I don't understand why there hasn't been a significant challenger to eBay in their space. They are notorious amongst sellers for their high fees and dispute resolution that almost always sides with the buyer.
You can challenge eBay locally, as shown by Craigslist and Gumtree. You can challenge eBay in a specific niche, as shown by Etsy. Facebook tried to take on eBay directly with Marketplace, with limited success. Amazon Marketplace competes fairly directly with eBay, but at a significant cost to Amazon's reputation - it has flooded their platform with counterfeits and fake reviews.
Shpock (mobile only I think) seems to be the nearest thing to a competitor at the local level, in Europe at least.
If you're seeking commodity items, the network effect is far weaker When I need a cheap USB 2.0 hub, why should I buy it from eBay when it will likely be a buck or two cheaper from a DealExreme/Banggood/LightInTheBox style direct-from-China shop? The selection will be adequate even if there's only one seller.
Similarly, as a seller, a combined marketplace makes sense when you have narrow inventory drawing low traffic. You have two widgets, and they'll sell faster being listed inside eBay's assortment of 500, than by trying ti SEO your two product pages. A lot of the classic eBay product lines were stuff where there were few "category killer" web shops with wide inventory and workable sales flow. (Think of the baseball card dealers where they publish paper price lists)
I wonder if in 10 years we'll see an eBay much more like that from 10 years ago. The cheap commodity items will eventually move to sellers' own sites where they aren't giving up a major cut of the purchase price, but more differentiated individual items will stick around.
What? As a buyer, I can still leave positive,neutral, or negative feedback. (I just checked.) I don't sell on eBay; so, maybe it's sellers that are limited in leaving feedback?
GGP simply doesn't understand the terminology.
Consistently siding with the buyer is the reason I use Ebay (and Amazon with A-Z) with confidence. You sell me what you listed, we're good. You don't? I'm probably going to be made whole by Ebay. That does open the door for scammer buyers. I hope, for sellers' sake, that Ebay has some kind of attention that they pay to patterns of bad behavior.
They don't. There have been quite a few stories about this, including some on HN, but the bottom line is that buyer fraud is rampant on EBay, and, as the GP said, when there's a dispute EBay never ever sides with sellers.
To be honest, while I also like buying on EBay because of the protections, I'm amazed that anyone still sells there; that's how bad it's gotten. I suppose whoever is left has just accepted that the fraud is a cost of doing business and prices it in accordingly.
Groupon isn't particularly busy and definitely aren't good with sellers. I've heard a lot of horror stories.
Overstock is probably the worst, and I'd say downright abusive to their sellers. They also have no API or FTP.
Rakuten, nee buy.com is a strange beast. They will pause your account for strange reasons. No API either.
Walmart has little useful online presence for 3rd party sellers and no API.
Newegg also has no API. I haven't heard any real bad things about them otherwise.
There are a lot of niche marketplaces that do very well in their domain. They aren't using APIs. Some are absurdly expensive and others are cheaper.
It doesn't really matter. No online market takes care of the seller, and honestly, the buyer is far more common than a seller. One seller leaves and another takes their place.
Bonanza and Etsy seem to be the closest things to what eBay was "back in the day".
Amazon used to have a facility where any regular Joe could resell some used item on there: you'd see the new item listing, and then you'd see "available for as low as $$$ from these new and used sellers" that you could click on. You can still buy from other sellers there, but only if they have paid sellers' accounts, which keeps out the regular Joe who just wants to sell a few things a year, like the time when I resold a used table saw I didn't need any more.
Looking for LoRa modules, eBay has 10 times more items, but half of the sellers are list the same item 30 times with different price and shipping costs, so that is actually reduced offer and enhanced misery. On Aliexpress you rarely find dupes from the same seller, they keep that shit at bay.
They have to be a bit biased towards buyers because scammers want money, and sellers get money. Buyer scams are mostly items that can be easily converted to cash, like laptops and phones.
https://www.cnet.com/news/merchants-pull-out-of-amazon-aucti...