My Improbable Evolution Into a Passionate eBayer
Most people love eBay. I am the sort of person who hates it. If eBay were part of my life, I'd be broke and devastated with furious, dark thoughts in my head about never being able to leave this awful place.
When Amazon first came out, all I could think about was that it would replace eBay and make everything better for everyone - so why draw attention to something that is doomed to fail?
I have a new job now where we sell on Amazon FBA (Fulfilled By Amazon). This means that in order to sell locally, you need a physical address or warehouse near your customers. There are a few companies who offer satellite warehouses in the US or Europe, but they charge at least $499 a month. This is just too expensive for me so I started investigating eBay again.
I prefer Amazon. The buyers and sellers are both better - which is why I like my job here - but as a consumer I wonder how on earth anyone can find anything on eBay! The user interface was built in 1995 and has not changed since. There are no real filters. The categories are gigantic and ill-defined, so it is easy to spend hours clicking through thousands of listings hoping to find an item you want (and paying for it if you do). Even the sellers have no idea what they are bidding on. And there are so many ways to be blacklisted, so many complaints and lawsuits that eBay is simply not fun anymore. I no longer find anything interesting on eBay. I am dreading coming home from work, because it means I will have to check the website for the next few hours.
It is hard for me to understand why buyers use it either, but then again people use some strange things so perhaps eBay does make sense for them too! But I like Amazon. It is easier for me as a seller to manage my inventory and price, since only one person can perform all these functions at once (and in my case it is me). I like that Amazon has a message system for buyers when I am out of office (unlike eBay). I like that eBay sometimes takes money from me and then doesn't show the buyer's order. I like that on Amazon, someone pays for something and it is "all-or-nothing," especially because we are talking about selling dozens of items per week. Every item has to be shipped separately or you lose money.
On eBay, one person can buy 50 items at once and there is nothing we can do about it except pay for shipping. So it seems fair to me that if someone buys 50 items at once, they should pay more than someone who buys one or two.
I think that the Amazon model is better. It is easier to manage, sellers make more money in the end because they are not paying a monthly fee and so on. And yet there is something that keeps drawing me back to eBay. Some people are so passionate about it and I can't figure out why. It's like a drug, a sickness - people feel they need it and they will not let go of it even though their life is upside down and their relationships are ruined because of the site. What is going on? I have heard all kinds of stories!
I was completely astonished when a friend shared his story with me. He is 50 and has been selling on eBay for many years. He's made a lot of money doing it, but also got a lot of negative feedback. On the very same day that he won an auction, his account was deleted! So he lost any chance at making a quick sale and instead had to wait another hour or so before being able to auction again. This was a serious problem because he was trying to sell something expensive and he needed the money ASAP. If I were in this situation I would have deleted my account!
This is not an isolated case - there have been several similar stories in recent months. The famous eBayers seem to be in a conflict with eBay, or the company that owns them, so they don't want to sell anything. This began some time ago - around 2005 or 2006. Back then there were many new sellers who had absolutely no knowledge of eBay's rules and they were misled by the ones who had been around for a while. Instead of accepting their mistakes and growing up, these sellers instead try to drag everyone else down with childish gossip and defamation. It's hard to feel sorry for them when they ask you how many items you've sold per week so far!
I know that this is an extreme situation but it illustrates perfectly what I mean when I say the community is completely toxic. Unethical people are destroying it, and the others just beg for their attention.
I was on a trip to China recently, and I went on eBay to look for an iPhone cover case. I didn't find anything very interesting (you cannot find one in Europe), but then I came upon this amazing table offering a set of real Han Dynasty jade ornaments for 50 USD! Such beautiful pieces you've never seen before. In fact, they're not real jade, so they are fake. But they are really well made. So I decided to bid on them - and then another person placed a bid, and another, and another. I had to increase my bid with each subsequent round because the amounts were getting too high. In the end I won for 220 USD, which is more than 5 times the price of a real jade set that you can find in a museum. It was worth it of course - but that is not why I bid in the first place! And... at one point during the bidding, there was no winning bidder! Even though there were several people bidding against me!
In other words, people were just bidding up the price artificially! You see this on eBay all the time. And then finally someone wins with a ridiculously high price. I have no idea why people do this. The only explanation I can come up with is that it is a way to get into the top bidder's list and make some extra money. But I think eBay needs to do something about this or it will ruin the system for everyone else.
For example, I have been selling a lot of old camera lenses on eBay recently, mostly because they are really easy to sell. The profit margins are huge, and there are hundreds of them that you can buy at any given time on eBay. It's much easier to do this than it is to sell new lenses. I was going to buy a new lens but I just couldn't justify the expense. So I decided that instead of buying one, I would just sell all of them (including the one I have now).
I have been selling them for about 12 months now. My inventory is about 300 items, and so far my profit margin per month might be as high as 20%! This is a lot when you consider that I spend no effort at all on advertising or keeping track of prices. Just writing descriptions and listing each item separately on different days, each one with its unique shipping price and tracking number.
Conclusion: eBay may be dying and the war between buyers and sellers may already be won, but it is still an amazing place. The price system is completely irrelevant here. People are more interested in a good story than in buying something for a rock bottom price. Some say that this can be leveraged to make you rich, but I think it mostly helps you to find the things you want - but not to sell them!
Compare this to Facebook, where I have less than 100 friends. The site has 400 million users, but I barely know anyone on it! It's like there's 300 million people who have no interest in me whatsoever! And that's fine with me too.