I Hate eBay

[GagaMan]

Good point, but it's still annoying to wait till the last second and shatter your hopes like that, when it looks like no one else is even interested in the item. A lot of the time things go for more than they're even worth to me, like the other person is a rich twat who'll pay anything just to win it. I tend to only put my max bid in straight away now, so if I do get outbid right at the end fair enough, let them have it. It would just be nice to win something once in a while for a reasonable price.

[Niode]

I think too many expect to get "deal of the century" with ebay and it just doesn't happen. Ebay is a sellers market, the entire system is there to help people selling items get the most out of it. After all, if ebay made it so that the buyer won the items for less, ebay would get less money as they take a cut from the final item value.

If you notice, the vast majority of bids on most items get placed in the last hour or so. There's no point putting in a bid too early and driving the price up. Just like in a real auction. It's always better to see if there is demand for the item first. If you've ever been to a real auction there's a real psychological game being played. You don't ever want to give it away that you really want something it will cause more people to just bid for the sake of it and drive the price up.

Plus ebay tends to be a great leveller of prices, most items go for a consistent average (trust me, go look at an item that goes up quite often like a wavebird or any atlus game for PS2 or something similar where the vast majority of auctions aren't BINs) you'll notice they all go for roughly the same price. Items get what they are worth on ebay quite a lot and people thinking they are being cheated all the time by bid snipers simply aren't paying the perceived value of the item and are expecting to get lucky with an underpriced/undersold item. Unlike flea/second hand markets and other bartering situations, getting a huge bargain isn't the norm on ebay.

[GagaMan]

Well in that case finding gaming bargains is nigh on impossible nowadays because everyone has stopped taking games to car boot sales and second hand shops and are sticking them on ebay instead. Great for the sellers, not for the buyers who actually want to play games and don't want to break the bank doing so.

(Seriously, the boot sales have been shit this year: all you find is common as dirt games they can't sell on ebay at all like football and crap. It's depressing because the whole idea of bargain hunting is dying.)

[shallowgamer]

With all due respect, I'd like to disagree that eBay is a seller's market. As a buyer, we have access to a handful of sellers that have the same item. While in a typical auction the buyers are competing against each other, on eBay the sellers are competing against each other as well.

And they've progressively taken steps to screw over the seller over the last few years. They took over paypal and implemented rules in the buyer's favor. If a buyer claims they never got their item, and the seller didn't pay extra for delivery confirmation, guess what? The buyer gets the item and keeps their cash. They put a cap on how much sellers can charge for shipping certain items, which drives the "final value" price up and means a bigger cut for eBay.
And finally, over the last holiday season, they eliminated negative feedback for buyers. They allow "unpaid strikes", which really isn't the only reason that a buyer would deserve negative feedback.

I do both buying and selling, and I'll say that I love buying on eBay because of the rules in place. The same rules also make me hate selling.

[GagaMan]

Yeah, selling on there is increasingly becoming a pain in the arse with the way Ebay and Paypal rape you with fees. I also find it ironic that anything I bid on I get outbid on, wheras most of the time people either don't even touch my stuff or win it at the starting price, which is why I only do buy it now or best offer now for most things.

[Ack]

To be honest, when bidding for something that I'm pretty "meh" on, I'll throw up a bid a few days in advance and not really pay attention. If it's something I want, I watch it like a hawk for the last ten minutes. But because of the issues, I've started looking towards alternatives to find the games I want.

[Niode]

I think you misread what I was getting at. I too sell quite a lot on ebay and the rules really annoy me and it's one of the reason I sell high priced items privately. I'd much rather do business with somebody in front of me.

What I'm saying is ebay works more in the sellers favour in getting the highest price. If ebay didn't bid for you then the price of items would be a lot lower since people would have to sit at the auction and bid manually. The current system favours the seller due to the way it works, IE somebody bids £20 on an item, and the item has a 99p start, that bidder then has the item currently at 99p despite putting £20, in a real auction you simply declare interest and the price moves up as more people declare interest. If somebody were to bid £19 on that same item the price of auction would move to £19 instead of 99p despite the higher bid being at £20. So the new person could never bid on that item again and it will be 'stuck' at £19. The only way the price would go down would be if the new bidder retracts their bid.

This particular system allows price fixing on ebay. A seller, if he was devious enough could get somebody else to bid on said item up to the price that he wants to get for the item. The bid is locked at that price until somebody bids higher. So you are more or less guaranteed to get it at more than that price and you don't pay the full fees associated with a guaranteed price auction (BIN).

[GagaMan]

Another shit thing about being a seller: if the post office manages to ruin a strong enough box in transit you get the blame for that as well! Also gotta hate how you can only give postive feedback to buyers or none at all, what about neutral?

[Ack]

The post office can screw buyers over too, if you're not using PayPal. I sent off a money order to a guy in Cincinnati over a week ago and it still hasn't arrived. He's being really cool about it, but this transaction has continued to drag on because the post office fucked up.

[Ziggy]

I too have once mailed out a check that NEVER made it to the seller. The guy was cool about it though, and everything worked out well.

I'm too scared to sell any thing on eBay now. I know some one has given me a shit star rating, but it hasn't effected me yet (I don't have enough of them yet before they start to count).