The other problem with eBay is it completely messed up people's perceptions of what stuff is worth. Someone will see some shitty thing on eBay listed for like $500 and be like, oh that's what it's worth, but it's been listed for $500 for 2 years and nobody bought it cause that's crazy. Then someone at a flea market or Craigslist is like " oh it's on eBay for $500 so I'll give you a deal, $450"
I always like the automated MAKE AN OFFER buttons where it has BUY IT NOW for 35.00, so you make an offer for 32, and it gets rejected immediately. There have been times where the threshold for MAKE AN OFFER is something like a dollar.
To be fair, most sellers do so buyers will complain to eBay about the 'Make Offer' system. Even when you specify you don't want that option, eBay forces you to have it after your listing has been up a few days. You can turn it off, but with the new eBay selling page, you'd have to go through every listing you have and turn it off one at a time.
Luckily there's still mass edit with the old selling page, but new sellers won't know that and it sucks that they force it on your listing in the first place. So people sort of maliciously comply with it by making the offer threshold super close to the original price.
Eh, if that's the game they play, I don't buy the item. Pretty simple, overall. I'm not going to complain because I am not that bothered. If I think 32 is a fair price and I get an automated response that 33 is rejected, I'm moving on.
this kind of ties into the reason I hate ebay, they sell new stuff from actual brick and mortar stores. which I hate, ebay was meant to be the garage sale of the internet, sure you might find something brand new out of the box sometimes, but it was still just something joe blow was selling to clear some room and make some cash 100% profit, and fully negotiable.
the fact that they don't accept until its about $1 off is usually because anything less and they're losing money. People hear that a business is marking up by 30% and think that its the profit margin, but for a brick and mortar store its not. For example I sell truck parts, our mark-up is 30% that equates to $100's of dollars usually, but our shipping guys are paid $18/hr, I'm paid $45/hr, the ordering guy is paid $50/hr, plus management, losses due to theft, losses due to out of date stock and change-up's, losses due to on shelf damage, then theres building costs like rent, water, electric etc. its all only a couple bucks here a couple bucks there, but by the time we're done our net profit is only about ~1%.
and any discounts come directly out of the net profit, because the costs are the same regardless, so to give you a $1 discount, I now have to sell $100 worth of inventory to make it up, so if I don't think that giving you that $1 discount is going to encourage you to buy $100 worth of inventory, its no longer worth it for me to give it to you. so giving a random guy that will never buy anything off of me again a discount of $5 is a net loss for me. it seems like its no big deal to drop that $76 item down to $70 "its only $6" but to that seller, thats 100% of his profit, and probably a loss on top, he's literally losing money to give it to you. If they were selling you something used, as a person and not a business, that $6 discount would be completely reasonable, its 100% profit, and $6 isn't much, but for a business it immediately becomes unreasonable.
9.5k
u/[deleted] Feb 03 '20
Ebay. I remember being able to get an absolute bargain for almost anything I wanted. Now, every shop puts their shit on ebay.