Want to Understand What Ails the Modern Internet? Look at eBay | Hacker News Reader

Want to Understand What Ails the Modern Internet? Look at eBay

nytimes.com

137 pointscgs137 comments

I use eBay frequently. I have only bought things, but I want to sell things, however I'm terrified of getting scammed. And eBay does nothing to ameliorate those fears. I got as close as taking pictures, writing a description, and stopped at the last step before putting my item for sale. Everything I've read suggests that it's simply not worth it to try to sell things because you have no protection from scammers.

As a buyer, however, it's great so unless you have enough margins to protect you from scammers, and if you just want to sell one-off things like eBay from the 2000s, then don't bother.

As a technology platform, eBay is an embarrassment. They released features like collections that didn't work on their production website and it looks like they got rid of it entirely now. They have a half-built API that has confusing documentation, and their APIs that do work aren't very useful. Nothing about their site has changed in 20 years, and they're waiting to die, like Yahoo. I'm surprised Amazon or even etsy hasn't been able to destroy them yet, since they're a stationary target that hasn't done anything meaningful in over a decade.

Their UI is so bad, they have to use a phony mockup app in their TV commercials. Watch the commercials where a woman sees a fashion item on the street and then buys it on eBay. Just try doing anything like that on the actual site. Their entire query mechanism has had severe breakages for years. You couldn't possibly construct a search that could isolate a particular shoe or handbag or whatever without traversing thousands of dissimilar items.

Tickets are a great example. I've done thousands of ticket buys and sales alike on eBay since the 1990s. But now, eBay actually sabotages ticket searches by polluting every event with hundreds of fake "classified ads" for StubHub (which they own) so that people give up and go to StubHub instead, more than tripling their cut (at the same price point). And you can't exclude those shell ads, which don't even represent actual tickets, from your searches anymore.

And the fraud problem is very real.

There's good and bad in the UI. Some of the features like being able to search for items in a set price range are very handy and don't seem to be available on other sites.

Most of their UI changes have been user hostile or added dark patterns. For instance where once you got local items and sellers by default, now it defaults to international and you have to change a setting to exclude overseas sellers. Almost everyone will want to shop nationally first. It's the same arrogant "knowing better" seen in Facebook's show recent posts constantly resetting.

Picking out one feature that they haven't ruined is poor consolation. As the other commenter notes Amazon has let you break down into price tiers for years. Most sites I shop at can do this.

eBay search results are better than Amazon however - but that is because Amazon's has become so awful.

> Almost everyone will want to shop nationally first. It's the same arrogant "knowing better" seen in Facebook's show recent posts constantly resetting.

A lot of people want to shop price first then see how much cost would increase by buying from someone already on the same continent.

Including shipping when sorting by price is the opposite of user-hostile and they've done this since forever, most online retailers don't do this.

Including shipping is indeed useful, but I was calling out changes, and as you say they've done that forever. Just about every change they've made in the last half decade that I can think of makes it less friendly.

I would be surprised if it's a lot that prefer default inclusion of international. They made the change right about the same time they made customs fees for international automatic and unavoidable. Makes me suspect that fee is including a hidden profit element in this dark pattern.

  Including shipping when sorting by price

Actually, they give search results preference to items with "free shipping" (their so-called "Fast and Free" cobrand) regardless of final price to the consumer.

That's possible on all sorts of sites, including Amazon as far back as I remember.

The fake ui for an ad seems like a pretty red herring. I’m not saying you’re wrong. That just seems like flimsy evidence. I mean, maybe they use a fake UI in the ad because it’s so good.

On a completely different note: the internet of commerce things has always felt like some sick mashup EvE Online and game of thrones. Not only is scamming and awful behavior allowed, it is encouraged by the way rules are enforced. The net is dark and full of terrors

Agree with all of your points plus the UI is massively inconsistent, not just in term of format, but different pages will give you different message count or items sold count, or one page will tell you you received a message and the message page will show nothing, it looks like something quickly hacked together in php in the old days. And I am not even talking about consistency between browser and iOS UI in term of information available.

Hadn’t use ebay for a long time and bought and sold a dozen items last month. Had to deal with scammers twice. One fake account winning an auction I was selling then failing to pay, forcing me to relist (I assume the scam is that a fraction of the users will ship before payment). Another fake account bidding seconds before the end on an auction I was bidding for a large amount, revealing everyone’s max bid limit, then cancelling the bid, and bidding £1 below my max bid limit to max me out (all within seconds). Unimpressed by ebay’ support reaction: “it is probably a new user who isn’t familiar with how ebay works”. Seriously? I even wondered if ebay wasn’t behind that fake account, then I thought that any decent programmer with access to the back end would do something more subtle than that to max out transaction prices, then I thought: but if it is the same guys who designed the rest of the website...

  ...revealing everyone’s max bid limit, then cancelling the bid

It's deliberate and common. This is why I, as most sellers, do only fixed-price listings anymore.

> This is why I, as most sellers, do only fixed-price listings anymore.

This.

I regularly buy on eBay and decided to sell a number of old hand tools. I have sold before, but not for a while. I put the the first tool as an auction to get the hang again, then waited 10 days for something to happen. During that time I purchased several items using buy it now and realised that I now AVOID auctions unless the items is particularly rare or special.

The BIN selling options interface seems to vary significantly depending on how you crate the listing: starting on somebody else's items and clicking "sell one like this" or creating a new listing from scratch, for instance.

But, yeah, I'm converted to Buy It Now as a buyer and a seller.

Yep - I had zero problems with fixed price on ebay with over a hundred listings. I sold my entire comic collection (over 2500 books) over the course of a year. The best compromise between auction and fixed price is setting fixed price with a "make an offer" option - then set the make offer option to reject all the low ballers automatically. :)

I avoid auction like the plague.

That makes sense but in my case the auction is also a price discovery thing. In the end I sold for about twice what I thought I could get from these items.

You can list for a high-end price and use the "best offer" feature to capture lower offers.

> One fake account winning an auction I was selling then failing to pay

I feel like auctions should be auto-pay. Or, at least have an option to list them that way. This reminds me of the time I was selling football tickets and someone did this. I had to scramble to sell these things after the person bid and never paid.

Tickets are obviously worth nothing after the event. It was a major headache, and I almost didn't sell them at all.

Doesn't help that half of the user panel hasn't been updated since the 90's/early 2000's. Some pages look relatively modern then some just look awful.

They've had a given typo ("choosen", in their end-item message) for at least fifteen years. I reported it to them in 2003.

Interesting that the public perception of trust has degraded so much as a seller. I've been a member since 2003 and buy small bits and bobs on there most weeks and go through phases of occasionally selling things maybe a couple of times a year when I need space / money - most recently an old computer and some guitar pedals.

I've only ever had a problem as a seller twice in all those years - one scammer insisting the cheque was in the post and demanding that I send the item immediately (and leaving bad feedback when I didn't) and another reporting the items being faulty despite being (incredibly cheap) untested vintage electronics for spares.

Neither time was I left out of pocket and I'd more than happily sell stuff on there again. But I have heard the horror stories and appreciate that I may have just been incredibly lucky.

That said, a few years back I did trip some kind of threshold and was automatically upgraded to a business account, which means that my "business" (aka home) address now appears prominently on all my listings. Apparently ebay have no way to downgrade it again and have asked me to just create a new account - throwing away 15 years' worth of positive feedback in the process...

My impression is that if you sell something of higher value, the scammers come out in droves. I tried to sell a DSLR through them, and the same scammer kept winning the auction and it took weeks to get out from under that bogus bid. I ended up selling on craigslist. Yeah, I had a few scammers, but they are easier to identify on CL, IMO.

I agree, it's mostly based on what you sell. Electronics like phones and cameras are notorious for this, while more niche items tend to be safer.

a few years back I did trip some kind of threshold and was automatically upgraded to a business account, which means that my "business" (aka home) address now appears prominently on all my listings. Apparently ebay have no way to downgrade it again and have asked me to just create a new account - throwing away 15 years' worth of positive feedback in the process...

Did they reach out to you? Did they threaten to ban your account for not listing as much as before?

I cant imagine going through the effort to do a clean up of accounts, but not have a way to fix them. Not even a manual one.

In the last two years, I've found that about 1 in 4 of my purchases from China will never arrive. Obtaining refunds is an easy process but frustrating. Many of the sellers will have rankings that make them seem trustworthy only to disappear completely. And we can also lay blame on the western hemisphere. Canada and USA postal systems bear the brunt of the costs of "free" delivery. They will give these packages low priority. Packages will languish for months and when items finally arrive, it can be difficult to arrange payment with the seller after a refund.

> In the last two years, I've found that about 1 in 4 of my purchases from China will never arrive.

I tend to use AliExpress for buying things directly from China. It's not always the easiest site to use if you want to make complex queries, but I've only had three packages out of a couple of hundred purchases not arrive - one the seller resent, the other two I flagged as not having arrived and got my money back pretty quickly - the site keeps your payment in it's own escrow service, only releasing it to the seller when you confirm receipt.

I wonder if there's anything unique about your situation or just a lot of bad luck. Are you buying generally higher-end items? What does the tracking reveal in terms of where in the process the item disappeared? In the US or China? Or was it just never tendered for delivery?

I've bought a lot of stuff from China on ali and ebay, but no single item over $30 in value. So far I'm at 100% in terms of delivered items. A lot of crushed packaging, but no damaged items. Maybe 95% in terms of on-time delivery.

I have had good experiences with items that cost over $50. They tend to arrive quickly. For instance, a tray of CPUs was shipped to me in less than 36 hours for $10 total shipping.

For me, it is the inexpensive items with free shipping that seem to be the most risky. I also probably bid on auctions rather than fixed prices items more than the average person.

>about 1 in 4 of my purchases from China will never arrive.

What country you in? For me (in USA), the non-arrival rate is well under 1%.

>Canada and USA postal systems bear the brunt of the costs of "free" delivery.

That makes no sense. You have either been infected by propaganda, or are a propagandist yourself.

The US postal system does bear much of the cost: https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/11/05/how-the-...

And for Canada:

https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/canada-post-reveals-it-is-the-rea...

As for the propaganda comment, isn't it a bit on the nose for someone to make that comment with a username Правда? Please let me now if you are having problem with colloquialism, comrade. да?

I have some troubles with colloquialisms.

I was abroad in the UK, and I need a bag to go around my waist. So I asked for a fanny pack at the local Tesco.

The saleslady started giggling. This is joke?

Fanny means something much dirtier in UK English than in US English.

Well, you've found some propaganda!

Here's a great quote: “It just adds insult to injury to watch our postal rates continue to climb while China is being given a free ride to siphon all this money out of our economy,”

Lemme get this straight, China is siphoning money out of our economy by selling us products at a fraction of the cost of local retail monopolies?

China is keeping money in my pocket! Money that I can invest and create jobs with. China creates jobs.

I've made a 1 cent purchase including shipping from Shenzhen.

China is not "siphoning money out of our economy". Chinese companies are passing their logistics costs to Western postal systems. There is a difference.

We honour the postage on packages from other countries. China's "One Belt, One Road" is being paid for by other countries' postal systems. Chinese companies need only get their products out of port.

Can't say that's my experience, buying from the EU. They can take a while, but I've only had a no-show once.

It’s not that bad. I sell a lot of stuff and have had no problems with scammers other than a couple of people doing a buy it now and then wanting stuff shipped to Lagos etc and payment via money order. You just cancel the sale and relist then.

The real risks are couriers in my experience.

eBay success:

1. Avoid GSP

2. Sell only inside your region

3. Mark and photograph everything sold and keep the serial numbers.

4. If there’s any risk of something packing up, sell it spares or repair. Doesn’t affect the final value.

5. If someone pulls one just cancel the sale and move on.

6. If someone picks up from you take a signature.

7. If you do a buy it now, tick the immediate payment box.

  If someone picks up from you take a signature.

Why? It offers you no seller protection whatsoever. Even a photo of the person picking it up wouldn't qualify.

  If you do a buy it now, tick the immediate payment box

If it's ship-only, yes.

ebay seller protection is pointless either way as the decisions are arbitrary. The receipt offers you protection as in if you have to take the buyer to small claims court or defend yourself then you are covered for transfer of goods. If you're a private seller, selling items under $20/£25 it's not worth arguing. Unless you're selling volume, don't even sell the items just throw them away or give them to someone.

Also run a mule bank account. All money in and out goes through an empty account which you transfer in and out of paypal. Never link a card to it. No arbitrary charges or refunds can be taken then.

If ebay have a problem with you they can come to your door and do it via official legal paths. They usually hire a debt collector here in the UK who will fuck off instantly if you file an SAR with them and ask for court documents (I had a run in with them a few years back after they didn't receive a fees payment I made due to a system problem)

But honestly there are so few problems out there really.

2. Sell only inside your region

I wish this was possible. Any time I list an item, it doesn't matter if I mark it US shipping only, and no matter how many times I put in the description that I ship US only, I get flooded with people from other countries asking, "How much to ship to {$nation}?"

After a while I got tied of telling them I don't ship to wherever they are, and just told them that international shipping rates are listed in the description. (Which they aren't, just the note saying no international shipping.)

Then I just started ignoring the bombardment.

Then I just stopped listing stuff on eBay.

There are buyer restrictions you can set up that stop this.

As noted in my original comment, it doesn't stop anything at all. You still get foreigners with US accounts asking for things to be shipped overseas.

> If there’s any risk of something packing up, sell it spares or repair. Doesn’t affect the final value.

This is rather surprising, as I'd expect this to halve the prices of items.

I was too. If you list it as "spares/repair only because no returns on XYZ" then it doesn't affect final value. I use this when selling vintage equipment because while fit for purpose at the point of sale it could blow up a week down the line with a new issue (as any second hand goods) or the buyer could meddle with it neither of which is my problem.

That may be true in general but if I were to receive a broken item and it was listed as working but no returns, I'd file a claim anyway. Sometimes I do pass these up too if the item is available from another seller.

It’s a combination of reputation and the description. I’ve sold hundreds of mid value items with no negative feedback.

Yeah but how many of them arrived broken? I suspect you've gotten lucky so far and/or haven't had a buyer like me that would hold you to the phrase (or whatever variation you use) of "tested and working".

Not a single item has arrived broken or non functional. I’ve had some extremely discerning buyers. I don’t sell generic stuff for ref. Specialist restored items. Mainly specialist equipment 40-50 years old that has been restored to new condition.

Indeed and that's the kind of stuff I buy too. But lucky for me, I've never had an item arrive non-functional that I can remember. I find ebay to be particularly reliable :)

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!

  Because eBay own PayPal

Not anymore.

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.

Adyen will be replacing PayPal as eBay's official payments affiliate.

If true that's a huge coup! I'd guess that over 3/4 of paypal revenue comes from ebay.

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. (!)

> Nothing about their site has changed in 20 years, and they're waiting to die, like Yahoo.

I'm from NZ and I suspect our local equivalent (TradeMe) has the same systemic problems:

* Horrific UI flaws.

* Adverts. Everywhere. It's like they don't want me to use the site.

* A new version of the UI for mobile browsers (a replacement for the broken mobile browser version), that breaks all their links within emails

* Automated emails sent at 4 o'clock in the morning (I complained and was told it was so they could use their servers efficiently).

* Please please let me filter for NZ only - so I can choose not to have drop shipped items if I want it this week...

I also use eBay.com.au and it is sweet to use in comparison to our local TradeMe, but TradeMe is the incumbent that everyone uses...

Somehow eBay's core business seems to be trying to force me to use something not-eBay.

The horrendous UI, unresponsive servers, bids being lost like every other auction, the easiest features like watchlist being outright broken 50 % of the time, watching items randomly not working, random 500/"oops" errors, broken search, tons and tons of ads (THIS IS A PAID SITE FFS) and so on make me think that they don't want to make money.

UX wise; I don't think it's possible to do worse than "Your bid of X has been submitted" followed by "This auction has ended. Sold for X-1.". Don't expect users to come back soon if you keep doing this to them!

> Automated emails sent at 4 o'clock in the morning

Turn off your e-mail notifications during sleeping hours? Pretty certain we all get e-mails at all hours of the day.

I've sold quite a few older "premium" things (>$1000) over eBay and didn't have any issues so far. Things I did no longer need like older computers, GPUs, drones, cameras, synths etc. I however always took photos of the package in the final stages of wrapping up, showing what exactly I shipped (together with serial numbers if available), including when it was ready for shipping in case anything scam-like arose. Maybe the price level guaranteed nobody wanted to commit that much money for scam?

>Maybe the price level guaranteed nobody wanted to commit that much money for scam?

I think you've just been lucky, after all the whole point of buyer-scams is that they buy something, then raise a complaint and get a refund.

The end result is that the buyer has your item, and has their money returned. Sure they might need some available money, but they don't lose out.

You've just been lucky so far. All those photos, serial numbers and the likes will mean almost zero to ebay if a buyer ever raises a dispute.

I use eBay frequently as a seller and buyer. If I don't need it fast, and I want it cheaper, I'll use eBay.

As a seller, I have very rarely had issues with buyers. I always sell via buy it now and I usually am able to get a price comparable to what I would have gotten on Amazon. I find that Amazon is not ideal for one off, used items. eBay tends to be better.

I've been using eBay since ~99. Bought and sold probably 50 or 100 things over that time; so I'm hardly a power user, but I've never come close to being scammed. You have to keep your wits about you, sure, but it generally works pretty well.

It helps that I'm generally selling personal stuff I don't need/want anymore, so the risk is relatively low (I've only had a couple of expensive sales where I sold things worth over $1500). On the other hand, if I was a store where profit margins were king and a scam could really hurt me, I'd probably have a better system and better intuition about scams as well.

Same here. Although it's been a very long time since I bought on eBay as well.

Now that I make some serious money, I'd rather buy from Amazon. Not the marketplace either. Just plain old Amazon. Where I know I am dealing with a company should problems come up and not some kid in their parents basement.

As far as selling goes, I come to know that all the buyer has to do is complain to eBay they never got the goods. How do they proof that? As far as I know they don't. They just write a colorful mail to eBay claiming nothing arrived and they sent the money via paypal and just as easy, the payment gets reversed.

Your comments regarding change in 20 years is rather over the top. I used to work at eBay and there has been massive change to the platform both internally and on the UI front. There were major changes rolled live to site in terms of search, mobile and web/desktop. Behind the scenes, there was movement from in-house to open source technology in a major way. Movement from 30k windows servers, to linux cloud (w/250K VMs on openshift), to docker to kubernetes. Moves on the client facing code from new implementations in java(raptor), then to node.js and more. eBay has embraced open source and also open sources many of their solutions as well.

"I'm surprised Amazon or even etsy hasn't been able to destroy them yet"

About 8 years ago I used Amazon to sell a bunch of my old books. Worked great.

Last year I tried to start doing it again, and it's a giant pain. Yesterday I tried setting up a new account and they aren't letting me add anything for sale to inventory because of some supposed undescribed problem with my credit card (which works fine for purchases).

So.. Amazon has its own problems.

> I'm surprised Amazon or even etsy hasn't been able to destroy them yet

Amazon's site is quite flawed as well. It's a lot better but not by much.

Etsy seems a better proposition but for whatever reason they limit the types of stuff that they sell.

Facebook seems to be coming on the scene now though their offering is more like classifieds than auction.

> Amazon's site is quite flawed as well. It's a lot better but not by much.

Amazon's UX is far from perfect but the site at least works. eBay's site is so completely dysfunctional I'm almost surprised that people still manage to complete a significant amount of transactions on there.

In my experience, Ebay is "just good enough" to do the buying I've been doing recently. It's not good but it does "work".

Amazon is an altogether more structured and reassuring experience, but you don't have all the stuff you get on Ebay.

I have never used eBay to buy anything. Though visited the site several times to look up random items. Regarding "Collections", I just visited their websites out of curiosity and looks like it's right on the front page and very prominent unless I am missing something.

I've sold a few things on eBay and never gotten scammed. Maybe it's just random luck, but it's nowhere near the 100% scam-rate that posts like this lead you to believe.

Me too. I've sold maybe 30 items from $50-$1000 in value and not been scammed yet.

Key word here is "yet"

I sell quite a lot, but only on a Buyer collect basis and I always make it clear that the buyer can inspect and then pay cash if satisfied.

I’m not exactly sure what point this article is trying to make, but as a regular eBay user, these are my biggest issues when using the platform. I’m based in the UK, so some of these may not apply for other locations.

- Delivery times aren’t accurate. When I buy something from eBay I expect it will arrive within a week, but if I want something to arrive in a shorter time I buy it elsewhere. There is no way to filter listings to find which sellers will post an item today, and ship it via a method that will arrive tomorrow. A lot of listings are marked Fast&Free, but those have an estimate delivery date of Thursday.

- Too many Chinese sellers. A lot of items are sold by Chinese sellers who list the item location as in the UK, but in the description say that there is a 20 day delivery time. If I want stuff from China I’ll buy it from AliExpress.

- Too many duplicate listings. If I search for a common item where there are a few variations, I usually see the same item repeated a handful of times on the first page.

>Delivery times aren’t accurate.. {snip} A lot of listings are marked Fast&Free, but those have an estimate delivery date of Thursday.

I think that's because if they don't give a pessimistic estimate of delivery time, they open themselves up to 'it didn't arrive next day' type negative feedback and DSR scores. I'm in the UK and am selling cars part time to earn extra money at the moment - most of which need things doing (hence my markup). Nearly everything I order from eBay arrives next day (if I order before 10am), even though it usually says 2-3 days minimum. But I totally agree, it's a PITA as you should be able to filter down to those who actually will put it in the post that day if you order before (say) midday.

>- Too many Chinese sellers

Totally. They are spottable for the most part, but it's a pain to have to read the listings for the giveaways, and occasionally I'll miss it and then have to wait a couple of weeks for something to arrive. This has happened in the past when I've paid for it, and then they've said 'sorry... just checked and the UK warehouse is out of stock, so we'll send it direct from our China warehouse' - as if there's actually a UK warehouse. These have ALL been listings claiming 2-3 days' delivery.

>Too many duplicate listings.

Yup. It's getting crazily difficult for car parts which I get a lot (see above) - slightly different listing, same seller, etc. Or different seller, identical listing with slightly different price.

The thing that pisses me off is when you do a search and sort by price, then it shows a million listings that have multiple items in the listing, with the cheap unrelated items being the only thing available for the low price.

I think I missed the point because I don't understand what this article is trying to say exactly.

The article is a meandering and muddles it point but here's the paragraph where the actual point is made:

In 2001, an eBay user might have given an eBay seller a low rating for an unsatisfactory packaging job; in 2018, an Uber driver might be dinged if a rider doesn’t like his personality or choice of music. Facebook recently began ranking publishers by trustworthiness, based on feedback from users. Upon discovering a problem, a platform company’s first instinct is to find a way to expose it to the wisdom of a market, or at least the will of a crowd.

It’s a transactional platform; the transaction is very clear to both sides,” Hagiu says. “By and large, buyers and sellers are aligned on eBay.” A seller banned for counterfeit sunglasses hasn’t lost any rights, just his ability to use eBay. Crucially, to most ears, a scammer’s claims to the contrary would sound ridiculous.

The article's view on what ails the internet is the flawed idea of "wisdom of the crowd". The recommendation based systems where companies say - "others watched/read this so, you must like it too".

But then the article presents Amazon as something better and conveniently forgets that Amazon too has a similar ratings system. Though only the product level reviews are front and center. Seller reviews do not take the limelight. And as evident by Amazon's glut of fake products this weakness of rating systems is being gamed too.

Also this:

> But quite often [Facebook is] managed like [a marketplace], because in many ways, that’s exactly what it is: a giant, multisided marketplace for buying and selling, in which the largest party — the users — doesn’t do the buying or the selling. A social network’s profitable transactions involve everyone but the users. Ad rates are even determined, in many cases, by auction. If eBay is a machine for finding the right price for a pair of shoes, Facebook — behind the veneer of enabling human connection — is a machine for discovering the right price for a pair of eyeballs. Your eyeballs.

  The article is a meandering and muddles

I agree... so I was surprised to read at the bottom: "John Herrman is a technology reporter for The Times."

  A seller banned for counterfeit sunglasses hasn’t lost any rights, just his ability to use eBay.

That's a crock. eBay has defended the sale of all kinds of counterfeit fashion items. Even if they shut off an account, the seller can make another immediately... or hijack a dormant one with a feedback legacy.

The other point was sites are often trying to address social issues with market solutions. Facebook's mission is social connection but its profit is attention bidding.

Maybe "stated mission"? Do you believe that Facebook's mission is actually social connection?

>Do you believe that Facebook's mission is actually social connection?

Exactly. I laughed out loud at how insanely cynical it is that they suggest that as their mission.

After reading it, you can almost hear Zuckerberg laughing and sneering, "dumb f___s".

He could have seen the light. Some sort of light. God. Landmark. Qigong. Some Hawaiian spiritual practice.

I noticed that when I finished the article I couldn't remember the title of it. It reads like a high school student's report who's still figuring out how write persuasive pieces.

OT: What eBay is really good at:

If you want to buy a notebook with a US keyboard (which some devs prefer) and when it's hard to get them in your home country.

eBay.com offers a Global Shipping Program where the US seller just send their stuff to this shipping program and eBay takes care of everything else. Even customs will be paid by eBay and the buyer just pays once and benefits from fast processing. It's a buttersmooth way of international shipping.

I got my last notebook within just one week and it was still cheaper than the local version in my home country. I know that some notebooks offer US keyboards in any country (ThinkPads and Macbooks) but then you usually wait also min 1-2 weeks because they are custom builds or they come directly from China.

Don't know of any other entity than eBay offering this.

The Global Shipping Program is a really fantastic thing. I've used it both as a buyer and a seller (vintage computers) and now have all sorts of interesting stuff from all over the world. Also no problems at all shipping CRT monitors internationally despite couriers (probably perfectly understandably) refusing to provide insurance on them.

From a senior management perspective, eBay is run like a private-equity backed portfolio company. No offense to PE firms, but eBay has the feel of being more worried about costs and makes very little investment in long-term growth--as if the owners just want to turn a profit and sell the company before the debt comes due.

This is why the UI is horrible and, in general, the site feels stuck somewhere in the early 2000s. Perhaps this is also why the company culture is broken and somewhat dishonest. They have frequently engaged in dramatic policy shifts when someone got the idea that the bottom line could be enhanced. In these cases, they are capable of totally disregarding their ecosystem (especially sellers and affiliates). Worse, they would outright lie about their intentions, which I suppose they felt necessary for placation when completely screwing over their "partners".

eBay has long had a certain toxic nature, including an almost uncanny ability to leave customers and partners feeling disappointed, if not outright cheated at some point. Whatever the shortcomings of the people who participate in their marketplace (including scammers), they are amplified by eBay, whose resolution policies essentially amount to doing as little as possible. This is what people are reporting as disappointment when they've needed an issue resolved.

I am amazed that people still use eBay.

This is in line with my horrid experience with them last year. I have experienced the fallout from each point that you made. I had no idea that an e-commerce platform as popular as theirs could be so incompetent, rigid and downright hostile since I've had the exact opposite experience with their competitors. Their resolution policies and guarantees are a joke.

It looks like I'm the only one in this thread who has the experience of being scammed, as a buyer, on eBay. Although admittedly, this happened on the Indian version of the platform (which is now owned by Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart).

I wrote about the irony of them promoting the sale of refurbished items when it was a refurbished Xbox that I purchased last year that turned out to be a dud, on Medium (https://medium.com/@chakrabortypritish/ebay-india-a-cautiona... - I had to incorporate a bit of sensationalism to try and fetch some views, which is why it's written the way it is, didn't work anyway). Turns out that the seller lied about the machine's warranty, and Microsoft support couldn't help me either. eBay support consistently told me that they couldn't do anything about this according to company policy. Never felt this helpless on an e-commerce platform, and I've never gone back on eBay.

And yes, their platform UI/UX is horrible, I concur. The only way to show that the Xbox was stuck in a boot-and-crash loop was to record a video, and they did not permit video uploads on their (laughable) grievance redressal platform.

On the other hand, it's a drag that there isn't something like Yelp for FLOSS.

I would have loved to see a rating and some reviews of several development processes before wasting my time posting patches.

I'm getting pretty good at working that out.

Note that this isn't a dig at any particular project, I know FOSS is hard and free time is scarce (and so is funding).

Quick ones:

1. Date of last commit to main repo

2. Number of issues open on Trac/Bugzilla/GitHub/Jira whatever (note, I'm taking a point off if you use Trac, only because there's still an instance from 10 years ago sending me emails that I can't unsubscribe from)

Takes more time:

3. Number of open pull requests/mailing list patches and general discussion around them

4. Any kind of clear and updated roadmap.

Edit: number one these days should be an up to date and working CI/CD system with published artifacts, including for Windows.

I like to look at the reactions maintainers have to pull requests. Do they usually get merged, or do they end up being dragged through a bureaucratic nightmare and eventually closed?

I've never written anything popular enough to really get pull requests, but I can definitely understand not merging a pull request due to not being able to maintain that code or it taking the project in a different direction to what you want.

It's one thing to say "no", it's another thing to say "later" forever.

That comes back to having a defined plan for where you want the project to go.

Isn't CHAOSS - https://chaoss.community/software/ that ?

Why isn't it very popular? Why don't people have it like the travis-ci badges?

Edit: https://cauldron.io seems to be a hosted version of GrimoireLab.

I've seen it fragment and specialize.

And I'm okay with that.

For instance with musicians - particularly guitarists (only because we tend to be gear enthusiasts) - Reverb.com has become our new Ebay.com. It's even replacing Craigslist for a lot of what we were doing previously (allows local deals, too).

They essentially took all the good things that were working for Ebay and tailored it to musicians. It's a slam dunk.

The article is incredibly meandering and non-committed to saying anything in particular.

I just cannot compare Amazon to Ebay. While I can get similar items on both what I use Ebay for , collectibles, antiques, and hard to find items, is outside the scope of Amazon. I never expected Ebay to be the big retail spot, for many of us it is the world's largest garage sale.

I use Ebay for many replacement parts for items not normally found in stores or worse jacked up on Amazon because they come bound with Prime shipping. Amazon might be top dog from name recognition but places like Wal Mart are trying and unless Amazon gets a grip on knock offs they are in danger of alienating a good number of buyers.

What happened to the future where all our transactions were secured by trust rated escrow agents?

Some day in the far future, eBay will invent a technology that lets people embed Youtube videos in their listings. I'm not holding my breath though.

Happy to share my experience with ebay.de in Germany as a seller and buyer.

Started selling some old tech/appliances I don't need anymore on eBay: last month 4 items for 250 EUR total, before that a few more items for ~400 EUR total.

Items went for 50-70% of the original price, and then eBay took their commission which at times was quite steep at ~15% of the selling price. It was still worth it since for most items I couldn't find any takers locally on Kleinanzeigen (Craigslist analog).

eBay has annoying limits for new sellers so to sell my old Sony camera I had to wait a month after selling my old Canon DSLR. It's impossible to contact a human support for this issue. They raised my limits automatically recently though.

Don't remember any problems with my buyers or when I bought something. Some of it I shouldn't have bought at all but that's a different story :-D Looking forward to clearing more of those storage boxes.

eBay really should allow you to filter out items with multiple price points. So many sellers abuse that system so heavily (e.g. the standard 99c memory card listings that have some crappy little microsd adapter included in the listings to drag the price range down).

Basically everything else that's bad about ebay I can deal with, but that's the one thing that sends me racing to other sites.

You can see the same on Amazon - just search for some 3D printing filament, you'll get listings that vary from 10 to 40€ all in one entry...

Ebay is trash but it's where the buyers are.

I've been buying and selling on eBay since they came to the UK but I have to hold my nose every time I visit the site.

Want to understand what ails the modern PSTN network ? Take into account that we have been trying to fix it politically for 40 years now.

I tried to Buy It Now an item off Ebay just now and Ebay responded, "Sorry, this seller is on vacation, so this item is unavailable."

Sinking ship.

I had the same experience, but just waited for my item, and it arrived. It was an obscure old bike part, quite rare and just what I needed, so I decided it was worth the wait.

It's usually listed very prominently on the listing page when this is the case. That said, I have no idea why sellers would choose to use this instead of just scheduling things around their vacations.

Ebay tracks shipping statistics, if you deliver late they ding you.

Why do the style guides of these large organisations often insist on the ludicrous capitalisation of "EBay" when it appears at the start of a sentence?

I don't know if it is large organizations in general, more specifically it seems to be the N.Y.C. media. They are so stuck in their hidebound style guides and rules that they apply them even when they are wrong.

N.Y.C. itself is another of their rules: put the dots in anything that seems like it might be an acronym or initialism, even when when the rest of the world stopped using the dots decades ago. When was the last time you saw NYC spelled as N.Y.C. anywhere, except for the N.Y.C. media?

These organizations will always write I.B.M., F.B.I., C.I.A., H.P., and so forth, even when those companies and organizations themselves do not use the dots in their official names.

What I can't answer, though, is your question: why do they insist on this even when it contradicts the correct usage?

Why? Historical pretension.

As a writer I will jump through linguistic hoops to move uncapitalised proper names away from the start of a sentence - for example, a medical device called "i-gel" which I wrote a paper on. Starting a sentence without a capital is just too jarring in formal writing I find.

Yep. For hundreds of years English has had a rule that proper nouns are capitalised; it is pretentious to imagine that "myThingy is soooo cool that you can't even use the rules of English on it."

Now in some fields, like computer documentation, there's practical reason to change. It would be confusing to capitalise command-names if they are lower-case in their (case sensitive) native language. But newspapers aren't bound by that consideration, and it doesn't really apply to company names anyway.

Actually, look in any book printed 18th/early 19th century and you'll see that the rules were quite different then: all nouns were capitalised, as in modern German, and the 'long s' was frequently used in the middle of words. Mass literacy, almost-universal schooling along with physical punishments for children not doing exactly what the textbook said have given us moderns the idea that the 'proper' English of our grandparents remained the same for centuries, but really the language has always been in flux and the rate of change just got significantly slowed by cultural pressures between approximately 1850s to 1950s.

I don't think of myself as a total sheep - case in point I put the comma outside of the quotation mark because otherwise it parses weird.

You are fighting the good fight.

> all nouns were capitalised

But that is still a rule that all proper nouns are capitalised. It's also beside the point. No one is claiming that rules don't change, or even that they are sharply defined. I was claiming that it is presumptuous complain about other people when they follow the traditional rules.

Even then, I don't think anybody would be outraged if I wrote 'Rsync' or 'Grep'.

Yeah, doing a MSc in CS that references a bunch of companies and open source projects... there was definitely some mangling needed to keep the uncapitalized proper nouns away from the start of sentences.

It usually happens because they have an unbreakable rule that all sentences start with a capital letter.

That is no doubt the reason, and it seems like a reasonable rule on the face of it.

But there ought to be another rule that takes priority over that one: when you use the name of a person or company, capitalize and spell it as they spell it. They are the ones who get to decide. It's not the prerogative of a third-party publisher or newswriter to override that.

It seems like a simple matter of humbleness and deference to whoever owns the name. It's eBay, not EBay, and IBM, not I.B.M.

What I don't understand is why a news organization would feel it's their business to override that - and why it's especially prevalent in the N.Y.C. media.

It is entertaining though! :-)

> They are the ones who get to decide

Once upon a time, the late musician Prince decided to change his name. Turns out that no, you don't always "get to decide" and even fans don't follow your every whim: Most ignored his choice and without much "humbleness and deference" started referring to him as TAFKAP—"The Artist Formerly Known As Prince."

Well, that and he changed his name to a glyph which didn’t actually appear on anyone’s system. It was practically impossible to call him by his ‘real’ name even if you had wanted to.

Prince had mailed out floppy disks to news organizations to accommodate that change. [0] The Prince font substituted his symbol for what would otherwise be a capital P. In addition, the font was also made available for download on CompuServe.

[0] http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/04/princes-legendary-floppy-...

>Peter Thiel — an early Facebook investor and board member — with his funding of lawsuits against media companies and his eclectic and severe right-wing politics.

The take away of Thiel glaringly missed Palantir in favor of some digs.

Agreed, although when I read that I was trying to remember what he is doing these days, and failed to come up with Palantir even though I used to work right next door to them. Of course, that doesn't absolve a journalistic enterprise of their responsibility.

Eclectic and severe right-wing politics? Awfully colorful way to describe him in an article which isn’t an editorial.

Would love to see the NYT describing a left winger as eclectic and severe. Even masked antifa don’t get that treatment.

It’s frustrating to have to mentally guard against this political mudslinging. The article is worse for it, and IMO it’s just coddling their readership and narrowing their audience.

Do you think either characterization - eclectic, severe - is actually incorrect?

There is a much more neutral way to write it.

>Thiel who is known for funding a lawsuit against Gawker and his conservative politics.

Still, I think those, while visible, are rather minor notes compared to starting a billion dollar defense contractor.

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