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Ebay will match Amazon’s, Walmart’s and others’ prices on over 50K items

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Re: Ebay will match Amazon’s, Walmart’s and others’ prices on over 50K items

#41

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #21
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't we want companies to engage in price competition though? Especially in a market with network effects which is dominated by a few large players.

> Don't we want companies to engage in price competition...? The literature is mixed on the effects of price-matching guarantees [1][2]. The most compelling resolution I've read says "price-matching guarantees can facilitate monopoly pricing only if firms automatically match prices. If consumers must instead request refunds (thereby incurring hassle costs)...any increase in equilibrium prices due to firms’ price-matc…

>In any case, enforcing an automatic price-matching ban would be difficult. Would you prohibit firms from lowering their prices to match competitors'? If not, it would just take a few turns of the ratchet to send the message to would-be competitors (and consumers). Whether the consumer surplus from those ratchet turns are worth the enforcement cost is an open question.

Couldn't you just make a law saying "price-match guarantees are illegal"? Firms who explicitly move prices to match each other is fine with me, but the match guarantee is problematic. It seems that your conclusion is that companies use matching guarantees to implicitly collude but that even if we got rid of this they would still collude. But we should still stamp out collusion wherever we see it even if that puts us in a whack-a-mole situation.

Re: Ebay will match Amazon’s, Walmart’s and others’ prices on over 50K items

#42

Post by losteverything »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #8
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #3

Here's what I don't get. Why do a price match guarantee? Why not just price your items lower? Or do a "match" where you guarantee every item for 10 cents cheaper than your competitors?

> Why do a price match guarantee? Why not just price your items lower? MAD [1]. Price-match guarantees are meant to deter price competition. If you cut your price below a price-matching competitor's, the time you have the best price will be short. After that, less profit for everyone (assuming similar cost structures). If, on the other hand, you match, everyone keeps their market share and margins. Price competition…

How does this relate to pricing for top search display? (being $.01 less than others')

Same rules/ theory?

Re: Ebay will match Amazon’s, Walmart’s and others’ prices on over 50K items

#44

Post by swlkr »

cletus wrote: post #37

What I don't get about eBay is they found initial success in being an auction site then they almost immediately decided they wanted to be an online retailer instead. Why not just be the best auction site you can be rather than be yet another Amazon wannabe? Interestingly Amazon has done the same thing except they want to be Google (Android) and Netflix (content bundling with Prime). I get the desire to grow but hones…

Amazon does a decent job at prime originals vs. netflix originals.

Re: Ebay will match Amazon’s, Walmart’s and others’ prices on over 50K items

#45

Post by saralily »

Shivetya wrote: post #34
petraeus wrote: post #16

PRO TIP eBay: people don't use your site not because of prices but because you are a horrible company to deal with.

I don't agree. As a buyer I have never had a problem they did not settle to my satisfaction. I did make sure in each case to have my facts in order. I tend to buy mostly antiques, glass and china, and have had three bad purchases which were fraudulent in some manner. This out of nearly three hundred purchases. I also purchase consumer items like batteries, dog toys, beef jerky, a DJI drone, and whatnot off the site.…

As a buyer you're more than protected.

As a seller, I'm exposed for 30 days, because you can, for any reason, choose to return the item with a full refund, and just say it doesn't work. Ebay does not take evidence from the seller that this patently untrue. I've been burned twice this way and lost hundreds trying to sell two laptops.

Re: Ebay will match Amazon’s, Walmart’s and others’ prices on over 50K items

#46

Post by uw_rob »

cletus wrote: post #37

What I don't get about eBay is they found initial success in being an auction site then they almost immediately decided they wanted to be an online retailer instead. Why not just be the best auction site you can be rather than be yet another Amazon wannabe? Interestingly Amazon has done the same thing except they want to be Google (Android) and Netflix (content bundling with Prime). I get the desire to grow but hones…

> What I don't get about eBay is they found initial success in being an auction site then they almost immediately decided they wanted to be an online retailer instead. Why not just be the best auction site you can be rather than be yet another Amazon wannabe?

I recently read a book [0] that outlined some of the reasons why that happened.

Two of the main reasons outlined were: (1) As more and more people started selling on the site, items started to become commodities with fixed prices. So even old antiques started to have a fixed value. This encouraged more people to just buy it now. (2) Even by the mid 2000's, when ebay was still considered mainly an auction site, only a very small fraction of sales were made by auctions. Something around 90% of sales were buy-it-now new items. This meant that their real success was in buy-it-now and they started to focus on that. (Don't quote me on the numbers in the second part, I will try to get more accurate ones later).

So they had a lot of initial success in being an auction site, but there isn't really much of an market for a general purpose auction site. And once you become a succesful auction site, you basically stop being a auction site.

[0] I cannot remember the name right now and I cannot find it. It was about providing real world examples of famous economic papers. It covered wide ranges of topics about used cars prices, trading in prison camps, ebay. It was released in 2016.

Re: Ebay will match Amazon’s, Walmart’s and others’ prices on over 50K items

#47

Post by hkmurakami »

saralily wrote: post #45
Shivetya wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree. As a buyer I have never had a problem they did not settle to my satisfaction. I did make sure in each case to have my facts in order. I tend to buy mostly antiques, glass and china, and have had three bad purchases which were fraudulent in some manner. This out of nearly three hundred purchases. I also purchase consumer items like batteries, dog toys, beef jerky, a DJI drone, and whatnot off the site.…

As a buyer you're more than protected. As a seller, I'm exposed for 30 days, because you can, for any reason, choose to return the item with a full refund, and just say it doesn't work. Ebay does not take evidence from the seller that this patently untrue. I've been burned twice this way and lost hundreds trying to sell two laptops.

Yeah eBay made a choice to only cater to mass sellers (and not indivoduals) and push the cost of fraud onto the seller.

Re: Ebay will match Amazon’s, Walmart’s and others’ prices on over 50K items

#48

Post by bitJericho »

kbart wrote: post #33
zanny wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phone cases and batteries are usually selling much cheaper on ebay than Amazon Marketplace. A lot of them are obviously fakes, but even the real ones are a good 20-30% cheaper.

"A lot of them are obviously fakes" Amazon is even worse, because sometimes there's no way to tell if items is original or fake and end up getting fake for same price as original. On eBay you can mostly safely assume it's fake, so at least you get what you pay for.

Well you can source ebay items from reputable, name brand, stores, and you know they didn't mix in fakes from chinese companies.

Re: Ebay will match Amazon’s, Walmart’s and others’ prices on over 50K items

#49

Post by adventured »

cletus wrote: post #37

What I don't get about eBay is they found initial success in being an auction site then they almost immediately decided they wanted to be an online retailer instead. Why not just be the best auction site you can be rather than be yet another Amazon wannabe? Interestingly Amazon has done the same thing except they want to be Google (Android) and Netflix (content bundling with Prime). I get the desire to grow but hones…

> rather than be yet another Amazon wannabe

Amusingly, seeing eBay's profitability early on, Amazon tried to build on an eBay wannabe product and failed miserably at auctions. eBay has had the segment to itself ever since. Why didn't Amazon solely focus on being the best retailer it could be, instead of pursuing a foray into auctions? They couldn't help themselves, they saw the $$$ eBay was earning, as Bezos did with the iPhone margins.

And while I fully understand the reasons for the valuation difference, I still find it hilarious that eBay is generating roughly as much net income annually as Amazon, at 1/12th the valuation.

Re: Ebay will match Amazon’s, Walmart’s and others’ prices on over 50K items

#50

Post by dionidium »

cletus wrote: post #37

What I don't get about eBay is they found initial success in being an auction site then they almost immediately decided they wanted to be an online retailer instead. Why not just be the best auction site you can be rather than be yet another Amazon wannabe? Interestingly Amazon has done the same thing except they want to be Google (Android) and Netflix (content bundling with Prime). I get the desire to grow but hones…

Etsy, eBay, etc. Clearly retail is a bigger overall market, so they can't resist.
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