| I want to love eBay but I can see why the board is so unhappy and the rot has been infiltrating the company for a long time. Back in the 00's I was a PowerSeller, shifting over $20k a month. At first it was an incredible experience and I was selling high value items to people all over the world with high margins and almost always a great experience. I was long on eBay and became a shareholder, passing up on Amazon whose business seemed much less appealing to me at the time. Then came along PayPal with their 3.5% uncapped fee, which on expensive items was significant. Buyers started expecting to be able to pay via PayPal and eBay stopped allowing trusted sellers to offer a small discount for paying by wire or cash. PayPal eventually became mandatory. Later, eBay's fees went up significantly. Those along with PayPal's fees ate in to my margins and I eventually lost interest, packed up shop and sold my stock at about break-even. While I continued to be an occasional buyer, I recently started selling a few items again. I was met with frequent time waster winning bidders and the same high fees that I remembered. My last sale was an iPhone X that went to Thailand, "covered" under PayPal's seller protection and sent with a shipping label printed directly from eBay's site. A few days after I had sent it, the buyer filed a dispute with PayPal saying he hadn't received it. PayPal almost immediately sided with the buyer with a boiler plate reply, removing the money from my account (including all fees) before the phone even had time to arrive. I sent an email to appeal which was met with a curt denial. I was almost $1500 out of pocket. Don't even get me started on their site and mobile app - so much could be improved and way too many clicks to do anything meaningful. One of my last battles was spending 3 hours on the phone to try and resolve an account bug as I had transitioned from UK->US which seems to be an edge case they didn't finish working on. It makes me sad because the idea behind eBay is fundamentally a fantastic one, you can still find great stuff on there and the prices are often much lower than Amazon (even more so with the recent coupons they must be burning through cash on). They still have the audience to make a global market place, although perhaps not for much longer. |