ebay changes?

[softball66]

ebay seems to have some smarties there who must fix something when it's working well.
Besides the aforementioned category change that doesn't make sense, there's the "private auction" setup which allows the scammers to put up
items that we know are fake but no one can contact the prospective buyers that they're being set up.
And the latest where the seller cannot leave a negative feedback against the buyer! Huh! ?? I saw some of the rationale for setting this up, about the sellers leaving retaliatory negative. But then to go to an EXTREME in the other direction? NUTS!
For example: I sold a glove recently on eBay and sent an invoice, a 3 day followup, an 8 day followup and the buyer, knowing full well the new rule protecting buyers, writes back "Stop bothering me. I'll pay." 12 days and he still hasn't paid. He's got 1200 feedbacks too
And we all know shill bidding goes on. I had direct proof of this. But...
the guy soon was back selling again on eBay.
Sad.

[spedrunr]

i totally echo the laments of the previous posts, but i would like to add 1 positive feature that i really appreciate about the ebay monster.

i just typed in 3333 to bid on a glove and missed the decimal point. and hit enter and ebay automatically truncated my bid to $33 (whew).

fortunately i caught the error before pushing the 2nd confirm button.

can you imagine bidding $3,333.00 on a $33 glove?

you think you've heard screaming from the "boss" about how your glove collection stinks up the house and has taken over her sewing room......

i know, pot-kettle-black on my previous post on decimals

[vintagebrett]

eBay is doing some interesting things as of late. Since the feedback change a couple weeks ago, I've been reading a lot of horror stories about sellers receiving negative feedback for no good reason. I think if this continues, sellers are just going to stop selling - I know that is what I would choose to do. Plus, I hear that eBay is requiring Paypal on all transactions on the Australian eBay site - apparently this is a test before they implement it in the USA as well. The whole shift is away from what made eBay great - regular people putting up an item or two a week and having fun seeing what it went for. Now the emphasis is on power sellers and buy it now. No fun.

An interesting correlation - when we were up at Brimfield a couple weeks ago there were tons and tons of shoppers - more than I've seen in 10 years. There was an article in an a local antiques magazine about the show and they reported the same thing - tons of shoppers. And apparently they weren't window shopping because the dealers in the article said they were selling stuff like crazy. Here you don't have to deal with feedback, shipping, seller fees, paypal, etc. - I think this environment is better for both parties. This might be a shift in buyer trends or being sick of eBay. It also might not have anything to do with it but I thought it was interesting. I much prefer the antique show/flea market scene to eBay even if I come away with nothing.

[awarsoca]

ok, what is really weird is that the search appears different at the office than it does at home. I use the latest IE at home and at the office and the look is different on search at the office. I was using Firefox at home but there is a noticable lag in load time at home, so I use IE for ebay searching at home.

[awarsoca]

No wonder:

http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?threadID=1000710162&tstart=0&mod=1212492552627