Imagine what Facebook could do with eBay.
eBay planning massive job cuts following PayPal split – report
Holiday good cheer may be short-lived for eBay employees this year, many of whom could reportedly lose their jobs not long after the Christmas shopping season. According to The Wall Street Journal, the online tat bazaar is considering cutting as much as 10 per cent of its workforce in the New Year, with most of the 3,000 …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 11th December 2014 11:07 GMT Jimbo in Thailand
This news is hardly surprising since ebay has gone to shite!
I've been a fairly active ebay buyer and occasional seller for almost 13 years now. Since choosing to become an expat 10+ years ago ebay has been a lifeline for stuff I either can't get here or is simply way too expensive due to Thailand's ultra-corrupt monopoly distribution system. I'll save that rant for another day.
OK, during my decade long expat odyssey I've steadily observed ebay heading for the sewer (nice euphemism, eh?). Of course greed is the reason and current CEO John Donahue has proven himself to be a completely clueless effing greedy moron. He obviously rode the short bus to CEO school. In a nutshell, via his policies, he has proven himself time and time again to be 100% pro seller and 100% anti buyer at all costs. The dumb f*ck doesn't realize that without buyers there ain't gonna be NO ebay.
I confess I never thought much of Meg Whitman when she was CEO of ebay (and think even less of her post-ebay), but compared to John Donahue, she was a freakin' Einstein, and the ebay experience under her watch was actually a lot of fun. And with the low ebay fees back then prices were much better.. Ahhh, those were the good ol' days when you could actually have decent communications between buyers and sellers to make the right buying decision. Of course Donahue has almost completely finished implementing his policy of ZERO communications between buyers and sellers. The stupid pecker-head doesn't realize that good communication is what made ebay what it was. He's also completely forgotten how important a positive 'ebay experience' was/is to ebay's success.
I have many other gripes but will stop here as this is turning into a tome. Suffice it to say that, if it were legal, and I was in the same room with that dumbass extraordinaire, aka John Donahue, I would put my right foot so far up his ass/arse that he could taste my friggin' shoestrings!
/end rant
Sigh... if only there was a decent alternative to ebay.
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Thursday 11th December 2014 12:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: This news is hardly surprising since ebay has gone to shite!
I have to disagree.
eBay has completely shafted sellers in the last 10 or 11 years. Massive fee increases and a dispute system which will always find in the buyers favour. I've been a buyer on eBay pretty much since they launched in the UK and still am today, but as a one-time PowerSeller I'd rather throw something away than list it on eBay.
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Thursday 11th December 2014 13:42 GMT Jimbo in Thailand
Re: This news is hardly surprising since ebay has gone to shite!
Interesting that you disagree with me AC but sorry to learn of your ebay ills. As primarily a buyer I've been shafted by the same system you complain about as a seller. One example is when a Powerseller shipped me a not only cheaper model Dell/Nvidia video card instead of the model I purchased for my laptop, but it was defective as well. When I installed it, a 2nd-hand part, it displayed tons of graphic anomalies, but I was at least able to verify it was indeed a lower end Nvidia model. I did return the part and after reviewing the seller's feedback found that he had been substituting cheaper parts to others so promptly left negative feedback. He in turn left negative feedback for me, lying about the whole transaction. This was just before ebay changed that policy. Not only did ebay refuse to remove the only negative feedback I've ever received, I checked later and found that they had even removed my negative feedback for that unscrupulous seller. How did he get a way with it? He had massive sales.
I've been ripped off on other transactions. One seller remarked a 2GB SD memory card as a 32GB, back when 32GB cards were the upper end. When I installed it it even reported 32GB. When I attempted to load it with about 20GB of mp3 files when it reached 2GB it completely locked up my computer. After rebooting and checking the card it showed 2GB capacity. During that period he sold a gazillion of them for a much lower price than normal, a red flag that I missed, obviously. Ebay/Paypal refused to refund my money until I returned the item to the seller in China, no less, when the seller was masquerading as a seller out of California. It would have cost me about as much for the return shipping as I paid for it since they required that it be returned with tracking and insurance, etc. so I just had to eat that one instead of throwing good money after bad.
I've had other sellers misrepresent items in their descriptions and I've had to eat those too. And when you look at how nearly impossible it is to contact a seller these days it certainly means to me that buyers are the step-children on ebay. Donahue actually gives sellers the option to refuse questions from buyers. WTF?!
In addition you can no longer report excessive shipping charges. It's also nearly impossible to report misrepresented items. Everything is buried under layers and layers of pointless menus that have almost zero usable options.
I do agree with you about the fees. I was actually a Powerseller for a few months when I was liquidating assets back in the US in preparation for moving to Thailand. Luckily, that was years ago and the fees were still reasonable.
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Thursday 11th December 2014 14:16 GMT StimuliC
Re: This news is hardly surprising since ebay has gone to shite!
eBay has an abortion of a website for sellers. It is buggy, impossibly slow, even on a 75 Mbps connection. In fact it is no less responsive on a 3Mbps connection and no more responsive on a 300Mbps connection.
It suffers from errors in coding that can leave a seller looking at a screen saying "System error please try again later" while the problem is that someone has screwed up. eBay won't accept there is a problem regardless of sending them a video showing it.
They are too busy using statements to try and get sellers to move the shipping cost into the price of the item with statements like "Sales go up 11% when you make shipping free". We all know that shipping is not free and a seller will merely increase the starting price of fixed price by the cost of the shipping and the cost of shipping on many items tends to be "25 to 35% of the total cost" so sales in real terms are dropping for the seller but it makes eBay's sales figures they report to the shareholders look better by that 11%. Individual sellers actually have sales dropping by about 15-25% or sometimes more in real terms.
Then eBay wonders why people quit and move to sites like Etsy etc, it's because eBay have screwed the sellers in the US, UK and other developed countries to favor sellers from China who can sell for 99 cents with free shipping!
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Thursday 11th December 2014 16:11 GMT Weeble
"There will be changes; there will be significant changes."
1) Actively stamping on fraudulent sellers (where "in UK" arrives airmail from HongKong, 3 or more "fronts" to a single trader, etc.)
2) A meaninful feedback system (why do I have to say "marvellous, fabulous, amazing", just to avoid being seen as "negative").
3) World Peace
Actually, (3) is most likely.