Why I don't like Ebay
I've been using the internet now for over a decade. My first experiences of it were with Windows 3.1 and a 14.4k modem. Back then you had to install some third-party software to allow you to actually dial up and connect as Windows didn't come with it built in until Windows 95 was released.
It was cool to refer to it as the "information superhighway" and "cyberspace", and you were considered quite a geek if you had an email address and surfed the web regularly.
So, fastforward a moment to 2006. The world and her dog are online, everyone from young kids to the so-called "silver-surfers" (who presumably book their Saga holidays online while surfing from their web-enabled Stanner stairlifts).
I don't fear the internet. I can't remember the last time my computer had a virus, or was infected with advertising or spyware, I never get a popup window unless I request it and I do all my online banking (and an awful lot of shopping) online. I can spot an email scam from a mile off. I even organise my social life online.
So why do people look at me funny when I say I have never used Ebay before?
If I utter these words in a crowded room then invariably there are gasps before the room goes quiet, and I am scrutinised as if I had just been dropped off from a passing Vogon spaceship.
"You mean you've... you've never used Ebay before? Really?" they say, with incredulity.
"Yes," I reply, now becoming scared for my own personal safety. "I don't like it."
Judging by its enourmous popularity and success, this seems like an odd thing to say, especially for someone as geeky as me. Practically everyone I talk to seems to use Ebay from time to time, but every time I've gone on to the site my spidey-senses begin to tingle. There are just some things about it I don't like at all.
For example: I don't like the terminology they use. Someone told me last night she'd won a bottle of champagne from Ebay. I was very impressed and pleased for her... I asked her what had she done to win it?
It turns out that she hadn't "won" the bottle at all, not in the real sense of the word "win", rather she had BOUGHT the bottle. She had bid the most money for it. I think, from memory, the bottle cost her £1. Bargain eh? But delivery was another £6 on top of that, making the totaly price a slightly less than dazzling £7.
Don't get me wrong... £7 for a bottle of champers ain't bad. But I hate the way Ebay use the term "you have won" something when you have really purchased it with your hard-earned cash.
Let's stick with this champagne auction a bit longer. She bought the bottle from some prevously-unknown-to-her person somewhere in the world. She has to trust that this person is honest and will ship exactly what she is expecting and it will be delivered on time and in one piece. She will have to wait a few days for her purchase. Compare this to a trip to the supermarket:
I walk in to the store and see a wide range of champagne on offer. I select the bottle I want; if I can see one and put it in my trolley I know they have it in stock, I know exactly how much I will be paying for it, and there's a firm guarantee that if it was the only one in store that nobody else can swipe it from me and pay an extra 50p for it at the checkout. I know I will be leaving the store with this bottle of champers.
Notice at no stage do I con myself into thinking I have "won" the bottle of champagne. Only if I was retarded would I think that I have somehow won the bottle by handing over money for it!
Let's assume the champagne from Ebay arrives safely and not too shaken up. The seller will get their £1 profit (if you can call £1 a profit on something that probably cost them more to buy in the first place). It's possible that they made more than £1 profit by overcharging for the postage.
I know of morally dishonest (yet still within the accepted rules) sellers who advertise their wares for a very low price, say £5, but it's only when you read the small print do you notice that the postage and packing is something silly, like £100.
I have also read about other auctions designed to trap the trusting and unwary where they advertise a Playstation 2 box, and show you lots of pictures of the PS2, even read out the specifications of the PS2 printed on the box. But what you're actually bidding for is an empty box. Re-read the auction carefully and you see that, but it is presented in such a way to trick you. Legally this is acceptable. Morally it stinks.
Going back to our champagne example for a moment, let's assume the seller made no profit from the P&P, they simply made £1 from the bottle itself. Unfortunately for them, they don't actually get to see all of the £1 profit as Ebay themselves want a fee for being the middleman. I'm not knocking this - it's perfectly fair and valid, but from the seller's perspective I can't imagine it's worth their time and shoe leather to package up a bottle, walk to the post office and wait in line to send it off, for less than £1 profit?
Notice earlier I fell into another trap - I said the champagne was from Ebay. Everyone says this. "I got this watch from Ebay!" or "I'll see if I can find a new car on Ebay".
If you buy something "from Ebay" you're really doing nothing of the sort. You are using Ebay to contact someone who is selling an item. It's no different than seeing an ad in your local paper which puts you in touch with someone selling a car. You know you are buying from the car dealer, not from the newspaper. If you're sold a dud, you don't seek recompense from the newspaper.
Personally I wonder at the sanity of people buying cars "from Ebay" (there it is again!)... if you're going to part with several thousand pounds with something as potentially dodgy as a car, don't you want to actually be there yourself to examine it inside and out and test-drive the thing?
By "dodgy" I mean the car might have been in an accident, might have been clocked, might be stolen (hard to check the VIN numbers from your armchair), might not even exist. It might make a clunking noise when you drive it over 30mph.
I'm sure there are bargains to be had from Ebay, but the trouble is, I hear success stories from both sides of the argument and they can't both be true. Not many people would brag about being ripped off now would they?
Some people talk about how cheap things are from Ebay; how little they paid for an item. Few mention how much the postage cost them, of course, and fewer admit that some of the items they are buying are second-hand, so it's not fair to compare them to a highstreet price, complete with the statutory 12 month guarantee.
It's also a bit of a lottery. Bid low and you're likely to be outbid. If you have your heart set on an item, then you have to bid high and hope nobody else bids close to your bid. Personally I'd rather just know how much something was going to cost me and that I'd be guaranteed of buying it for that price. I don't like the uncertainty of auctions.
But what about those people who claim they make a fortune from selling on Ebay? There are books about how to become a professional Ebay trader, give up your career and spend your day working from the comfort of your living room as the cash piles up. Some buyers are mugs, they'll pay well over the odds for stuff, be it concert tickets or junk you don't want any more. Some claim they buy from second-hand shops and sell them on Ebay for huge markups.
I wonder just how much money the average person would make from this, taking into account all the fees you pay. Ebay charges a fee for listing something, a fee when you sell something and they also get you again if you use PayPal 'cos they own that too! Then there's the time factor... let's say you earn £150 a week clear profit from Ebay. How many hours did you spend taking photos of your items, advertising them on the site, then taking the payment, packing the item up and then mailing them out? Can you guarantee you'll earn this every week?
My final objection to the site is this, and it may sound superficial. I don't like the design. It's messy. It's ugly. It's not intuitive for me to use. It looks very amateurish and there are few blocks in place to stop people adding malicious code to their auction pages to trick your browser into doing something you don't want it to.
There's clearly only ever one guaranteed winner with Ebay...
...and that's Ebay themselves.
It was cool to refer to it as the "information superhighway" and "cyberspace", and you were considered quite a geek if you had an email address and surfed the web regularly.
So, fastforward a moment to 2006. The world and her dog are online, everyone from young kids to the so-called "silver-surfers" (who presumably book their Saga holidays online while surfing from their web-enabled Stanner stairlifts).
I don't fear the internet. I can't remember the last time my computer had a virus, or was infected with advertising or spyware, I never get a popup window unless I request it and I do all my online banking (and an awful lot of shopping) online. I can spot an email scam from a mile off. I even organise my social life online.
So why do people look at me funny when I say I have never used Ebay before?
If I utter these words in a crowded room then invariably there are gasps before the room goes quiet, and I am scrutinised as if I had just been dropped off from a passing Vogon spaceship.
"You mean you've... you've never used Ebay before? Really?" they say, with incredulity.
"Yes," I reply, now becoming scared for my own personal safety. "I don't like it."
Judging by its enourmous popularity and success, this seems like an odd thing to say, especially for someone as geeky as me. Practically everyone I talk to seems to use Ebay from time to time, but every time I've gone on to the site my spidey-senses begin to tingle. There are just some things about it I don't like at all.
For example: I don't like the terminology they use. Someone told me last night she'd won a bottle of champagne from Ebay. I was very impressed and pleased for her... I asked her what had she done to win it?
It turns out that she hadn't "won" the bottle at all, not in the real sense of the word "win", rather she had BOUGHT the bottle. She had bid the most money for it. I think, from memory, the bottle cost her £1. Bargain eh? But delivery was another £6 on top of that, making the totaly price a slightly less than dazzling £7.
Don't get me wrong... £7 for a bottle of champers ain't bad. But I hate the way Ebay use the term "you have won" something when you have really purchased it with your hard-earned cash.
Let's stick with this champagne auction a bit longer. She bought the bottle from some prevously-unknown-to-her person somewhere in the world. She has to trust that this person is honest and will ship exactly what she is expecting and it will be delivered on time and in one piece. She will have to wait a few days for her purchase. Compare this to a trip to the supermarket:
I walk in to the store and see a wide range of champagne on offer. I select the bottle I want; if I can see one and put it in my trolley I know they have it in stock, I know exactly how much I will be paying for it, and there's a firm guarantee that if it was the only one in store that nobody else can swipe it from me and pay an extra 50p for it at the checkout. I know I will be leaving the store with this bottle of champers.
Notice at no stage do I con myself into thinking I have "won" the bottle of champagne. Only if I was retarded would I think that I have somehow won the bottle by handing over money for it!
Let's assume the champagne from Ebay arrives safely and not too shaken up. The seller will get their £1 profit (if you can call £1 a profit on something that probably cost them more to buy in the first place). It's possible that they made more than £1 profit by overcharging for the postage.
I know of morally dishonest (yet still within the accepted rules) sellers who advertise their wares for a very low price, say £5, but it's only when you read the small print do you notice that the postage and packing is something silly, like £100.
I have also read about other auctions designed to trap the trusting and unwary where they advertise a Playstation 2 box, and show you lots of pictures of the PS2, even read out the specifications of the PS2 printed on the box. But what you're actually bidding for is an empty box. Re-read the auction carefully and you see that, but it is presented in such a way to trick you. Legally this is acceptable. Morally it stinks.
Going back to our champagne example for a moment, let's assume the seller made no profit from the P&P, they simply made £1 from the bottle itself. Unfortunately for them, they don't actually get to see all of the £1 profit as Ebay themselves want a fee for being the middleman. I'm not knocking this - it's perfectly fair and valid, but from the seller's perspective I can't imagine it's worth their time and shoe leather to package up a bottle, walk to the post office and wait in line to send it off, for less than £1 profit?
Notice earlier I fell into another trap - I said the champagne was from Ebay. Everyone says this. "I got this watch from Ebay!" or "I'll see if I can find a new car on Ebay".
If you buy something "from Ebay" you're really doing nothing of the sort. You are using Ebay to contact someone who is selling an item. It's no different than seeing an ad in your local paper which puts you in touch with someone selling a car. You know you are buying from the car dealer, not from the newspaper. If you're sold a dud, you don't seek recompense from the newspaper.
Personally I wonder at the sanity of people buying cars "from Ebay" (there it is again!)... if you're going to part with several thousand pounds with something as potentially dodgy as a car, don't you want to actually be there yourself to examine it inside and out and test-drive the thing?
By "dodgy" I mean the car might have been in an accident, might have been clocked, might be stolen (hard to check the VIN numbers from your armchair), might not even exist. It might make a clunking noise when you drive it over 30mph.
I'm sure there are bargains to be had from Ebay, but the trouble is, I hear success stories from both sides of the argument and they can't both be true. Not many people would brag about being ripped off now would they?
Some people talk about how cheap things are from Ebay; how little they paid for an item. Few mention how much the postage cost them, of course, and fewer admit that some of the items they are buying are second-hand, so it's not fair to compare them to a highstreet price, complete with the statutory 12 month guarantee.
It's also a bit of a lottery. Bid low and you're likely to be outbid. If you have your heart set on an item, then you have to bid high and hope nobody else bids close to your bid. Personally I'd rather just know how much something was going to cost me and that I'd be guaranteed of buying it for that price. I don't like the uncertainty of auctions.
But what about those people who claim they make a fortune from selling on Ebay? There are books about how to become a professional Ebay trader, give up your career and spend your day working from the comfort of your living room as the cash piles up. Some buyers are mugs, they'll pay well over the odds for stuff, be it concert tickets or junk you don't want any more. Some claim they buy from second-hand shops and sell them on Ebay for huge markups.
I wonder just how much money the average person would make from this, taking into account all the fees you pay. Ebay charges a fee for listing something, a fee when you sell something and they also get you again if you use PayPal 'cos they own that too! Then there's the time factor... let's say you earn £150 a week clear profit from Ebay. How many hours did you spend taking photos of your items, advertising them on the site, then taking the payment, packing the item up and then mailing them out? Can you guarantee you'll earn this every week?
My final objection to the site is this, and it may sound superficial. I don't like the design. It's messy. It's ugly. It's not intuitive for me to use. It looks very amateurish and there are few blocks in place to stop people adding malicious code to their auction pages to trick your browser into doing something you don't want it to.
There's clearly only ever one guaranteed winner with Ebay...
...and that's Ebay themselves.
Comments
Secondly do check the P&P (you can buy a pda for a penny but the Postage is £570, but the item is available through a froogle search for £350 !!).
ALWAYS pay through paypal (it doesn't cost the buyer anything) and never purchase anything over £500 as you are covered through their fraud protection only up to £500.
Never buy food or drink and never buy a car (unless its from a dealer selling his trade-ins and the you have the sale of goods act to protect you).
A lot of reputable companies (such as HP) sell their refurbished items on Ebay, stick to buying with them if you can.
Read a seller's feedback; this gives you information as to their reliability as a seller. There are a few more tips but I think I would insult anyone who reads this, as its common sense.
Lastly yes you can make a lot of money from Ebay, I know of someone who simply buys from Ebay and then sells it again (multiple sales reduces the charges from Ebay) and makes between 20% and 50% profit on each item. He charges the same rate for P&P and sometimes makes a profit and sometimes not.
Finally a simple bit of advice ; If the price looks too good to be true, DON'T bid, it will be a scam or stolen goods.
You can't blame people for using Ebay for selling cars privately as this can cost as little as £6 but as Jo says you must be mad to buy one unseen.
My final comment is a total agreement : the average 14 year old could design a better site than ebay but that would "eat" into their profits and they would have less to "toast' to!!
Tim