Have you used eBay in the last few years? It's awful for sellers and awful for buyers. This is coming from somebody who buys on eBay twice a month on average.
I try not to use it and then something will come up and I use it. Could be my market, or who knows what but there seems to be more scams.
It’s the only place someone can give you a fake tracking number (somehow people get these from UPS) get caught and other than a refund after weeks and a negative reputation ding, they get to keep on doing it. The fake tracking number scam has been going on for years too, it’s still happening. Permanently ban for people caught doing this, preferred shippers with eBay as a managed tracker or something like that.
I have never had this happen, but I don't buy from first-time eBay sellers. There are definitely scams on there, but they seem to be "too good to be true" prices with 0 reviews on the seller.
Surely you're not getting scammed by sellers with lots of reputational history?
I actually am more nervous as a seller, as their buyer protection almost always sides with buyers, at least in the US (and the fee is astronomical.)
Well, a month ago was my last use for about a year. A user with a 96% positive feedback and definitely a lot of sales slow played and then issued a fake UPS tracking number. The negatives in their history sounded mostly like communication issues so I assumed they were okay. They sell a lot of things in the $30-$90 range, this was a $200 item they had listed for $145, and they supposedly had a couple of them. A local store ran a sale around the same time that has it at $150 so it wasn't crazy. Upon deeper inspection of their reputation once things got fishy, they have 150+ sales, 4 negatives, 1 neutral. There are real looking positive feedbacks but about half are automated positive feedbacks. Not sure entirely what that means.
A refund has been granted but ebay's computers show that someone in my zipcode has also recieved a package (mine should have been 20lbs, the one sent was 2lbs and received by someone with a different name) so I'm kind of expecting a little more drama before it's all said and done. To be fully transparent, it was marked shipped without tracking and has an estimated arrival date of 10 days; after 10 days I asked if it had shipped and was told no and offered a refund and then it became marked shipped with a fake tracking number and "was delivered." The short of it is they're a somewhat prolific seller, I can't think of any reason it issue a fake tracking number and they had my money for about a month. I'm getting the money back but I'm back to square one. The sale at the local store ended.. It's not that big of a deal, just annoying.
It seems like there are sort of 2 classifications of bad experiences. There are poor descriptions, slow transactions, shipping mix-ups, mis-communications and things of that nature. A reputation ding is probably appropriate. Then there are more fraudulent things and ebay has chosen to not really punish those things and let them go, same way Amazon will gladly list and sell fake goods.
As a seller, the buyer can claim that the package they received was empty or just had a brick or whatever, and eBay will almost always side with them. I have multiple friends who were been hit by this.
It's not great for sellers either. I was banned during the time period before the Paypal divestment for having the galls to subpoena a nonpaying buyer's records. They take a cut from both sides. Sotheby's takes 10.5% (I think). eBay takes twice that for something comparable in value.
And yet, it's still the place to go to buy anything secondhand or used. I'd go so far as to say eBay could be nationalized under the Defense Production Act due to the critical role it plays in manufacturing by keeping obsolete manufacturing machines running.
The best part is eBay works exactly the same as 10 years ago, as far as I can tell.