As a buyer, eBay is easy to use and there’s no question about that. You can peruse the products, pick what you want, buy and most of the time you’ll get exactly what you paid for. Of course it’s true that pretty much everyone has a horror story or two (or more) from getting bad product from an eBay seller, but fortunately these days those stories are far fewer in frequency.
As a seller, eBay has become, simply put, a huge pain in the ass to use. If you haven’t used eBay in a while, I can almost guarantee that when posting anything for sale these days you’ll probably get so disgusted with the process that you simply won’t bother and elect to use Craigslist instead.
I’ll use myself as an example here.
I had two Radio Shack scanners that used to belong to my late father. Both had their original boxes. One was a 200-channel base home scanner and the other a 100-channel mobile scanner. Both were in really good condition and I wanted to sell both as a set.
I made a conscious decision not to even bother with eBay for these because of all the annoyances of using the eBay system. Leaving aside the fact that I would have had to add in extra cost for packaging and shipping, posting items for sale on eBay simply isn’t easy. To post even one item for sale takes a good ten minutes, and on top of that you have to sell items “the eBay way” (those who know the site know exactly what I’m talking about), and it’s further complicated by the fact that other sellers will be most likely competiting against you, and you’ll always lose.
On Craigslist, it’s a whole lot simpler. Get an account, verify with your cell phone, post the item (which takes less than 5 minutes), done.
I was able to sell my scanners in less than a week through Craigslist and got exactly the price I wanted for them. And I didn’t even have to ship the things because the buyer was willing to pick them up locally – which I actually appreciated because he saw for himself that the equiment worked before the purchase was made.
It’s not that I haven’t sold things via eBay in the past. Heck, I even sold a car through that site once. But it seems to me that years ago eBay was a whole lot simpler and seller-friendly. These days if you want to sell through eBay it’s almost mandatory you have to operate through there as a business owner. The eBay site is absolutely not friendly to regular Joe and Jane sellers anymore.
Now it could be I’m just flat-out wrong about all this. Maybe eBay hasn’t changed, and I’m the one who’s different and not the site itself. However I can’t deny that the hoops you have to jump through just to get an item listed on the eBay site these days is rather complicated; I know it used to be simpler.
My question to you, the reader, is this: Has eBay from a sellers point of view changed for the worse? I personally think it has.
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It is a royal pain. Not to mention getting a fair price, eBays slice, or buyers sending something back because they do not have a clue to what their doing and then they write a negative review. The whole thing needs to be revamped in my opinion. The bad thing about Craigslist is the human contact so you have to be smart about that in today’s world.
Too annoying not To annoying, sorry if this comment is too annoying
The fact that they (eBay) can tell me (the seller) on how much i am going to charge for shipping AND the fact that i can not leave negative feedback as a seller, for someone that does not pay for a item and have to go thru the non-paying bidder process.
Ebay has definitely change. Especially for me since I was an Ebook Seller. I used to write ebooks and sell them on Ebay. Before, I would sell the ebooks for about $3.00 bucks a copy. Which was awesome in the past because I could email them to my customers and save on the shipping.
Now ebay wants me to physically mail the ebook on a CD to my customers, which the postage will eat some of my profit. So after paypal fees, ebay fees, and postage, I will earn a whooping $1.00 for each sell. Not only that but customers who couldn’t read and were expecting an actual book not an ebook burned on a CD, they would leave me negative feedback and Ebay couldn’t help me with that.
The main annoyance to me with ebay is the fact that they are trying soooo hard to be like amazon with the “shopping cart” button thing. It’s a freakin’ auction site and not a regular e-commerce site. This is why they are making it extremely difficult for small time sellers to do business. They only want the mega sellers on there as vendors.
Another thing is the fact that it’s sometimes hard to determine the location of the item (usually chinese sellers) or the rampant abuse of stock photo usage instead of pictures of the actual item. Reserve auctions need to go too. Most people won’t waste time on reserve auctions because of the wasted time for nothing. Usually the reserve price is real near the buy it now price (if one was listed).
Then you have the fees and charges that ebay is double dipping on, since they own PayPal. I checked into selling some small item around 14 dollars and after you add it all up between the both of them, I would have to mark up the cost around 15% or more to get what I wanted out of the item. Buying is usually not bad as long as you use some common sense and thoroughly read the auction description. The sellers are bound to this and any communication you have through ebay. The strict shipping fee thing is because of the old trick of starting an auction at .99 for an item and charging 100.00 for shipping so the seller would get what he wanted for an item and try to skirt the ripoff fees since they didn’t charge the fees on the shipping costs.
If they wanted to have an amazon-like store they should have made one and left ebay alone the way it was IMO.
The take over of Paypal or both joining is a big part of the problem.