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Subject: |
The Changing World Of eBay |
| Date: |
2008-11-10
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The Changing World Of
eBay
By Cliff Ennico
www.creators.com
"I do a lot of public speaking to promote my small business. Most of my
speaking is for local organizations; I don't charge them a fee, and
there's no contract involved. But lately I've been contacted by some
event planners to speak at trade shows around the country, and their
contracts are several pages long! What are some of the things I should
be looking for in these contracts? Do I need an attorney to look at
each of these when I receive them?"
It's no secret. It's getting harder and harder to build a
successful eBay selling business. Not only is the competition
greater than ever before (between 700,000 and 800,000 sellers in the
United States alone), but eBay itself is making it tougher for sellers
to succeed by "raising the bar" for people it will allow to sell on the
site.
To understand the changes that have rocked the eBay community in recent
years, it helps to understand the fundamental difference between
"amateur" and "professional" retailers.
When eBay was first launched in the mid-1990s, it developed a
reputation (rightly or wrongly), as "the world's flea market".
Anyone with twenty-five cents to spend and a few spare hours to create
an eBay auction listing could sell anything on eBay to anyone in the
world. They did not have to be a "regular vendor": they did not
have to follow rules of business etiquette, they did not have to keep
careful books and records, they did not have to be disciplined about
how they conducted their businesses or how they interacted with
customers.
That was the great charm of eBay in the "good old days" of the late
1990s. It was more than just "online commerce". It was a
community of buyers and sellers interacting with each other on the
site, and you never knew what would happen when you bid on something
for sale there. You might make a friend for life. You might
meet a world authority on a certain type of antique or
collectible. You might even meet your future spouse or life
partner on eBay.
Often you were buying from people who knew less about their merchandise
than you did, and you picked up some amazing bargains that way because
"these people on eBay don't know what they've got".
But eBay's charm was also its greatest handicap. Many times when
bidding on eBay you found yourself dealing with the seller from Hell -
somebody who was trying to pass off fake antiques as genuine, somebody
who was ripping you off on shipping and handling fees, somebody who
shipped you an article different than the one you ordered (and wouldn't
give you your money back), or somebody whose sole goal in life was to
steal your personal identity online.
eBay, in short, developed a reputation as the "Wild West" of online
commerce - a place where anything could happen, and often did.
In recent years, eBay has taken some dramatic steps to move away from
its "Wild West" image and become more respectable as an online commerce
venue for serious sellers and buyers - steps that, in some cases, have
alienated large sectors of their selling community. Among some of
the more recent changes:
- the development of Detailed
Seller Ratings (or DSRs) that enable buyers
to rate sellers on a variety of different aspects of the sale
experience (for example, shipping speed, quality of merchandise,
communications) rather than an "overall" rating;
- eliminating sellers' ability to leave "negative feedback" on
buyers,
while allowing buyers greater leverage to leave "negative feedback" on
sellers;
- requiring eBay sellers to use an "online payment system" such as
PayPal
for all transactions, and prohibiting them from accepting checks, money
orders and other paper-based forms of payment; and
- eliminating certain benefits (such as eBay's coveted
"PowerSeller"
status) for sellers whose DSRs fall below certain percentage levels.
Many sellers complain that, because of these changes, "eBay isn't as
much fun as it used to be," and numerous newspaper and magazine
articles and online "blogs" have accused eBay of trying to eliminate
"Mom and Pop" sellers from the site in favor of large corporate
retailers.
But the truth, as always, is a bit more complex than that. eBay
has, and probably always will, welcome the small "Mom and Pop" retailer
on the site, especially in the "antiques and collectibles" and
used/secondhand merchandise categories where eBay still reigns supreme
in the e-commerce world. Because the site is so easy to use, and
because of the extensive support sellers receive on the site, eBay will
probably for some time continue to be the first place small businesses
go to "cut their teeth" when venturing into e-commerce.
What will clearly no longer be tolerated on eBay, however, are
"amateur" sellers - people who don't run their businesses in a
professional, customer-friendly and, well, "businesslike" manner.
You can be small and thrive on eBay, but from now on, you gotta be good.
Cliff Ennico (cennico@legalcareer.com)
is a syndicated columnist, author and former host of the PBS television
series 'Money Hunt'. This column is no substitute for legal, tax or
financial advice, which can be furnished only by a qualified
professional licensed in your state. To find out more about Cliff
Ennico and other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit our
Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2008 CLIFFORD R. ENNICO. DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS SYNDICATE,
INC. Permission granted for use on DrLaura.com.
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