related benefit to eBay from bringing in new buyers of obscure stuff is that many of these people are probably not in the habit of online shopping, or at least not on this type of site. Once they start hanging around eBay looking for obscure items, they’ll soon start to notice that you can get just about anything on eBay, and start shifting some shopping that they used to do in bricks-and-mortar stores, or the online sites of bricks-and-mortar store chains, to eBay
I think what's going to happen is the complete opposite. I am a full time (almost) Ebay seller. I deal in antiques and hard to find oddities. I have almost 1000 sales and 100% positive feedback.
With the new system, they are going to wipe out your hard earned ratings and only keep the past years I think (both buyer and seller).
Any seller with under 100 recent sales (60 days I believe) will be required to take Paypal. Paypal will hold your money in their "escrow" account for up to 21 days. I've heard that they give buyers their money back for no reason at all.
The new search engine they will implement will show you items listed by their criteria. Their criteria is by Powerseller and their rating. Little guys items are going to be hard to find.
There's a whole lot more changes than simply upping the fees and not allowing sellers to give feedback anymore. You will find less oddities and much more big box items that you can find anywhere.
Small sellers are being squeezed out.
I'm very sorry to hear that. Some of the most wonderful things that I've bought on eBay came from smaller sellers.
Well, I guess I'm done. I've paid north of 10k in fees but between me and one of my business but partners we have fewer than 50 sales. The reason...we sell industrial equipment that usually starts around 5k and goes way higher. Businesses simply won't paypal money for big ticket items. If I'm forced to use paypal, that's the end of that.
Many Power sellers are usually guys selling cheap Chinese crap under 20 bucks. I guess they'd rather make $1.50 a time than hundreds at once.
My personal account is often just cameras or whatnot, but I've probably only paid a few hundred in fees in the past 8 years. This powerseller garbage is the end for me.
I wasn’t endorsing the feedback changes as they’re being done (see my post #23 for my thoughts on a better alternative, and my post #42 for an example of why the current system doesn’t really work).
I don’t know the details of any changes being made to how items are prioritized in search results (I’ve only been a buyer, so am fairly ignorant of the mechanics of selling). I tend to run searches either for obscure terms (like the small town’s name) or with very customized saved searches (e.g. I run a daily search with a string that has one included word and around 40 excluded words). The former yields very few results, so prioritizing isn’t an issue — I’m quite sure I get them all. The latter is designed (by me) to exclude most listings for new or common items that contain my included word, and regularly yields a lot of hits for listings from sellers with less than 10 feedback ratings, and some with 0. If they make changes that muck with that system, they’ll hear loud protests from me.
I think they’re thinking less about squeezing out small, but quasi-professional sellers like yourself (maybe because they assume — correctly or incorrectly — that you’ll just put up with it), and more about pulling in new small, occasional sellers (the cleaning out the attic to make a few bucks crowd). They are clearly having no trouble attracting professional sellers of new commodity-type items, and it’s a little more problematic to prioritize those listings. Hard to come up with a system that keeps the smaller sellers of those items on even footing, while addressing the fact that a lot of buyers of these types of items are not sophisticated searchers, and are likely to put in short search strings that match several thousand current listing (think “mp3 player”).
I’m forever hearing horror stories about PayPal, and have one of my own that’s practically beyond belief just by virtue of how idiotic it was. One of the silliest pieces of the story is where eBay assured me they would contact PayPal about my problem (as it related to an open transaction that PayPal was preventing me from completing), copied me on the e-mail they sent to PayPal, resulting in my getting copied on a long series of automated “not delivered, still in queue” messages and a final “undeliverable” message. Little wonder ordinary folks have trouble communicating with PayPal — eBay owns them and can’t even get its own e-mails through to them! End result was a dealer who was driving 800 miles round trip to deliver my purchase (a large, fragile antique) to my home on a Saturday, agreeing to just accept my personal check when he got there. For the most part, though, PayPal seems to be a great thing for buyers, but needs a lot of tweaking to be anything but a PITA for sellers.
If you want to give me your eBay user name, I’ll check out your offerings.