There was a time not too long ago when, if I was looking at an item in a store and I wasn’t sure whether or not I wanted to buy it, I would think to myself, “Eh, I can always find it on eBay later, maybe cheaper.” That is no longer the case.
Whether the item is a book, a comic, a CD, a video, or a piece of electronic equipment, the eBay bargains are gone. Everything that’s there is priced right about what one would expect to pay anywhere else, with the only added enticement being a much greater possibility of potential fraud than at nearly any other online retail outlet.
Perhaps worse, the selection has vanished along with the savings. As an avid music listener from an early age I have a lot of music, and 99% of the time if I’m looking to buy a piece of music the chances are it’s not going to be the kind of thing they have at Wal-Mart. At one time, virtually any album — in print or out — was available on eBay. Often at ridiculously inflated prices, true — but still, there were bargains to be had there. Once, but no more.
Where have the deals and selection gone? For the most part, Amazon is where I find myself ordering items online, and if it’s not Amazon it’ll be some smaller, dedicated online retailer that specializes in what I’m looking for.
It’s not just buying, either — I’ve pretty much lost interest in selling things on eBay. All of the items listed above are also things I’ve sold on eBay over the years, in the range of multiple thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise, nearly all via auctions I started at 1 cent with no reserve price. Some auctions went for more, some went for less, but it all evened out for the most part and made it worthwhile. But over time, the margins of profit got whittled down, and so did sellers’ freedom, and eventually, my selling activities tapered off. It takes time and effort to sell things anywhere, including eBay, and for the effort to be worthwhile there has to be a significant payoff at the end. As that payoff dwindled, so too did my willingness to spend my time on eBay.
As a seller, I think the last straw was when they took away the ability for sellers to give negative feedback to buyers. Any schoolchild can tell you that a feedback system where the “positive” option has no corresponding “negative” value is meaningless (”Was this the best field trip ever? Or the bestest field trip ever?”), but evidently eBay management couldn’t figure that out. I actually only recall leaving negative feedback once or twice out of hundreds of auctions — for some reason, packages sent to Italy had a tendency to mysteriously disappear before delivery — but that was hardly the point. The removal of the option was insulting to the point that I just decided I’d had enough.
Since then, I haven’t sold a single item on eBay. I think I’ve bought one CD — and let me note I have no boycott or any other aversion against buying items from eBay, I’ll get whatever I need from whomever’s willing to sell it to me at the best price. It’s just happened that that has been ebay only once in the past — year and a half? Two years? More?
I have a stack of books building up that I would have put on eBay in the past, and it’s starting to build up to the point that it’s nearly time that I need to do something about it. Recently, eBay switched their policies again to make auction-style listings with a starting price under $1 free, up to 100 per month. That’s free to list, of course, but on the back end, there’s that 9% final value fee, and then PayPal’s almost 4% fee, and then of course the userbase just isn’t what it used to be, and USPS rates have gone up, and…
I think I’ll look into selling on Amazon, they always seem to have good deals on used books there these days. Although frankly, the best deals I’ve gotten on books in the past year have been from walking in and browsing the shelves at 5th Avenue Books here in San Diego’s Hillcrest district, so maybe I’ll just take them down and see what I can get for trade — you know, the way people did before eBay.
