@t-man-x wrote:
It's typical stuff where eBay has failed honestly. I mean what have been peoples' complaints from the beginning? Ripoff shipping costs, sellers claiming items were shipped that weren't, etc.
eBay has dealt with these things. Why do you think that sellers are now charged FVF on shipping? So that there is no point to shorting the item price and padding shipping and handling. The sellers gain no advantage on their eBay fees, and they just turn off a lot of buyers. Sellers are free to defeat themselves, as they should be.
As for sellers not shipping, are you familiar with how the Money Back Guarantee works? If buyers are competent, they file for a refund, and the seller not only has to give back the money, he gets disciplined for it. The Item Not Received dispute works, but it's up to buyers to know that it's there for them.
Had they cracked down on shady sellers long ago Amazon would probably be either bankrupt or it would be an online Barnes and Noble. Instead eBay is losing market share while Amazon is looking at possibly 50% of all online sales within the next few years.
To some degree, that is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Amazon began as a conventional mail-order merchant, selling goods it controlled through means that it controlled. Yes, they started Marketplace to make themselves more like eBay, but they still have flexibility that eBay doesn't have because buyers can buy directly from Amazon as well as from Marketplace sellers.
eBsy remains at its heart Pierre Omayadar's marketplace for Pez dispenser collectors. In fact, there are many times when I believe that eBay would work better if it gave up trying to be all things to all people and return to its roots, being content as a marketplace for collectibes, an Etsy for nerds of varous stripes. eBay began as a peer-to-peer marketplace, with all of the strengths and weaknesses of that model, and that is what it remains in spite of everything that has happened in the last 20 years.
As a result, eBay does not and cannot control its sellers as tightly as Marketplace does (and in spite of what the whiners here will say, Marketplace is a harsher seller environment than eBay). As a result, eBay sellers are more free to experiment than they are on Marketplace, and to that degree eBay is still a place where you can find things that you wouldn't on Marketplace.
