Webthoughts

What is up with eBay?

They have implemented, over the last year, several changes that make me wonder they are sniffing in their corporate offices. It really seems that they are making changes that will not help the eBay community.

The first of these was the ill-advised change in policy that no longer allows sellers to leave negative feedback on buyers. I understand their point about being worried about retaliatory negative feedback from sellers, but what are sellers who get legitimately screwed supposed to do? For example, I recently had an item bid on and won. The "buyer" never paid for the item. Repeated attempts to contact the buyer were ignored. I relisted (and sold) the item, but this buyer, for whatever reason, didn't pay and no consequences occurred.

Second, the mandatory requirement to include shipping charges in the auction. Okay...sounds good, right? Well, the problem is, their automatic calculation tools only work for USPS and UPS. For a variety of reasons (the biggest being, I've had BAD, BAD experiences with UPS), I'd prefer to ship via FedEx. eBay offers no option to automatically calculate FedEx shipping, so I need to pre-calculate shipping costs to include it in the auction. The problem with that is, I have no way of knowing exactly what shipping costs will be until I know who the winner will be. Therefore, because eBay requires that shipping costs be included in the auction, I'm required to use to services that I really don't want to use because of the bad experiences I've had before. This just smells of both those services putting pressure on eBay to force their services to be used, rather than the competition.

Now, eBay is going to mandate PayPal payments (or credit cards if the seller has a merchant account), rather than allow mailed payments. Granted, most payments sent to me were via PayPal, but I've had buyers who absolutely REFUSED to use PayPal and wanted to mail a money order or cashier's check. Plus, consider that PayPal is OWNED by eBay. That doesn't smell at all...

eBay seems bent on making sure that they do what they can to alienate their sellers, and in some ways, their buyers. I understand wanting to try to eliminate fraud and whatnot, but they have gone way overboard and many of their decisions seem more directed at lining eBay's pockets rather than keeping their user's best interest in mind.

eBay is still the number one auction site, but will this continue?