Hello eBay community or otherwise, I have come to suggest something as a long-term seller of eBay, and only recently a buyer.
Due to the lack of punishment wrought upon international scam "artists", whether the initiative to solve this problem is not present or no problem is even perceived, the image of eBay and what its mission must be is looking grim in comparison to other online retailers. I am ashamed that the suggestions eBay serves by algorithm are the results of many International sellers having learned how to exploit this website to serve their listing above a more relevant, local listing.
To provide just a little bit of detail, and certainly not the whole story:
If you have ever chosen to sort an electronics search by "newest first", "ending soonest", so on and so forth, a plethora of Chinese listings may flood your results. Certainly, if China was the problem, which it is not, one could make it a habit to exclude all international listings with the Filter. The problem with these listings, in almost all cases, is that one of the following is taking place:
-A variety of often random products is listed as one, with a low-price item planted to put the listing on top of "lowest price" sort; for example, "$0.01-179.99" for a Samsung Galaxy S6(and other products?)
-A product listing, legitimate or otherwise, gets duplicated and set to be relisted in succession of itself in order to be the "newest" and "soonest to end" listing
-The provided photographs are stock or stolen images, and associated with these particular sellers is a reputation for dishonest "new" products that could have been discredited with original photos(or listed honestly in the first place)
-The spam of listings you are seeing have already been bought and returned, and this is round 2, 3, etc.; Nothing really is stopping the sellers
-Seller's Feedback rating associated with the above scam spam somehow manages to be enormous and positive, and it isn't until closer inspection that you notice the amount of negative feedback and what it pertains to; often the products are badly packaged, missing parts, not as described, never shipped, never contacted; the positive feedback looks suspicious and non-human
-As you escape the droves of horribly dishonest listings, your home page is still plagued with what eBay thinks you want to see, which is 9/10 times an international listing as-described above despite not clicking on too many of these things. I personally never see recommendations leading me to low-feedback, honest sellers with cool products.
I was going to suggest a way to deal with this, and even wrote a loaded statement or two before backspacing it away. However, I encourage anyone with challenges to what I have written to think about the platform of eBay in the eyes of a consumer, and go see for yourself. It isn't fair that you are more likely to get scammed than not, even despite the measures that have been taken to prevent that. I don't think they are enough, and in the long-run have caused damage to online commerce in North America and otherwise.
If you feel the same way, or radically adverse, then perhaps you can speak up about what you think of eBay as a potential or seasoned buyer of "stuff". What do your friends think? Unfortunately, everyone I know personally avoids eBay due to its reputation.
