Ebay's revenue could dry up

In Australia, the UK, Ireland and the Philippines, eBay has obscured auction bidding to the point that genuine bidders have got absolutely no chance of detecting and thereby protecting themselves from “shill” bidding (a criminal offence in most civilized countries) by unethical vendors.

Notwithstanding eBay’s statements to the contrary, this application of absolute anonymity (ie, Bidder 1, Bidder 2, etc) by eBay on these sites serves absolutely no purpose other than to deceive consumers by making even any otherwise blatantly obvious shill bidding undetectable; and the same criticism has always been applicable to eBay’s other shill bidders’ facility, “User ID kept private”.

My concern then is not so much with the effectively bidder-specific anonymity (“a***b (n)”) now in use in the US and elsewhere (and which still allows genuine bidders some opportunity to watch for suspicious patterns of bidding on a seller's other auctions) but with the absolute anonymity (“Bidder N”) in use in Australia, the UK, Ireland and the Philippines.

Again, notwithstanding eBay’s various pronouncements about shill bidding being banned on eBay, eBay is now, on these sites, effectively (and now knowingly) “aiding and abetting” such shill bidders to defraud consumers. …

For those of you with a longer attention span, a lengthy critical analysis of this matter appears at: 
http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=6498345#6498345
I apologise in advance for the length of this linked “rant”. Needless to say eBay would not tolerate it on their discussion forums and I have spent time on eBay’s “naughty chair” for posting links to it.

If you are an unethical shill-bidding seller or a buyer who is not concerned that on the above-mentioned national sites eBay is effectively “aiding and abetting” such shill-bidding sellers to cheat you, read no further.

I have been selling on ebay for one year straight and have bought many things to, i am seeing ebay crash and am very happy although sellers are selling this new worth $200 for a mere $10 (loyal sellers) while teens trying to make money dress up calling things Vintage when they have been made this year!

I have been countlessly accused of Shill bidding; I am an honest seller with massive fees to pay when my items go for $10 and my fees are $100 (not to mention i offer free post) 

I will never use ebay for as long as i live and am glad i am "suspended" and will not be paying there fees, For god sakes im only 17 and my friends 16 (they sell on ebay too) and they don't even try to see how old we are. 

although i found a awesome site which doesnt charge sellers fees but it doesnt have much "advertisment" so its low key but with many items, this will be my new site www.oztion.com.au untill i get a reasonable high paying job.

ebay is dodge, and i am glad to see it crash. Honest Sellers have no rights; how can we not leave bad feedback now for someone that doesnt even pay us but we can get bad feedback because they didn't pay? and why are dodge sellers still allowed to sell?!

Ebay's problems rise from several highly unpopular bussiness decisions adopted by the new CEO.
It is apparently customary, in today's business world, for a new CEO to try to make a name for themselves by changing things that work instead of leaving it alone and find ways to improve what is already established.

It is my opinion showing absolutely no respect for established eBay sellers is a bad way for anyone to begin their tenure, and changing most of the rules and regulations by creating an on-line mall, much like the new CEO wants to do, is not what the millions of eBay sellers and members want. I dare eBay to put it to a vote of all its members, just to see where the new CEO, and his ideas,stand.
After all, it's the Powersellers and the flea market venture that has made ebay the conglomerate that it is today.
Everything else is just another yuppie trying to make themselves stand out..........

I don't understand what ebay are doing.

They complain that revenues have dropped and buyers are leaving.

Reasons:

1) They muck around with international visibility across all sites - people cant find things - sales drop.

Answer - put full visibility back and let buyers opt out of international listings if they dont want to see them

2) They remove shop listings from searches = people cant find things - sales drops.

Answer - again make it opt out for users.

3) They ignore reports of dodgy sellers violating rules. Why? They knock them off the site they lose money. If they want to protect buyers get rid of the bad ones and make it safer.

Answer - protect everyone on ebay, take violation reports seriously, protect the user first, generates trust, which in turn generates income.
EBAY MUST STOP PROTECTING THEIR FEES FIRST


Many UK users are now leaving to go to amazon and ebid.net and their own sites.

too little too late ebay - you've made the best sellers feel like scum. You want income, protect your sellers.

They've been slowly committing suicide for the last few years.

Today is my 10 year anniversary on greedbay... I have supported the on~going boycott and will continue to do so indefinitely.

I haven't listed anything on their site in 4 months and have no intention of doing do.

I remember when greedbay was a total blast to deal on, both buying and selling! I've met some incredible people, who have remained friends over the last decade.

Believe it or not, greedbay actually *did* used to fight fraud! 
They used to suspend sellers who would shill bid, sellers who sell brand new satin nightgown sets that they buy at Target, remove the tags and sell them as 40's vintage... they used to enforce their own policies... those days are over...

It's *only* about the money now.

They allow the fraudulent sellers to continue, because even if they rip off an unsuspecting buyer, they still collect listing and FVF fees... greedbay couldn't care less about honest buyers or sellers....

And they should.

Just as the comment of pfromg stated... that's how many, many buyers feel... the buyers have been ripped off for far too long... greedbay has let fraud grow to such magnitude and word of mouth can make you or break you, that they have cut their own throat by driving the buyers away themselves.

They wrecked the site all by themselves.

They didn't enforce their own rules and reg's, strictly for their own *temporary* monetary gain.

I mean, my gosh... all of the big execs started dumping their stock in the last quarter of last year!

If that's not a blatant show of what's to come for the site, I don't know what is!

I will never buy or sell on greedbay again.

They took all of the fun out of it and I can't see paying someone for the amount of abuse they dish out these days.

Thank goodness for eCrater and the other excellent venues out there!

Ebay suffers from manager arrogance and junior high school level 'programmers' that would rather play around and make the user interface more 'fancy' than adhere to known software discipline standards. Every 1.5 years they change the user interface around for NO REASON therefore creating another learning curve for millions of people and more wasted hours. The same reason ebay managers do not listen to input is the same reason their software is buggy. 

Mar. 2008. Ebay lacks even the most basic features of good user interface design. The main ebay login page will not TAB from the password field box to the "keep me signed in checkbox" - are we the users supposed to bounce back and forth between the keyboard and mouse? It's standard UI design to support the keyboard keys and the TAB key to move between fields and text boxes. This is a UI standard that has been around for 30+ years now. Bill Cobb has been emailed about this 10 TIMES over the past 6 months. No fix. How can ebay execs possibly have a good listening attitude with obvious user interface problems that have been reported repeatedly over several months. 

When will Ebay realize that the sellers also buy and cannot buy if the marketplace gets messed up. My favorite sellers are GONE and I want them back. If they come back, I'll buy again but they won't be returning unless Ebay makes it easier to sell. When I sold stuff on Ebay, I sold to a lot of other sellers. Most of the fraud I've run into has been on international or electronics type stuff. I never had problems with mom and pop sellers. They seemed to care about the transactions. Ebay needs to wake up and figure that dropshippers aren't gonna cut it. We wanted the flea market feel. That's why we shopped there. Bah.

I've traded on ebay for nearly a decade. As many others have pointed out, they have completely abandoned the small time entrepreneur who they built their business on, and defaulted to large firms or fake companies.

This, plus the insane fees they now charge for little added value, has put them into the toilet permanently. They are an over managed, bumbling, over hyped silicon valley has-been, who will decay into oblivion in the next 4 years

ebay never has and probably never will "police" it's site. Fraud is rampant. and according to ebay, the members take care of the site.

Well, obviously that's not working any longer. Items are being reported, but ebay does not have a sufficient customer service department to handle millions of listings.

They HAVE to start cleaning up the listings and not allowing buyers or sellers to change ID's like their underwear.

That's all.

ebay has been treating their small, honest sellers really badly and catering to the larger, sometimes dishonest, sellers for several years now. The small guys have seen fees going higher and higher, no customer support, false accusations which results in their accounts being temporarily suspended. These are the very sellers that made ebay a success. And now ebay is continually, for several years now, seeming to do what they can to get rid of these sellers. Constant greed and biting the hand that feeds you ultimately ends in the demise of the biter.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/66733-ebay-bares-its-ugly-new-face?source=d_email


A place to organize. 
A place to unite. 
A place to focus. 

http://forums.delphiforums.com/boycottebay

Like PayPal, I don't think that anyone ever liked ebay, it's just that there weren't any good alternatives. That's slowly changing.

I guess ebay never heard the saying, "don't shit where you eat."

I used to use Ebay a lot , yet I haven't visited the site for a long time now.
The problem is that rather than being the bargain hunters paradise that it once was , its now become the best place to get ripped off & stitched up.

There are relatively few private auctions, everything seems to be being sold by shady back street traders with no face.You can pretty much always buy cheaper elsewhere , and you always seem to get ripped off with the postage charges.Ebay is a safe haven for rip off merchants and I see no reason at all to buy at Ebay these days.

Amazon has become the alternative now.
You dont have to bid , the post charges are fixed and you know you wont get ripped off.

Ebay is a great place to be ripped off, I agree.

The web interface for sellers is clunky, the feedback system is crap and unreliable, the charges are high, and paypal even higher.

I have sold stuff on Ebay, but its a struggle, punters are warey, Ebay offers no protection, and generally its a place I avoid.

The best way to sell stuff on Ebay, is advertise one item, then sell the rest off the back of it privately through the contacts made.