Are there still ridiculously high fees associated with selling a product on eBay?
I have something that due to the niche of the product, makes it very hard to sell to anywhere BUT eBay. There are a lot of attempted alternatives in this niche but none provide the instant kind of payment you'd get from using eBay or have the quantity of buyers. It is truly the network effect at work.
What's my point about this? It's that the problem with eBay isn't because it doesn't have a Pinterest-esque style layout. No one really cares about eBay's dotcom style layout, or the fact that it the logo until recently was schizophrenic about it's capitalization. It's because they completely bone the sellers. If you're a seller on eBay, you're constantly juiced on every little single thing. You also have little recourse if a buyer rates you poorly (I guess punish him back by rating him badly too?). It's been a slow methodical shakedown of sellers and quite frankly people are sick of being nickel and dimed to death. So I hope this blows up in their face and that they continue to lose market and mindshare.
And I find it funny that eBay is now promoting that images are the way to go with this layout when for years they nickel and dimed sellers on photos (Is the max 3 without paying? I forget) and the photo quality of those images was always terrible, like someone set JPG compression to 50%
If you're selling on eBay and something goes wrong (buyer claims she received a box of rocks), there really isn't much to do. PayPal and eBay favor buyers so much that if the buyer really wants her money back, she'll certainly get it.
That doesn't sound right. I bought a mobile phone on eBay and the seller sent me a unit that was (a) a different model and (b) clearly used. I jumped through all kinds of hoops, culminating in a letter from my lawyer certifying I received a different phone. The end result was, I could not return or exchange the unit, and my negative feedback and rating were erased. Stories like mine are legion. eBay emphatically does not favor buyers, they screw everyone equally.
Because nefarious sellers and buyers would have unlimited license to prevent negative feedback from being posted to their account, ever. They would always appear to be a new seller/buyer.
> I have something that due to the niche of the product, makes it very hard to sell to anywhere BUT eBay...It is truly the network effect at work.
I get the impression you assume the network effect is something that just happens over night. The network effect is extremely hard to master and takes a lot of money/time to do so. Hence why the fees are as high as they are.
> So I hope this blows up in their face and that they continue to lose market and mindshare.
Care to elaborate? I wasn't under the impression ebay was doing either.[1]
> I get the impression you assume the network effect is something that just happens over night. The network effect is extremely hard to master and takes a lot of money/time to do so. Hence why the fees are as high as they are.
Network Effect as in they use their sizable userbase to prevent any other competition in the space. For online auctions to work you need a large buyer base so it can attract a large seller base.
I never said it was easy or difficult, not even sure you need to "master" it, but who cares? That wasn't even an important point of that sentence, which was that it's difficult to sell anywhere BUT eBay because of the Network Effect
Fees are high because eBay has no idea how to keep earning money except to gouge people. They certainly can't make buyers pay anything so the sellers essentially get dumped with more and more "fees". I am still confused how that relates to the discussion about the Network Effect. They worked hard initially and now they deserve to gouge people who are using their site?
> Care to elaborate? I wasn't under the impression ebay was doing either.[1]
I cannot prove either but how does showing a stock price disprove what I said? They can still lose marketshare and still have a positive stock price. And they continue to make profits because they continue to bleed their sellers dry.
Ask anyone (or I guess, just sellers would be more accurate) if they would use eBay if they had to. They would say, "Fuck No", so why do they use it? Because, Network Effect.
> Network Effect as in they use their sizable userbase to prevent any other competition in the space
That's not network effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect).
I think you mean to say: "It's unfair that a service, which provides more value than a coompetitor, charges a higher fee"?
The Network Effect does not imply monopolistic behaviour.
That's two distinct issues.
Although large successful companies tend to do both, it does not imply causality.
It is true that the need for the network effect is a Barrier to Entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barriers_to_entry), which is what keeps your "competitor" from entering, and which leaves Ebay with monopolistic situation - intented or not.
> For online auctions to work you need a large buyer base so it can attract a large seller base.
And how do you propose companies should attain a large buyer base without spending large amounts of money? eBay is NOT forcing you to use their platform, much like google is not forcing you to use their search engine. Customer acquisition is EXPENSIVE.
> They worked hard initially and now they deserve to gouge people who are using their site?
I don't think I follow your logic? Software development and marketing don't just all of the sudden stop as soon as a company attains a substantial network effect. Should facebook stop developing now that it has a substantial network effect?
> Fees are high because eBay has no idea how to keep earning money except to gouge people.
How do you propose they protect their network effect then?
> I cannot prove either...Ask anyone (or I guess, just sellers would be more accurate) if they would use eBay if they had to. They would say, "Fuck No", so why do they use it? Because, Network Effect.
Classic case of Cognitive dissonance.[1] If I read between the lines all I hear is "complain complain complain", with no substantial evidence to back it up. If this is that big of an issue, you (or anyone for that matter) would see an opportunity and steal market share yourself. I'm sure you would find the costs of establishing and maintaining a network effect exponentially difficult.
That was the first thing I noticed. Even their logo is so badly compressed it hurts my eyes.
And for example this part - http://pics.ebaystatic.com/aw/pics/announcements/new/logo/te... - gives the impression that the front-end guy was trying to implement the design very fast.
I liked the scrolling effect on the "promo" page though, quite creative.
It's boring and doesn't really make any sense. What is that pictograph for sellers meant to mean? Why is there 1 picture of a person for ~3 million active users? The layout is also oddly inconsistent. It goes from having "NNN" and "MILLION" equal width on 3 of them to only getting up to half way through the O in MILLION in the other 2. I suspect that's because one of the pictographs didn't look right squashed into the available space so they expanded it into the number area, but then they had to make the one above it match so that things looked balanced still. Why is the number of mobile registrations in 2012 not an Arabic digit like everything else?
It's not really an infographic, it's just some somewhat suspectly typeset data and some icons.
I have something that due to the niche of the product, makes it very hard to sell to anywhere BUT eBay. There are a lot of attempted alternatives in this niche but none provide the instant kind of payment you'd get from using eBay or have the quantity of buyers. It is truly the network effect at work.
What's my point about this? It's that the problem with eBay isn't because it doesn't have a Pinterest-esque style layout. No one really cares about eBay's dotcom style layout, or the fact that it the logo until recently was schizophrenic about it's capitalization. It's because they completely bone the sellers. If you're a seller on eBay, you're constantly juiced on every little single thing. You also have little recourse if a buyer rates you poorly (I guess punish him back by rating him badly too?). It's been a slow methodical shakedown of sellers and quite frankly people are sick of being nickel and dimed to death. So I hope this blows up in their face and that they continue to lose market and mindshare.
And I find it funny that eBay is now promoting that images are the way to go with this layout when for years they nickel and dimed sellers on photos (Is the max 3 without paying? I forget) and the photo quality of those images was always terrible, like someone set JPG compression to 50%