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.
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.