It's true, each marketplace has their problems.
In my experience, the bigger problems with both marketplaces:
Amazon: Very vulnerable to abuse by foreign sellers. For example, China sellers do frivilous claims against honest sellers, where sellers have to provide large amounts of documentation to prove their items as authentic. Meanwhile, you report a China-based seller for legitimately breaking copyright, and the claims don't go anywhere, as Amazon is not able to confirm or deny authenticity.
The other major issue with Amazon, is in regards to Customer Service. The CS reps on the phone will straight up lie because they send a survey after phone calls.
In truth, the CS reps do not have the power to do anything. They can 100% understand your case, but even they must send to their Seller Performance team to do anything.
This is where the problem comes in. The seller performance CS system is somewhat automated. I've had supervisors write appeals with me for the Seller Performance team, and even though you hit every requirement, it is automatically rejected.
You are literally unable to speak to someone who has the ability to help you, and getting past their automated systems is the biggest challenge.
When we used to sell on Amazon, we had a very obvious case - a manufacturer made a claim on one of our items for copyright, when our item was a DIFFERENT brand than the manufacturer! It was an open and shut case.
It still took us well over a month to get past the automated system to have it resolved.
EBay: EBay's customer service, often times, surpasses Amazon's. You can actually speak to people who have the ability to solve most issues.
EBay is a bit more problematic with policies. Often times the policies are very unfair to sellers, and even in situations where you have hard evidence, it is not accepted. On Amazon, if you use FBA, you can use their image verification system to be protected. On eBay, you are 100% unprotected in the same cases.
In 2018, eBay has many new problems due to the increased outsourcing of their development, and accelerated rate of change.
Amazon has much less huge technical issues compared to eBay. Their development team & server infrastructure is very obviously better than eBay's. Their changes are typically well tested. EBay's changes are most of the time untested & bug filled. Instead of fixing these issues before moving on, eBay keeps rolling out change after change, introducing more & more bugs.
Which is part of the problem. EBay technical team used to call us back on rare occasions. Now eBay's tech team does not do that at all.
EBay also has the new catalog team this year. This team is also outsourced. If you have catalog issues? Too bad. Nobody can help you.
There's no department overseeing the tech team. There's no department overseeing the catalog team. If you are having trouble with either team, you are simply out of luck.
This is a contrast to Amazon. Amazon is jumping through hoops to get past their automated CS systems, but if you get past their systems, you will promptly get assistance. On eBay, you can be escalated to every department, but even those departments, the best they can do is email the outsourced team and hope for a response.
EBay also does much more search manipulation. Some are still arguing this, but it is extremely obvious this year if you simply search your own items and sort by price. It's not really something that can be argued anymore. And it's very bad if you have buyers contacting you because they could not find your items, and the items that are showing up for them are higher prices than yours.
We had technical issues for many months this year, and the eBay CSR's told me directly that the Utah office's CS team believes they have found a common denominator with all the accounts facing visibility issues this year. They repeatedly are escalating it to the tech team. The tech team is simply rejecting it. So their hands are tied.
We have had catalog issues this year as well. Since before the Spring update in March we have been requesting. Right now we have 3+ cases open (1 was recently merged in to these 3 last week). Not a single case has been resolved. In all these months, we're still not showing up in the new catalog properly.
EBay also has put additional requirements upon us that our competitors do not have. We asked some of our partners (who are also top sellers in our category) and they have confirmed that their branded items appeared in the new catalog no questions asked. An ex-employee of ours, on a new eBay store under 6 months old, with a completely new brand that was not registered yet, was added to the new catalog no questions asked.
Meanwhile, our brand was the #1 selling brand in the category over the last 4-5 years, and after many months of requesting to be added to the catalog, we had additional requirements put upon us. We even had to provide eBay information about where our items are manufactured! This is a huge issue for us. Not only is it unfair that our competitors did not have to provide this, but asking for manufacturing information is a very iffy situation. There's NDA's in place so I'm not even sure we are rightfully allowed to share that information. But we did provide eBay with what they asked, and STILL have not had our situation resolved.
This is a potential conflict of interests, because now eBay has information on where the top selling brand in the category is being manufactured, and could use that information to their own benefit.
On Amazon, if you got past their automated systems, there's 0% chance that you would not have received assistance in as many months as we have spent trying to resolve these issues.
Furthermore, eBay's upcoming change to SNAD FVF's is unfair beyond a point that Amazon policies have went. Becuase you have absolutely no way to fight SNAD's, and if the customer opens as a SNAD and even admits it was not a SNAD, you are STILL stuck with the defect, no way to fight it, and could have FVF's added on.
This is a huge security vulnerability as well, because buyers can abuse this situation and potentially force other sellers to have increased FVF's, basically making it impossible to compete in the category.
Regarding "bribes", well it's pretty well documented at this point that eBay does have some favortism for extremely large sellers as well. Feedback being manipulated, or defects being removed. A quick google search finds many examples of this. It sounds very much like the Amazon situation.
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With that said, its true, both markets do have their advantages and disadvantages.
Part of the discontent we have with eBay personally, is that eBay was actually a very great place to do business, until the recent changes this year. Between broken features, technical issues affecting visibility that caused us to lose half our staff, catalog issues that have been impossible to receive a response, run-arounds from employees, 3+ high ranking representatives disappearing when helping us, lies from supervisors (where eBay admit we were not being treated fairly), and policies becoming more and more difficult to do business... it has been a very hectic year.
It also seems many of the changes are counter-productive. They keep saying they want to compete for market share with Amazon. But their changes this year have done nothing except make eBay prices go UP. EBay's one advantage over Amazon was the prices. They have basically given up that advantage, in order to try to offer better shipping and return options for their customers. But their shipping & returns methods STILL do not meet the bar set by Amazon. So now eBay lost their price advantage, and is still 2nd rate in Shipping/Returns. Meanwhile, the focus on shipping & returns still has some obvious issues with the policies being fair for sellers, and these have not been addressed.
I'm hoping 2018 is just growing pains for eBay, and they will get on track in 2019. But I have to be honest, I am very worried. The recent changes are not helping them achieve their stated goals. Making things harder on sellers is not the way to grow eBay, as sellers are the core to eBay as they do not provide their own merchandise. Raising prices for buyers is not the way to grow traffic on eBay either. Trying to emulate Amazon is destined to fail, as customers have no reason to shop on a 2nd rate Amazon rather than just using Amazon directly. And eBay is giving away their biggest advantages they had - big pricing, and a marketplace where sellers of unique or rare items could find success.
