[dingaling]

> Maybe eBay survives as an international site

I don't really know what alternative there is to eBay as an 'everything shop'. I can get specific screws there, or diff fluid, or a customised motorhome name sticker, or an old baseball cap for an airshow I attended in 2008.

And if I bought the wrong diff fluid I can sell it.

The main value over Amazon, though, is that the search works.

[ryandrake]

> The main value over Amazon, though, is that the search works.

Super true. You can actually search for the exact brand you want and not get a search result page full of brands XIAOLE, LLKAPOO, JEMROK, QPPNSS, VRINHH.

Also, I don't really know why, but I have much greater confidence on eBay that I'm not going to get something counterfeit or unsafe.

[Scoundreller]

EBay does do search well. Exact phrase matches, negation, ORs

A search for this works exactly as you expect:

(Lamborghini Urus, Audi RS Q8, and Volkswagen Touareg) “stereo wiring harness” -untested

It’s gotten a bit more fuzzy if you do something wrong. I used to have an alert for a mis-spelled brand name to snipe stuff :)

[zargon]

> I have much greater confidence on eBay that I'm not going to get something counterfeit or unsafe.

On eBay, sellers control their inventory, listings, customer service, and resulting reputation end-to-end. On Amazon, the incentives are backwards.

[bsder]

At this point, online fraud control is getting absurd, and AI is just making it untenable. I simply won't use ebay for anything above $50 anymore.

Having physical locations that you have to come to pick up your Thneed protects both buyer and seller. Buyer can verify that what was described is delivered and seller can verify actual pickup with ID.

If they apply a bit of logistics for shipping between stores, Gamestop could crush it.

Fraud is forcing the pendulum to swing from everything-online back to everything-in-person.

[wmoxam]

Facebook marketplace is an everything shop, though a bit more local in nature. Also, it's much easier for small businesses that ship to have an online store thanks to Shopify, etc.

The last few times I've used EBay is to get parts for old garden tractors, and even for that I've found cheaper options with small retailers that specialize in that stuff. Most ebay shipping pushes the cost up too much, and with the small retailers usually I can get a bunch of things I need at the same shipping price.

[mywittyname]

FB Marketplace is full of scammers too. Every time we've tried to sell something, we've had people try to steal our phone number and register it with their Google Voice account.

[wmoxam]

How do they try to steal your phone number?

I've only contacted buyers/sellers in FB Marketplace via FB Messenger so they don't even have my number ..

[NetMageSCW]

Interesting you think that because my main experience is the search is horribly broken and they do nothing globally to fix it. Most of it saved searches are full of exclusions because a positive search includes so many irrelevant items. And they don’t enforce categorization so listers constantly put in better categories for their items, when they aren’t just lying with things like “calculator not HP”.