Has ebay been taken over by amazon?

Question

It seems more and more of the item I buy from ebay are drop shipped by amazon? Is that happening to anyone else? Also, sellers are listing their items as here in the US and then shipping them from China, India, etc. I would not mind if they told the truth, I wouldn't buy from them as I try to buy from US sellers only. I am beginning to think ebay has been taken over by amazom?

mr_lincoln · Answer

Hi @scarrara What kind of things are you buying???

eburtonlab · Answer

@scarrara

It may not be possible to always identify in advance those sellers who drop-ship, but it is possible to identify some common characteristics of illicit retail drop-shippers or other under-performing sellers, and thus avoid the worst of them.

Often they can be spotted by a combination of low feedback number, free shipping of heavy items where it would not be profitable to use retail shipping, use of stock photos, high handling time (not necessarily if they are using Amazon or Walmart, though), poor feedback received with complaints of delays and wrong items or out of stock cancellations, very odd item selection and/or quantities like items were chosen at random from a catalog, canned item descriptions scraped from another site that exactly match many other similar listings, differences between registration location on the feedback page and item location (or vague item location -- like "US, United States"), or inability to answer even basic questions about the items being sold.