If you're a longtime eBay buyer, it's true that there are more auction listings than ever before to wade through for any search. It's also true that there are many more “professional” sellers on eBay than there once were, and that many more items are now “international” and/or come with more complex payment or shipping terms. It's also true that the need to maintain strong feedback profiles leads many sellers—especially those that are much more interested in making money than in preserving any “old” eBay culture—to respond to negative feedback in kind and to adopt a more caveat emptor (“buyer beware”) attitude than the one to which many veteran eBay buyers are accustomed.
If you're a longtime eBay seller, it's just as true that there are many more buyers than there used to be who will not read listing terms carefully—who will expect you to accept payment in ways that you can't, or to ship to places that you don't, or to find included in a shipment things that aren't. It's also true that many of them increasingly expect customer service of a sort that eBay sellers aren't traditionally accustomed to providing, including real warranty service, immediate shipment and immediate exchanges, phone access and instant communications, and even new-quality goods all the time, regardless of whether an auction listing says “AS-IS,” “used,” “refurbished,” or “new.” Finally, it's equally true that a growing reservoir of eBay buyers exist that will happily “neg” you before giving you a chance to resolve a problem, or that will do so even in cases in which your terms are clearly spelled out in your auction listing.
All of these things are are true. What, therefore, is to be done? To hear the comments that I receive from dedicated sellers or longtime shoppers, all that has to happen is for eBay to take a stand against poor practices. Unfortunately, the matter of whether the stand should be pro-buyer or pro-seller is precisely what's at issue. After all, eBay has to balance the needs of buyers, the needs of sellers, the needs of its investors, and the pitfalls of rapid growth—all at the same time. It is not surprising that nobody is getting everything they want, least of all those who remember the way that eBay “used to be.”
The process of “keeping eBay usable,” therefore, is every bit as much the responsibility of its users as it is of eBay itself. eBay users will have to adapt or go elsewhere—and to do the latter is to run the risk of not having a tremendous resource like eBay available to us in the future.
Coping Tips for Buyers
Though eBay will likely never again be the informal, limited-size-and-scope buying and selling marketplace that it once was, it's still possible to find and get good deals on eBay. (I, for one, continue to buy about 80 percent of everything I use on eBay.) The important thing to remember is that it is up to you to ensure that you find and get the deal that you're looking for.- Learn to search effectively. Rather than simply typing in a single search term from eBay's home page, the time has come to learn to use advanced search features—to use features like custom searches or product finders, as well as to save items that you're interested in once you've found them.
- Be much more alert as you shop. As a buyer in an increasingly crowded marketplace full of an increasingly diverse body of sellers with varied backgrounds and customer service practices, you'll need to be sure to protect yourself. Become more strict about your feedback standards, read item listings very carefully multiple times to be sure that you're getting what you want under terms that you prefer, and pay with PayPal to protect yourself should anything go wrong.
- Be more careful about knowing your own needs. Depending on the type of shopping you're doing, take the most careful measurements possible, check compatibility beforehand, ensure that the shipment method(s) offered correspond to times and places when you can be present to receive an item.
- Make peace with buyer-seller communication. Given an increase in retaliatory feedback, be ready to pursue negotiation more carefully as an avenue for the resolution of conflicts. Contact your seller early and often in the process to ensure that you're both on the same page, and to press them to resolve an issue should anything go wrong.
- Develop your patience. The increase in the size of eBay's membership, the number of auction listings that are live at any given time, the complexity of eBay's own rules and processes, and the shift in eBay's market position means that the time needed to resolve a dispute is simply going to increase as eBay becomes more and more like other buying and selling venues and less and less like a little world unto itself. If you're unwilling to be more patient or feel that you can't be more patient with sellers than you are already being, then it's time to re-read the first three items above and become ever more strict in your shopping habits on eBay.
