The same could be said for eBay. Buyer of my MBP opened a claim against me cause I didn't include the OS install disks (which Apple stopped shipping years earlier). Had to bend over backwards to prevent this con artist from keeping the laptop and money. Now I don't sell shit on eBay.
You are identifying eBay with Paypal. If you accept, say, only bank transfer, the worst thing that can happen (in "regular" conditions; of course there are exceptional cases) is a negative feedback.
I've sold hundreds of items on eBay, almost all payable only via bank transfer/cash, and never had serious problems. If I get a smaller audience, well, that's an acceptable compromise in the long term.
They used to. But lately as they've spun off paypal they've been trying to distance from it because paypal takes a seperete cut of the transaction too.
What if there was an EBay like action site where you couldn't just sign up, and rather someone had to "vouch" for you? When fraud starts happening, you can see who vouched them in and shut down the network. If people start selling vouches online, then you suspend both them and the person who had the bad judgment to vouch them in originally. (maybe they can keep using the site, but not vouch, etc.)
The site would also collect identifying information about everyone who transacts while using it. Maybe phone number, or driver license photo. You are not allowed to have more than one account, although you can have multiple "personas" if you wish, each with their own ratings. (but creating multiple personas cannot fool site anti-abuse staff, who can all obviously see the same account behind it) Creating an account is hard. The site would employ advanced protections against account takeover.
Whenever you buy and sell from someone, perhaps you can see the "7 degrees of Kevin Bacon" style interpersonal connections that link you to them via vouches. If fraud happens, it makes all of your connections look bad, and there would be an incentive for them to shun you, if they care about retaining their access to the site. When fraudsters get onto the platform, you can always trace their vouches back to the "bad apple" who showed poor judgment and began inviting the wrong certain people. Indeed, perhaps in order to retain access to the platform overtime, you have to keep getting vouches every once in a while.
Big sites would not use these policies since they would invoice friction on purchases in result in lower conversion. But perhaps there is a niche somewhere for a highly trusted online auction house.
I wonder how far a system like this could go in stamping out fraud online. It seems like the problem with fraudsters is that they can always keep coming back with new accounts that everyone is forced to treat with the certain default degree of trust, and then the fraudsters exploit that. If you made it difficult for each person in the world to have more than one account on the service, then anyone engaging in repeat fraud would very quickly stand out as such. (As many personas as you want, but only one account)
Can't have both sides simultaneously, both a marketplace with too many scammers requiring a complicated solution AND A clean marketplace.
Or phrased another way, its like the gun control problem where the only people following the gun control laws are the non-criminals you have no need to fear, and the people who don't play by the rules are the only source of problems.
Facebook already lets you post for-sale ads in a group if it set up for it, it even reminds you from time to time to take down your ad if you have sold it. They do not take any commission for it and rely on you to you use your common sense as if you were selling in a newspaper.
It sounds like new users would have to rub a bunch of bots just to start making their first sales, leading to high demand for a user friendly botting ecosystem
I once sold some parts on eBay from a washing machine I broke up, including the busted motor controller board - this particular model of board was not very sophisticated, but it was difficult to source and very expensive, so I sold it 'for spares or repair', stating that the main triac had blown and taken a track with it, so the board would either need some competent rework, or be stripped for what was still working. The guy whe bought it complained that I had sold a faulty part..and ebay agreed so I had to refund him. I insisted the board was returned 'for inspection' and just binned it. Too much hassle.
> I sold it 'for spares or repair'...complained that I had sold a faulty part..and ebay agreed so I had to refund him
Unfortunately even though eBay violated their own written policy by siding with him, this is SOP for them. They have a decades-long unwritten policy of shitting all over their sellers. This became apparent when they removed sellers' ability to leave negative or neutral feedback for buyers, which led to a huge influx of scammy buyers. eBay didn't care because more buyers means more revenue, and the sellers who had built their entire business on eBay had little choice but to stick around for the shafting.
1. Craigslist is slow. On eBay, you're done in 7 days. It can be pretty hard to get full market value on Craigslist in anywhere near that amount of time, if at all, especially if you're in a smaller city.
2. People on Craigslist are flaky. I have no idea what compels someone to email a seller with interest, schedule a time to view an item, and then just not show up, but they do it all the time. Why even bother?
3. People on Craigslist are needy. On eBay, I list and then I sell. I am selling two items on Craigslist right now. You should see my phone's messaging app. It's full of the unknown numbers of un-serious buyers asking pointless questions they'll never follow up on.
4. People on Craigslist are, well, people. That means I have to meet them somewhere. Arranging that always ends up being more difficult than a trip to the post office.
I view the tradeoff like this:
eBay = simple, easy, fast, but with a nonzero likelihood of total loss
Craigslist = nearly guaranteed to be difficult, slow, and annoying, but with a very low chance of total loss
I don't think it's an easy decision. They are definitely not interchangeable.
> 2. People on Craigslist are flaky. I have no idea what compels someone to email a seller with interest, schedule a time to view an item, and then just not show up, but they do it all the time. Why even bother?
I was moving and had to sell a lot of stuff fast. I scheduled around 6 people to come look at a futon. 0 showed. Even after I offered to give it away for free. Huge waste of time.
> 2. People on Craigslist are flaky. I have no idea what compels someone to email a seller with interest, schedule a time to view an item, and then just not show up, but they do it all the time. Why even bother?
I was beginning to think that buyers on Craigslist are instructed to act this way. :P
Even so, there's a good possibility of old-school fraud, with fake cashier's checks, or getting mugged. A recent trend has been for police departments to allow CL transactions to take place in their parking lots.
I do all of my Craigslist transactions in the lobby of my bank. They have cameras and a security guard, and as an added bonus I can deposit the cash right away.
I read that when it was posted, and I got the I pressing the conman was pulling some trick to claim he had informed the other party, but hadn't actually done so. If that's the case then you'd need ESP to avoid being scammed.
In my (fortunately limited) eBay selling experience, you also just have some very stupid people. I got into a hassle with selling a brand new digital camera to someone because they refused to understand (in barely coherent English) that the "digital zoom" in the specs cut & pasted from the manufacturer was not a "zoom on the outside" to use his terminology.
I haven't sold on eBay for ages. There's very little I want to sell that is worth enough to go through the hassle though I'm not sure there are generally good alternatives. (For used photo gear, I'd use one of the online stores. I won't get as much but there's much less risk and hassle.)
Yep. When I sold my last Iphone, the guy said the wifi had connection issues (It was the version where your finger could reduce the signal). I told him that that was a known problem with the phone, but if he still had problems with it, he could take it to an apple store as the phone still had applecare+. He said the apple people are mean and he didn't trust them. He kept trying to get me to compensate him $50 for a repair until finally he ended up returning. So annoying.
Another lesson about ebay: Don't ever ship something to an address other than the one ebay has. My brother sold his phone and the guy asked him to ship it to "his daughter's house for a present". Turns out the account had been hacked and now he had just sent his phone to a scammer.
The last horror story i have: The same brother sold an iphone on ebay and the guy claimed it came with the screen cracked. Ebay sided with him on the return and my brother received a letter in return with nothing in it. Fortunately for him that time, ebay just let him keep the money and the scammer keep the phone (albeit, after 2 hours of arguing with their customer service).
TLDR: I've had way too terrible experiences on ebay to ever use them again.
I lied, i have one more minor horror story with buying too. I bought my rMBP off of ebay for a pretty good price. A few months after I bought it, it stopped booting and would show a grey screen with a question mark on a folder (means there is no boot drive to load from). When I took it into the apple store, I found out that this laptop had been dropped right before I bought it and had to have like $1500 worth of repairs as it was having the same problem.
So not only do you have to worry about scammers, you have to deal with a market for lemons [1]. (Quite ironic now that I think about it as that is one of my favorite economic articles)
Selling on eBay only makes sense in bulk, with hundreds or thousands of SKUs. I gave up selling in low volume there long ago; nowadays for phones, tablets, and watches I use Swappa, and for anything else it's Craigslist or local "online garage sale" groups on social media.
The company I left last year sells the bulk of their products on Amazon, and maybe 1/4th of their inventory (same type of products) is listed on eBay. Amazon sales are relatively smooth with much less friction per sale than eBay. It's gotten better since they went with a sales aggregator service, but they still barely break even on eBay as opposed to Amazon and physical storefront sales, when they figure in labor and time costs. When I worked there the sales personnel were able to list five or six items on Amazon in the time it took to list one item on eBay.
On eBay, yes, because even today eBay still requires you to photograph the actual item you're listing if it's not new and factory sealed, and a lot of their merchandise is open-box. The switch to a sales aggregator service helped, but they still have to go hands-on with the bulk of their eBay listings.
eBay really doesn't make sense for a larger business unless they have thousands of the exact same, new sealed merchandise, and that tends to be the cheap mass produced garbage that you find on wish.com and similar sites. The small to mid closeouts wholesaler doesn't have a place on the site anymore, which is why many are moving to Amazon. Unfortunately, as this article points out, scammy buyers are just as much a problem there.
I've found ebay is a great place to sell smaller, cheaper things that I probably couldn't find a buyer for on craigslist. Stuff of lower value (<$50) that I wouldn't mind losing anyway really, like an extra laptop battery or an old cell phone. For those things, it's not worth the effort to find a craigslist buyer and meet up somewhere, but tossing it into a flat rate box is very easy.
As things get more expensive on eBay, you become a bigger target for scammers and stand to lose much more, so it becomes a terrible option both because of how many scammers there are and their policy of screwing over sellers. Also the more expensive it is the more likely I'll be able to move it on craigslist which is a sure thing.
On the other hand for the odd item at less than $50 or so, I can't be bothered spending the time and effort to list on eBay. I'll just take it down to Goodwill or whatever. Not worth my time.
Whenever I sell any of my electronics now, I do it via Craigslist or specialty forums - Hardforum and Anandtech have pretty large For Sale/Trade communities and they all use Heatware for feedback.
