One of ebay's Cottage industry got absorbed into the mothership. I wonder if they made consideration for consolidating all the various auction listing businesses across the country.
EBay Valet
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Re: EBay Valet
#12ebay doing its hardest to be like amazon, while their actual auction experience is getting worse and worse.
They're doing that on purpose. I think a major turning point was discovering that "buy it now" auctions (i.e. normal, fixed-price sales) were massively more popular than auction auctions.
Thats because they failed to ever fix bid sniping, switching to dutch auctions would have been better for everyone.
Edit: Dutch auction is the wrong term and I cant track down the actual name. But essentially the auction gets extended by 10 minutes every time someone bids if the auction is going to end in less than 10 minutes.
Re: EBay Valet
#13You get 70% of the sale price if your things sell.
30% commission, and the valet's incentives are for a quick sale rather than the best price, if the behavior of existing bulk listers is anything to go by. These people are usually not especially knowledgeable about the items they sell and so have a poor grasp of pricing - often good for me as informed buyer, but a real pain in the ass for sellers.
Re: EBay Valet
#14I remember ebay consignment stores that existed locally years ago. They took on the order of 50-60% of the total sale price.
It was a horrible deal, and every single one I knew of is now closed for business.
Re: EBay Valet
#15You can't set your own price, and you only get a two-week run. On the other hand, you don't have to deal with the cesspool that is being a seller on eBay.
I wonder how eBay will deal with the "yes, please iPad to vacant lot near warehouse Miami" folks, other than immediately transferring buyer's funds without the possibility for reversal. If they did that for ordinary sellers, I'd quite happily ship my iPad to the sketchy address and go on my merry way.
Re: EBay Valet
#16FOBO (YC2011) has a similar model and it takes only a 15% fee. http://www.fobo.net/
Re: EBay Valet
#17Will it not create conflict of interests? On one side, eBay should make their listing and selling processes as easy as possible for individuals, and on the other side keeping them somewhat difficult will promote Valet service.
It would not be a conflict of interest if the Valet service does not generate more profit per sale after everything is factored in.
I believe it is fair to assume that Valet service will be costlier for the user. So, if eBay makes the same profit on Valet as on direct selling, then eBay may not feel motivated to push through usability enhancements in direct selling, even though it is definitely beneficial for its users.
Of course, I am over-simplifying things, but I have been in a similar situation wherein the customers of our service started offering to pay us to help them use our service. Instead of accepting payments, we helped the users for free and took their problems as problems with the usability of our tool which we needed to fix. We believed that accepting paid service as a revenue channel would deviate us from making a good tool in the first place.
Re: EBay Valet
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're doing that on purpose. I think a major turning point was discovering that "buy it now" auctions (i.e. normal, fixed-price sales) were massively more popular than auction auctions.
Thats because they failed to ever fix bid sniping, switching to dutch auctions would have been better for everyone. Edit: Dutch auction is the wrong term and I cant track down the actual name. But essentially the auction gets extended by 10 minutes every time someone bids if the auction is going to end in less than 10 minutes.
Beaten to it.
Sniping is hugely frustrating and the main reason people either use buy it now or plain old ads (cf gumtree/Craigslist etc)
Re: EBay Valet
#19ebay doing its hardest to be like amazon, while their actual auction experience is getting worse and worse.
They're doing that on purpose. I think a major turning point was discovering that "buy it now" auctions (i.e. normal, fixed-price sales) were massively more popular than auction auctions.
Anecdote about eBay, I sold an iPad on the site about 3 years ago, it got bought "Buy it Now" 3 times in a row from fraudsters even after restricting countries and ratings ppl just refused to acutal pay for the goods.
However after one "Free" re-listing ebay demanded that I pay them, even though the item had not sold. So in effect ebay has created an economic model where they benefit from scammers and fraudsters.
I never sold anything on the site again.
Re: EBay Valet
#20Isn't amazon already doing something similar with "warehouse deals" and "fullified by Amazon?
Warehouse is all Amazon returns, AFAIK. But you can do used sales off of the main purchase page, and mail in your stuff to have it Fulfilled by Amazon. I've been looking into this quite a bit lately since I have about $7,000 of Canon gear to sell off. I think I'll stick with Amazon. Ebay's 30% seems ridiculously steep.
For $7,000 of Canon gear, 30% is surely steep. I think you should just sell your stuff directly on ebay. They just charge 10%. I think ebay valet's customer base is people who have something around but don't know its value and just want to get rid of it.