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Comment by ninkendo | Hacker News Reader

I had the exact experience selling an iMac on eBay about 10 years ago. Buyer clicked buy it now, my listing was removed, they never paid. They deleted their account shortly after (it was some .ru email address.) eBay had nothing to say other than “try again after X weeks”. Why, so it can just happen again? They admitted they have zero protection against it.

I deleted my account and sold it on Amazon instead. How anyone puts up with eBay I have no idea.

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FWIW, eBay no longer works like this. When you put up a listing there’s now an option, enabled by default, to require payment at checkout.

This situation may still occur if you are taking offers on an item. In that case the buyer has to pay within 48 hours of the offer being accepted or the listing will become eligible for re-posting.

Our national buy/sell platform (aquired by ebay twenty or so years ago) has a similar system now where they will handle the payments and exchange of currency on confirmation of reception of items etc, I believe it's very successful, but they had to do something because nobody was trusting the site anymore for trading anything valuable.

I sold quite a few things on Amazon back in the day. Was great for getting things off my shelves collecting dust at a good price. At some point maybe ten years ago they started requiring very invasive identity validation to sell. My account from '98? and good selling karma does not matter apparently, not grandfathered in.

Long story short, don't expect Amazon to be more reasonable than Ebay these days.

How is this equivalent?!? In fact, stronger seller identification is what makes the site safer for everyone. I think you're really missing the point of stronger identification on commercial sites. It should be done for sellers AND buyers alike. It would drastically decrease the number of bad transactions if people knew they were no longer shielded by anonymity.

Not worth it to me to sell an occasional ~fifty dollar item. Would rather leave on the sidewalk or throw in the trash if need be.

unless you are a regular seller, Amazon is completely not worth it, right?

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