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I wish ebay wasn't so buggy. Mysterious failures, absent error messages-- both as a buyer and seller. Aliexpress has much better software in my experience. :(
If I were buying anything expensive, I'd care, but it's still better than Amazon for many things.
eBay is a fascinating story for their early impact to the commercial internet. It is also fascinating to see how they've fared: it is still around but now it is being eaten up by competitors like Facebook Marketplace in the US, MercadoLibre in Latin America and others. PayPal is on a somewhat similar trajectory. The lesson here is to keep your customers happy or someone else will. Also found it interesting to read ab…
That seems trite. Why couldn't ebay/paypal keep their customers happy?
It looks to me like these companies epitomize the management philosophy of "software doesn't matter". Having established a lucrative niche with strong network effects, they offshored their software development. The CEOs are pure managers without software backgrounds; they could just as easily be running Proctor & Gamble. And so they run it like Proctor & Gamble.
Stripe, Amazon are run by people with software backgrounds.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> seller A was powerless to stop it They could select the "Amazon barcode" option (instead of the default "Manufacturer barcode") under "Barcode preference" which prevents commingling (but requires the seller to apply seller-specific barcode labels to all units).
Had no idea this was possible. I wonder if some more judicious process to make it easier for sellers to use this could stamp out the issue at the source.
I wish ebay wasn't so buggy. Mysterious failures, absent error messages-- both as a buyer and seller. Aliexpress has much better software in my experience. :(
Yeah, the shopping cart performance has gotten so slow lately, I've gone days without being able to complete checkout. Or some items would complete and others would still be sitting there, lather rinse repeat, and some simply vanish without actually being purchased. Some get purchased twice... If I were buying anything expensive, I'd care, but it's still better than Amazon for many things.
You might want to try:
- using 8.8.8.8 for DNS
- a different browser in case there's a plugin problem
- traceroute
- a different location in your city, like an Internet cafe
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was a tiny tiny competitor to eBay some 20 years ago and the pez story was pure BS. The reality is that eBay (that is AuctionWeb) got its initial traction from spamming Usenet as the story correctly states. Very quickly they moved from spamming themselves to letting their users spam Usenet. This is the "growth hacking" model still followed today by many. The question is there any moral middle ground? If you can sea…
Being "born from spam" really explains a lot about how most eBay sellers communicate to this day.
However:
- You can sign up for a store newsletter
- in the past few months, ebay is sending auction time notifications, and pinging sellers to offer discounts to viewers. That's the only thing that has the spam smell, but the discount offers do help distinguish who wants to make a deal :)
I still don't understand why eBay hasn't leveraged eBay, Skype and Paypal into something like WeChat.
Microsoft bought Skype, and Paypal is independent now.
I am fascinated by how many key technologies they had without those parts being integrated into something bigger than their sum.
I worked there on contract a couple of times, got to know some of the folks - and it sure seems like it was a breeding ground of interesting Internet ideas. Matt Dillon, who has clearly proven his mettle in the time since, was developing his keen sense of social stewardship by keeping BEST's internet services up and running - I'll never forget the shock of discovering that they ran the entire thing on a database system Matt had developed himself...
I wonder what other things came from that incubator. It was a wild scene, indeed.
It’s funny how Amazon feared eBay, and then failed to beat them — in 1999. But when I worked at eBay in 2003, they had the mailroom put a sticker on every amazon box that said “Next time get it on eBay!” And now the tide is swinging back a bit as people get fed up with fakes and commingling at Amazon. At least with eBay you know the product you’re getting is actually from the seller you bought it from.
This is a great video showing how stolen credit cards are laundered through eBay “Nina Kollars - Confessions of an Nespresso Money Mule”
Marketplace is also based on the abundance and quality of contents (merchandise). Scale effect is good at the globalization period but not sure for the next era.