This is anecdotal, because it's only my experience from being a long time eBay user (buying and selling).
1 Buying on ebay is nice and safe because eBay protects the buyer and will almost always rule in the buyers favour.
2. Selling on eBay is fraught with problems: The Seller is not protected from scams at all. It's easy for a buyer to buy something, and they can flag to eBay that their account was compromised. Because eBay own PayPal they then just yank back the payment until the issue is resolved, and there's nothing a Seller can do about it. See point #1
3. If you are just having a clear-out and want 'some money' for old stuff you no longer want, then yeah it's still worth putting stuff on eBay. You may not get top-dollar for what you sell but at least stuff doesn't end up in landfill.
4. Trying to sell on eBay as a new business is a complete no-no these days. The big powersellers are so entrenched that for most product lines they dominate the search results. eBay now lets you 'boost' your items for an extra fee, which is basically a scam to paper over their broken ranking systems.
5. If you are a new 'business' seller, you are limited to a set number of items up for auction at any one time, which severely limits your ability to get exposure in listings. This is a crazy policy. It is like buying shop premises in a mall, but only being allowed to stock up one shelf inside the shop for 6 months. It's just not a viable start-up situation.
6. If you want to sell as a business, doing that via Amazon is a much better bet these days. Depending on how much you want to pay you can either just list your item and manage everything else yourself, or send a palette of your stock to Amazon and let them deal with everything for you ('fullfilled by Amazon'). tbh, I've not doing this in practice yet, as my current stock doesn't qualify, but it certainly seems more new-business friendly than eBay.
Here's my view of the scams. Modern retail has created the expectation that you are entitled to a refund for anything, no questions asked. A retailer can take a statistical view of this situation, and price their goods according to the expectation of how many refunds they have to eat.
Eating refunds is preferable to being strict about them, because the freewheeling refund policy invites more sales overall. This may also be a policy of the credit card companies, since they want to do more business as well.
eBay wants your experience to be just like buying from any online retailer, so they impose the same policy on their sellers. Naturally this invites the scammers. But the calculus is the same: The retailer eats the scams and bakes the cost into the selling price.
The hardship is for the "little guy" who wants to sell a few things. They can't take a statistical view -- a single loss could kill them, or eat all of their spare time dealing with it. But the little guy isn't eBay's focus. It was announced long ago in the business press, that eBay was shifting their focus from being America's Yard Sale, to being more of a regular online retail space akin to Amazon (at the time).
My thought is that eBay works for sellers if you've got a big enough mark-up and enough sales to cover the cost of simply writing off the scams and refunds. For crap bought as surplus, or imported in bulk from China, the mark-up could be greater than 10x.
> eBay protects the buyer and will almost always rule in the buyers favour.
Exactly so. I've done a bit of buying and selling acoustic guitars, and would now only do "buyer collects".
I do this because several acquaintances have been scammed, mostly with the buyer claiming that the guitar wasn't in the case when it arrived. In each case, eBay has sided with the buyer.
So I've now given up eBay and found a local auction house that does regular musical instrument auctions... much less chance of being scammed there!
Good point, forgot about that. tbh, nothing changed after the spin off. eBay still seem to have direct control over how your paypal account gets/loses funds.
10 years ago, maybe. Paypal evolved into a full-service payments processor since.
(By "full-service", I am not saying good service; just that they offer a broad spectrum of services now.)
One irony is that eBay was originally very hostile to Paypal as they tried to get traction for their own Billpoint system. They even killed listings for having Paypal payment buttons in them.
Fast forward a few years... eBay becomes so protective of Paypal's de facto monopoly, they made it a policy violation to even mention accepting cash in a listing. (!)
1 Buying on ebay is nice and safe because eBay protects the buyer and will almost always rule in the buyers favour.
2. Selling on eBay is fraught with problems: The Seller is not protected from scams at all. It's easy for a buyer to buy something, and they can flag to eBay that their account was compromised. Because eBay own PayPal they then just yank back the payment until the issue is resolved, and there's nothing a Seller can do about it. See point #1
3. If you are just having a clear-out and want 'some money' for old stuff you no longer want, then yeah it's still worth putting stuff on eBay. You may not get top-dollar for what you sell but at least stuff doesn't end up in landfill.
4. Trying to sell on eBay as a new business is a complete no-no these days. The big powersellers are so entrenched that for most product lines they dominate the search results. eBay now lets you 'boost' your items for an extra fee, which is basically a scam to paper over their broken ranking systems.
5. If you are a new 'business' seller, you are limited to a set number of items up for auction at any one time, which severely limits your ability to get exposure in listings. This is a crazy policy. It is like buying shop premises in a mall, but only being allowed to stock up one shelf inside the shop for 6 months. It's just not a viable start-up situation.
6. If you want to sell as a business, doing that via Amazon is a much better bet these days. Depending on how much you want to pay you can either just list your item and manage everything else yourself, or send a palette of your stock to Amazon and let them deal with everything for you ('fullfilled by Amazon'). tbh, I've not doing this in practice yet, as my current stock doesn't qualify, but it certainly seems more new-business friendly than eBay.