the last 10 years, got more and more expensive to put stuff on and with trying to be also a 'marketplace' it is sucking more and more.
